English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Lawrentian Woman: Monsters In The Margins Of 20th-Century British Literature, Dusty A. Brice

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite his own conservative values, D.H. Lawrence writes sexually liberated female characters. The most subversive female characters in Lawrence’s oeuvre are the Brangwens of The Rainbow. The Brangwens are prototypical models of a form of femininity that connects women to Nature while distancing them from society; his women are cast as monsters, but are strengthened from their link with Nature. They represent what I am calling the Lawrentian-Woman.

The Lawrentian-Woman has proven influential for contemporary British authors. I examine the Lawrentian-Woman’s adoption by later writers and her evolution from modernist frame to postmodern appropriation. First, I look at the …

Dramatizing Trauma In Resistance To Post-Colonial Hegemonic Culture : A Magic(Al) Realist Reading Of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Love And Frida Kahlo's Selected Paintings., Feng Yi,

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this cross-disciplinary dissertation is to explore how magic(al) realist techniques are applied in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Love and Frida Kahlo’s selected paintings to dramatize the traumas experienced in post-colonial period, and how the artists resist the cultural hegemony through their art works. From the magic(al) realist and Gramscian point of view, the dissertation focuses on 1) the similar situations and cultural hegemony of African Americans and Frida Kahlo had experienced; 2) why and how Toni Morrison and Frida Kahlo chose and used magic(al) realist techniques in their art works to dramatize the traumas; and 3) how …

Tracing Appalachian Musical History Through Fiction: Representations Of Appalachian Music In Selected Works By Mildred Haun And Lee Smith, John C. Goad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research seeks to compare and contrast fictional Appalachian writings by Lee Smith and Mildred Haun to contemporary historical sources in an attempt to trace the development of Appalachian music between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. The thesis examines two novels by Lee Smith (The Devil’s Dream and Oral History) and the collection The Hawk’s Done Gone by Mildred Haun, which includes a short novel and several short stories. Contemporary primary sources and scholarly secondary sources were used to compare the fictional works’ depictions of Appalachian music to their historical counterparts. Also included within the …

The Being Of Art And The Art Of Being : Hermeneutic Ontology In Gadamer And Woolf., Adam Noland,

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overall, the point of this project is to plumb the affinities between Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic ontology and Virginia Woolf’s novels—how these affinities illuminate and contribute to an improved understanding of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Woolf’s novels. For their part, Gadamer and Woolf belong to a similar cultural and historical milieu, each, in one way or another, a participant in the intellectual and artistic movement known as Modernism. This movement arose in response to the encroaching impersonality of scientific objectivity: both Woolf and Gadamer recognized the pitfalls of this objectivity, as it necessarily discounts the interpretive opportunity and responsibility of …

The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwardian travel writing between roughly 1905 and 1914 serves as a bridge between the closing of the long Victorian period, the beginnings of modernism, and the changes to come in the twentieth century. The search for authentic experience characterizes travel writing in the Edwardian era. Significant cultural, technological, and social changes caused Edwardians to examine their perceptions about possibilities for authentic engagement with other places and people in their travels. As a result, Edwardian travel writers explore various methods by which to engage authentically with other cultures. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines a number …

Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates The Human Corpse In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Charles Hoge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores representations of the human corpse in nineteenth-century British literature and ephemeral culture as a dynamic, multidirectional vehicle used by writers and readers to help articulate emerging anxieties that were complicating the very idea of death. Using cultural criticism as its primary critical heuristic filter, this project analyzes how the lingering influence of folklore animates the human corpses that populate canonical and extra-canonical nineteenth-century British literature.

The first chapter examines the treatment of the human corpse through burial and mourning rituals, as specific developments within these procedures provide interpretive windows into how the idea of death was quickly …

British Fascism In The 1930s In Life And Literature, Jennifer M. Janes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Political and economic turmoil in 1930s Britain gave rise to a home-grown fascist movement led by the controversial Oswald Mosley. Literature of this period by Joseph O’Neill and Rex Warner mirrored the internal nature of the British fascist movement by depicting fascist-like societies embedded under or entrenched within the English countryside. Their metaphors of fascism rising as a solution to fear and disorder conjure the threat of fascism that was rising in Europe in that period. The metaphors are made more particularly relevant by the fact that the forces of Italian, German, and British fascism were not invasions from without, …

Jess's Search For An Understanding Of Truth In Fred Chappell's Kirkman Tetralogy, Alex L. Blumenstock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Fred Chappell’s Kirkman tetralogy, narrator Jess Kirkman synthesizes a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding the nature of truth. Blurring the distinction between art and life, Jess's narrative structure mirrors the imaginative reconstruction of experience; the novels are largely non-chronological emotive interactions with and reflections of his most salient memories and imaginings. Synthesizing an impressive cacophony of voices, Jess's stories both describe and apply the wisdom and tales Jess acquires from and with his family members. Each story informs the prior and the next, and the rhizomatic interaction between language, narrative, and reader explores Jess's numerous identities and understandings as …

Southerner As Other: Exploring Regional Identity Through The Southern Vampire, Lauren N. Fowler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since its conception in folklore and superstition, the vampire has had an innate ability to reflect the environment of the culture that creates it. Each manifestation of this being is entirely unique to the culture in which it is born. The vampire of the American South is no exception to this idea. As a region with a particularly tumultuous history, the South has been molded by many cultural influences. Religion, sexuality, and race are some of the most notable factors to have impacted the area. Many Southern authors writing vampire fiction explore the fears, stereotypes, and prejudices of the culture …

Redefining The Unrepentant Prostitute In Victorian Poetry, Marijana Stojkovic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Poets such as Thomas Hardy, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy portray prostitutes who seem guiltless about their choice of profession. Hardy's Amelia seems to symbolize the mutation of a pure country girl into a soiled disciple of evil; yet in the poem the changes in her life brought on by prostitution are evident in her drastically changed physical appearance and mannerism. Webster's Eulalie is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who undermines the stereotypical generalizations about prostitutes, relocating the source of the Great Social Evil from her profession to the institutionalized educational failure that trains women for nothing better than housekeeping. …

Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading Of David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Beth Katherine Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A cosmodern reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas creates a positive vision of the future for readers through various techniques of fragmentation including fragmentation of voice, language, and time. By fragmentation, I have in mind the consistent interruption of the novel’s voice, language, and time that requires an active and aware readership. The reader’s interaction with the text makes the novel re-constructive. In fact, the global nature of Mitchell’s novel, its hopeful ending, and its exploration of the effects of globalization can be considered as a means of exploring the dynamic relationships between the characters, the reader, and Mitchell’s authorial …

Functional And Stylistic Features Of Sports Announcer Talk: A Discourse Analysis Of The Register Of Major League Soccer Television Broadcasts, Marco Balzer-Siber

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the register of television sports announcers in Major League Soccer broadcasts, based on six 20-minute transcription samples. The first part considers individual linguistic features and inquires whether they fulfill a communicative function or whether they are of stylistic nature. In an effort to attract more viewers in the United States, production companies had originally adopted the duality model of a play-by-play announcer and a color commentary from other American sports, while many other countries traditionally feature only one commentator. Consequently, the second part of this discourse analysis will focus on the cooperative interactional behavior. The conclusion will …

A Few Good Men And Women : The Rhetorical Constitution Of Military Personnel Identity., Ashly Bender Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the public negotiation of service member identity by multiple stakeholders as a way to better understand the available rhetorical strategies for affecting ideological constructions of identity. While current Rhetoric and Composition research attends mostly to student-veterans, I draw on cultural and rhetorical theorists, such as Louis Althusser, Kenneth Burke, Maurice Charland, to identify the rhetorical approaches used to construct military personnel identity, particularly in the post-9/11 era. Through analysis of films, recruiting materials, and the publicly-shared stories of personnel, I extend current understandings of constitutive rhetoric and rhetorical identification—which tend to focus on the work …

“A Polished, A Practical, Or A Profound Education” : (Gendered) Rhetorical Literacies And Higher Learning In Louisville’S First Free Public High Schools, 1856-1896., Amy Jean Lueck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This archival project investigates the first public high schools in Louisville as they negotiated the means and ends of providing higher education to an increasingly diverse and expanding body of learners. Drawing on primary documents from the schools’ first four decades of operation—particularly school board reports, newspapers, and student writing—I foreground the interplay and overlap between regional and institutional identities and histories, which contribute to a rich and complex picture of “higher education” in the nineteenth-century US. Each chapter of the dissertation explores a distinct but overlapping aspect of the curriculum—including “practical” education, women’s education, and manual or industrial education—that …

William Faulkner And Alcoholism : Distilling Facts And Fictions., Quintin Thomas Chipley 1956-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about …

Themes Of Self-Laceration Towards A Modicum Of Control In Nineteenth Century Russia As Expressed By Dostoevsky In The Brothers Karamazov, Jonathan Ball

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of the academic discourse surrounding Dostoevsky and his epic, The Brothers Karamazov, has been directed toward the philosophic and religious implications of his characters. Largely overlooked, however, is the theme of laceration. In the greater scope of laceration stands the topic of self-laceration. Self-laceration refers to the practice of causing harm to the self in a premeditated and specifically emotionally destructive fashion. The cause of this experience is varied and expressed in as many ways as there are individuals. The struggle in the Russian psyche between viewing the world as fatalistic or as more of an existential …

Composing A Literary Adoption Memoir And Self Through Creative Nonfiction Memoir Writing, Jamie K. Nagy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adoption writings span across various forms, such as fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry, theatre, and scholarly fields of study. While many of these adoption writings speak to the complexities of adoption, the general public still tends to see adoption “such a beautiful thing” to do—as the best plan for the child, a noble act, a selfless decision, and a solution to a long-standing social issue. This thesis explores the “literary adoption memoir”—artful writings about real life happenings; my contribution to this genre addresses the complexities of the closed adoption era, transnational/transracial adoption, and parenting an adoptee as an adult adoptee. For …

Bluegrass, Bildung, And Blueprints: The Little Shepherd Of Kingdom Come As An Appalachian Bildungsroman, Leona Shoemaker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come takes as its backdrop the American Civil War, as the author, John Fox, Jr., champions Kentucky's social development during the Progressive Era. Although often criticized for capitalizing on his propagation of regional stereotypes, I argue that the structure of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come is much more problematic than that. Recognizing the Bildungsroman as a vehicle for cultural and social critique in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writing, this project offers an in-depth literary analysis of John Fox, Jr.'s novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, in which I contend the story itself is, …

A Rhetoric Of Fields: Orientationalist And Enactive Essays For Writing Studies, Daniel Louis Singer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning primarily in the late 1980s, the phrase “Writing Studies” has increasingly come to be used as a synonym for “Composition and Rhetoric.” Analyzing the orientational and disorientational significance of assuming both synonymy and distinction between the two, I argue for a methodological enactment of Writing Studies as a distinct but deeply entailed field and consider a range of conceptual, practical, political, disciplinary, institutional, curricular, and identity issues at stake in doing so. As the possibility of a Writing Studies that is non-identical to Composition has not yet been widely taken up, the potential of Writing Studies as a distinct …

Rhetorical Imperialism, Allison Welty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is often described as a grotesque labyrinth of symbols and images representative of the Latin Boom literary moment. The novel’s purposefully ambiguous construction opens itself up to two opposing readings that reveal discrepancies and conflicts in postcolonial and globalization studies, and as such, my project consists of two papers, easily read separately or in conversation with one another. The first proposes a reading of the novel as an assertion of marginal identity onto the world stage, ultimately upholding the indigenous native as a source of strength. Here, the novel’s appropriation of the folklore …

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art …

Pastoral Unity: Constructions Of Nostalgic Retreat Space In Charlotte Brontë'S Shirley, Joel Tyre Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to address questions of unity within Charlotte Brontë's Shirley. From the time of its publication, Shirley has been criticized for major characters and themes that do little to contribute to the work as a unified whole. Critics focused on the caricatured portrayal of religious figures, the ongoing industrial conflict, and the reconciliation of one of the novel's heroines to her mother as justification for the novel's lack of unity. In this thesis I hope to reconcile these criticisms and propose a unifying framework in which the characters and themes in question act as necessary components. Through …

Middlemarch: Eliot's Spencerian Sociological Study Of Provincial Life, Kellie Marie Mckinney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the novel Middlemarch, George Eliot fulfills the intention of her subtitle and uses sociological theories to conduct A Study of Provincial Life. Eliot's letters, journals, and various essays provide evidence of sociologist Herbert Spencer's influence on her own writings. Spencer's specific opinions and contributions not only strengthen the sociological message of Eliot's novel, but a handful of his ideals shape the narrative voice of her novel. Variations of Spencer's theories are seen in Eliot's "authorial narrator's" comments and observations of the Middlemarch couples. With her narrator, Eliot applies Spencer's theories on "belief" and on the correlation of …

Not (Just) Donne: Alchemical Transmutation As Immortality In Shakespeare’S Sonnets, Brandi L. Moody

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shakespeare, in his sonnets, employs alchemical references in the sonnets that ultimately fail, in order to show how fruitless it is to pursue immortality. The poet urges the fair friend, who himself is like the self-consuming ouroboros, to father a child that will continue his legacy and allow the fair friend to live on via the child. Language associated with the child is alchemical, referencing distillation, vials, flasks, and the renewing power of the philosopher’s stone. The dark lady, the opposite of the fair friend in every way, can be explained as fulfilling alchemy’s union of opposites needed for a …

From This Dark Place To The Other: Violence And Connection In The Poetry Of Brian Turner, Alan R. Swirsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Brian Turner is a poet and American soldier who served in Iraq at the start of the 21^st century. His poetry is about his experiences as a soldier interacting with the Iraqi people, his time in America following the war, PTSD, and the endless violence in the war zone. As a comparatively recent entry into the genre of War Poetry, his work pays homage to the writers who preceded him, like Wilfred Owen and Bruce Weigl, while also referencing Middle Eastern poets typically outside the scope of American literature. Through Turner’s recurring themes and motifs, connections are established between …

Functional Violence In Martin Mcdonagh's The Lieutenant Of Inishmore And The Pillowman, Lindsay Shalom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While Martin McDonagh’s plays have engendered laughter, disgust, and fear, he might be best known as part of a long line of Irish playwrights who faced controversy due to their art. Much like Synge, Shaw, and O’Casey, McDonagh has faced criticism and even outrage due to the violence and misunderstood portrayals of the Irish in his plays. Though the violence in plays like The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore has been labeled gratuitous, we might better understand the purpose of that violence by examining them in light of Michel Foucault’s concepts of knowledge and power. Foucault’s approaches best highlight …