English Language and Literature Commons^™

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, …

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 …