History Commons^™

Of Ghosts And Spaceships: Reclaiming Chinese National Identity Through Science Fiction, Nicholas M. Stillman

Global Honors Theses

This paper examines the extent to which Chinese science fiction literature has played a role in the reframing of Chinese national identity as one that is based in scientific and technological development. Specifically, whether the recent push during a 2007 conference in Chengdu for increased science fiction consumption has resulted in more scientific development and more positivist science fictional literature.

The paper both evaluates the current state of science fiction in China and the potential impact of its narratives through an analysis of the historical context of the role of science fiction in China compared to the more modern usage …

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Making The Past Present, Rebecca Hoevenaar

Honors Projects

Art has the unique ability to create new meaning from past events. As a work of literature, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has succeeded in doing this. Vonnegut took the bombing of Dresden and make it present and relevant in the minds of young Americans during the Vietnam War. Readers made connections between the two horrific events. In our contemporary world, Slaughterhouse-Five still remains an important work of literature. Violent conflicts and horrors continue to happen as with the recent Iraq War.

The Queer And The Bodily: Explorations Of Power In Women's Visionary Writing In The Book Of Margery Kempe 2014, Jayne Emerson Stacconi

Master's Theses

The provocative Book of Margery Kempe is a seminal text in the history of female authorship. Claiming to be the first written autobiography, The Book serves as a literary representation of womanhood during the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries when Margery was writing, and also speaks to circulating medieval discourses of religion, pilgrimage, and sexuality. Participating in medieval women’s visionary writing as a genre, Margery’s visionary power is a tool by which she is able to emancipate herself from the limiting roles of wife and mother. Additionally, by working within the conventions of visionary writing, Margery is able to …

Bound By Words: Oath-Taking And Oath-Breaking In Medieval Lceland And Anglo-Saxon England, Gregory L. Laing

Dissertations

The legal and literary texts of early medieval England and Iceland share a common emphasis on truth and demonstrate its importance through the sheer volume of textual references. One of the most common applications of truth-seeking in these sources occurs in the swearing of oaths. Instances of oath-taking and oath-breaking, therefore, are critical textual loci wherein the language of swearing unites an individual’s socially constructed reputation and his personal guarantees under the careful supervision of the community. Traditionally, scholars looking at truth and attestation from the later medieval period tend to view early cases of swearing as procedural, artless, or …

Culture In Crisis: The English Novel In The Late Twentieth Century, Michael F. Harper

Scripps Faculty Books

Culture in Crisis begins with political and social history at the moment of the election of Margaret Thatcher. Many saw in this event the dissolution of the ideal of the liberal State once believed to be shared by both the Left and the Right. Ranging widely over such writers as Anthony Powell, John LeCarre, Samuel Selvon, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Drabble, Harper examines various responses to this “crisis” which he shows to have roots in a pernicious ideal of “Englishness” going back many generations. With considerable skill and a masterful grasp of books and ideas, he presents the novel as …

Hamish Henderson And Nelson Mandela: Notes For “Rivonia”, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes and reproduces manuscript notesin the G. Ross Roy Collection University of South Carolina Libraries, for the protest song "Rivonia" ("Free Mandela"), written by the Scottish poet, folklorist and folksinger Hamish Henderson (1919-2002) in 1963-64 in response to the trial of Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress who had been arrested at Rivonia, South Africa and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island; assesses the influence of Henderson's song, which was recorded in 1964 by the Corries Trio, and sung at the anti-apartheid protests at Murrayfield, Edinburgh, against the visit of the Springboks rugby team in …

Walt Whitman's Vision Of The Inferno, Or Dante In Drum-Taps, Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.

History Abroad: How Do Denmark And The U.S. Measure Up?, Louis T. Gentilucci

Student Publications

By viewing bias itself as a product of history, educators and scholars can understand it better in their own times. By studying the historical path of the United States and Denmark, scholars can see that the nature of history can have subtle but important impacts on common education. Even when educators are aware of potential bias, history itself warps its dissemination.

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Marvel Comics And New York Stories: Anti-Heroes And Street Level Vigilantes Daredevil And The Punisher, Jesse Allen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that the creation of street level, vigilante heroes The Punisher and Daredevil created by Marvel Comics authors and illustrators in the late 1970s and early 1980s reflected the socio-economic environment of New York City at this same moment in history. By examining an era of New York that was fiscally and socially tense along with the development of characters created by the New York based Marvel Comics, I aim to show how their creation was directly related to the environment which they were produced in.

The Gawain-Poet And The Textual Environment Of Fourteenth-Century English Anticlericalism, Ethan Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 14th-century Middle English poems Cleanness and Patience, homiletic retellings of biblical stories which appear in the same manuscript as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, offer moral lessons to a general Christian audience, but the introduction to Cleanness, with its reference to men whom "prestez arn called," suggests that a central feature of their rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Priests do not appear as exemplars but as potentially filthy hypocrites who inspire God's harshest wrath, since their sins may contaminate Christ's body in the Eucharist.

Using Cleanness's opening lines as a guide, this dissertation …

Whose India?: The Independence Struggle In British And Indian Fiction And History, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In Whose India? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct “India” during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at …

As Close As You'll Ever Be, Seamus O'Scanlain

Publications and Research

Short story collection featuring Victor McGowan - set in Galway, Belfast, Boston and New York. Irish crime fiction noir collection.

The Dutch Black Legend, Carmen Nocentelli

Carmen Nocentelli

English “Hollandophobia” is usually understood as a function or reflection of the rivalries that characterized Anglo-Dutch relations during the seventeenth century. Working against such a circumscribed understanding, this essay contends that Hollandophobia is best thought of as a “Dutch Black Legend”—that is, as a deliberate repetition of the Hispanophobic topoi known as the Spanish Black Legend. Only by acknowledging the intimate relationship between these two phenomena can we make sense of Hollandophobia’s peculiar features while discerning how this discourse helped construct what the English took to be proper Europeanness.

The [Ftaires!] To Remembrance: Language, Memory, And Visual Rhetoric In Chaucer's House Of Fame And Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Shannon Danae Kilgore

Honors Program Theses

Geoffrey Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame explores virtual technologies of memory and reading, which are similar to the themes explored in Danielewski's House of Leaves. "[ftaires!]", apart from referencing the anecdotal (and humorous) misspelling of "stairs" in House of Leaves, is one such linguistically and visually informed phenomenon that speaks directly to how we think about, and give remembrance to, our own digital and textual culture. This paper posits that graphic design, illustrations, and other textual cues (such as the [ftaires!] mispelling in House of Leaves] have a subtle yet powerful psychological influence on our reading and …

Animals And War: Studies Of Europe And North America Edited By Ryan Hediger, Rebecca Raglon

The Goose

Review of Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America, edited by Ryan Hediger.

Framing Identity: Repudiating The Ideal In Chicana Literature, Michael A. Flores

All NMU Master's Theses

In the 1960s Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez penned his now canonical, epic poem “I Am Joaquin.” The poem chronicles the historic oppression of a transnational, Mexican people as well as revolutionary acts of their forefathers in resisting tyranny. Coinciding with a series of renewed, sociopolitical campaigns, collectively known as the Chicano Movement, Gonzales’ poem uses vivid imagery to present an idealized representation of Chicanos and encouraged his reader to engage in revolutionary action. Though the poem encourages strong leadership, upward mobility, and political engagement the representations of women in his text are misogynistic and limiting.

His presentation of the “black-shawled …

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …

Feminism, The Left, And Postwar Literary Culture By Kathlene Mcdonald (Review), Danica Savonick

Publications and Research

Reviews the book Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture by Kathlene McDonald,University of Mississippi Press, 2012.

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

Charleston Library Conference

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

King Maker In The Mind Of The Maker, Mark Eckel

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

"The mind of the maker and the Mind of the Maker are formed on the same pattern, and all their works are made in their own image." Dorothy Sayers goes to great lengths to expose a Christian view of creativity. Seen from a First Testament perspective, Sayer's ideas conform closely to human kingship originally intended by God; the vestigates of the robes remain.

In this paper I will seek to intersect Sayer's views of The Creator, the creature, creation, and creativity with the biblical-cultural connections in Genesis 1. What does it mean to be made in God's image in the …

A Day In The Life Of A Hero: The Three Unities In C.S. Lewis's Neo-Classical Romance, Joe R. Christopher

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

C.S. Lewis's "The Nameless Isle" is, if one ignores the first fifty-seven lines as an introduction, curiously shaped to meet the requirements of the Three Unities as the Renaissance and as Neo-classicism understood Aristotle's Poetics. Or at least two of them. The Unity of Place is obvious: all the action is set on the same isle. The Unity of Plot may be debatable since the dwarf has more to do with the resolution of the conflict than the hero does, but at least there is only one basic conflict. And, most impressive of the Three, all the action occurs on …

C.S. Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, And The Transatlantic Expression Of Sehnsucht, Jedidah Evans

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Once A Queen Of Glome, Always A Queen Of Narnia: Orual And Susan's Denial Of The Divine And Redemption Through Grace, Kat Coffin

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

Susan Pevensie is one of the most misunderstood characters in C.S. Lewis' classic series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Writers such as Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, and Philip Pullman have declared the character's face as a reflection of Lewis' sexism and misogyny, further claiming that Susan's exclusion from the final book of the series was due to her penchant for lipstick and nylons. Feminist criticism has found Susan's treatment pointedly gendered, displaying Lewis' supposedly negative attitude towards traditional forms of femininity.

While "the problem of Susan" has garnered critical response, little thought has been given to Susan in relation to Orual, …

The Wars We Sing Of: Modern And Medieval Warfare In Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Alethea Gaarden

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

The Artistry Of C.S. Lewis: An Examination Of The Illustrations For Boxen And The Chronicles Of Narnia, Kathryne Hall

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

The Wizard In The Well: The Transmogrification Of The Mythical Merlin In C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, Mark R. Hall

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Maleeldil And Mutual Society: A Modern Woman's Defense Of Jane Studdock, Crystal Hurd

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

Over the past few decades, many scholars and casual readers have derided C.S. Lewis as a misogynist for the "expulsion" of Susan from Aslan's Country. However, closer examinations of Lewis's underlying philosophy and previous experiences with women lend us exceptional insight into his changing perspective as well as his portrayal of feminine characters. Written before his wildly popular The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis's science fiction or Ransom trilogy provides a glimpse into his developing talents as a fiction writer but also provides crucial commentary on the gender issues plaguing the twentieth century. This paper will investigate, through his correspondence, …

George Macdonald And J.R.R. Tolkien On Faerie And Fairy Stories, Paul E. Michelson

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

The paper discusses the ideas of George MacDonald and J.R.R. Tolkien on Faërie and Fairy Stories, based on an analysis of MacDonald's essay "The Fantastic Imagination," Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien's correspondence, and Tolkien's unpublished introduction to MacDonald's The Golden Key.