English Language and Literature Commons^™

"O Carefull Verse": Neoteric Poetics In The Shorter Poems Of Edmund Spenser, Melissa Joy Rack

Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims to illuminate a new aesthetic in the shorter poems of Edmund Spenser. I introduce the concept of Elizabethan neoteric poetry as a method of describing the set of poetic values that inform these poems. Spenser’s shorter poems are puzzling to critics because of their peculiar style, and because they deviate from the traditional rota Virgilii, or laureate career trajectory in which the poet progresses from pastoral eclogue, to didactic georgic, and finally to epic. This model is complicated considerably by the peculiar pastoral innovation of the Shepheardes Calender (1579), as well as Spenser’s return, late in …

Rhetorics Of Self In Eighteenth-Century Biography, Nathaniel Don Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the rhetorical methods that eighteenth-century biographers use to produce selfhood and to educate readers in behaviors that promote sociability. The interventions of the New Science’s inductive epistemology in rhetoric and conceptualizations of selfhood, as well as the rise of print culture, offer a foundation for exploring the emergence of the modern biographical form in the eighteenth century. In its development, eighteenth-century biography utilizes various rhetorical techniques to create a rhetoric of self, which arranges documented, lived experience into a print selfhood that readers can observe empirically and sympathetically, an engagement with the print person through which they …

Southern Gothic Fiction And New Naturalism: Toward A Reading Of New Naturalism, Jeremy Kevin Locke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist …

Military Virtue In Roman Rhetorical Education, Anthony Edward Zupancic

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the connection between rhetoric and military culture in the early Roman Empire. Despite obvious references to the military and martial virtues, little scholarly attention has been directed to exploring the possibilities located within this connection. This dissertation is an alternative cultural history of rhetorical theory and pedagogy that draws on close reading and philology, as well as performance and metaphor theory. In building on the cultural history of Rome, I introduce a concept of “military virtue” that expands on understandings of the Roman notion of virtus (virtue) found in recent scholarship. Since virtue in the ancient world …

Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, And Money In Women’S Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930, Julia Poindexter Mcleod

Doctoral Dissertations

“Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, and Money in Women’s Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930” connects American women’s literature to the ideological tensions that affected women’s participation in the development of industrial capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working against separate spheres ideologies that largely restricted women’s activities to domestic duties as wives and mothers and discouraged them from working in the public marketplace, American women authors engaged with the contemporary economic theories of John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen and promoted New Woman principles to forge new avenues of fulfilling and productive work for women.

In chapters focusing on entrepreneurial work that …

Samuel Beckett: Age, Impairment, And The Drama Of Confinement, Victoria Helen Swanson

Doctoral Dissertations

The aging body is a universal feature of corporeal existence and, in every sense, aging alters physical and mental performance. Approaches to age and performance studies often focus upon the aging actor or the challenges faced by actors when they are cast in roles which require them to act the part of a much older character. Samuel Beckett’s use of aged or aging characters has gone relatively unnoticed by scholars, especially in his dramatic works. This dissertation positions aging as vital to engaging with Beckett’s drama. Aged figures appear across Beckett’s career ranging from his earliest works to his latest. …

Guiding Transhumanism: The Necessity Of An Ethical Approach To Transhumanism, Marian L. Laforest

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Crafting Memory And My Collector, Katherine Ann Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a partial novel entitled My Collector as well as a critical introduction that explores both the usefulness of a craft essay, and how memory is rendered in fiction through the intersection of time management and point of view. In the critical introduction, I conduct close readings of two of John Banville’s novels—The Sea and The Untouchable—and apply ideas about time and memory from essays by Maud Casey, Joan Silber, and Adam Braver. My explorations demonstrate that the role of memory in fiction is more than setting up a cause-and-effect or a simple explanation for …

Myth Y La Magia: Magical Realism And The Modernism Of Latin America, Hannah R. Widdifield

Masters Theses

The similarities between Latin American magical realism and European surrealism have long been regarded as part of a shared, cohesive movement in literature and art. After all, they share certain nonsensical and fantastical traits that place both movements far away from the Realism that modernism, as a whole, refutes. But in light of postcolonial theory, it becomes more and more necessary to explore magical realism as a geographically and politically situated movement with its own unique value in discussions of Modernism; not an offshoot of surrealism, but a sister genre, born in the distinct atmosphere of a region trying to …

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …

Everything Leaves A Trace: D. H. Lawrence, Modernism, And The English Bildungsroman Tradition, Justin Miles Mcgee

Masters Theses

During the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth-century, the Bildungsroman acted as a vehicle for artists’ reflections on the turbulent time. The Bildungsroman is especially well suited to capture the fragmentation and disillusionment characteristic of modernism because of its sensitivity to the community’s role in the individual’s social normalization. D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913) embodies the jarring transition from the world of the Victorian Bildungsroman to modernity. While Lawrence’s novel still relies on characteristics of the Victorian Bildungsroman, it makes a significant attempt to break away from the Victorian Bildungsroman. Lawrence uses the …