Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Talking Some Sense Into Chaucer: Bodies In “The Miller’S Prologue” And “The Miller’S Tale”, Jacqueline Joewono

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

If there is one question that underpins the evaluation of any great literary work, it is the following: How does the text make us feel? Through affect and textural studies, the answer becomes more complicated than any old adage might readily convey, for “feeling” here becomes a matter of simultaneous tactility and sentiment. Under this lens, perhaps no historical period becomes more desirable to feel than the Middle Ages; it is here, after all, that readers’ responsibilities with texts are pluralized: readers move from listeners born from oral traditions to participants of all kinds. Feeling, then, may be found in …

An Almost Threesome: Erotic Love Triangles And Authorial Choice In Malory’S Le Morte D’ Arthur, Maria L. Avery

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

It seems to be nearly a critically unanimous consensus that when translating Chretien de Troyes’ romance of the glorious King Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, in his Le Morte Darthur, approaches the narrative of Sir Lancelot with the unwavering attitude that Lancelot must not only sustain the status of Arthur’s most revered knight and truest friend, but also be a true and ideal lover for Guenevere. This deep sense of friendship and comraderie between Lancelot and his king is also reflected in nearly all of the relationships between Arthur’s knights; which is, similar to de Troyes a very important component …

Chaucer's Collision Montage, Brandon Simmons

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage can be applied to The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer’s writing is highly visual and often unconventional. This study analyzes several portraits and tales to demonstrate Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique. The opening lines of the General Prologue present the juxtaposition of the tripartite plant and humans to suggest commoners’ social immobility. The interruption of the Miller’s Tale clashes with the Knight’s to suggest the possibility of social mobility and to challenge traditional patriarchy. The latter half of the narrator’s description in the Wife of Bath’s portrait indicates a sexualized subtext through the juxtaposition of …

Slaying Hybridity: The “Uncreated” Monstrous Doubles In The The Saga Of The Volsungs, Nibelungenlied, And Kudrun, Kyle Augustyniak

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper examines anxieties about gender and gender in a thirteenth-century Old Norse text, The Saga of the Volsungs, and two Middle High German texts, the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun. All three exhibit a similar uneasiness about gender performance. In these epics, fears about gender fluidity are founded on the slaying of hybrid mythological creatures (dragons and griffons) and are perpetuated by various media: blood, tears, clothing, promises, and lies. These monsters threaten the established order within the text, a patriarchal order defined by feudal society. Once the hero defeats the monster—whose very essence is simultaneously an embodiment of the perceived …

The Enclosure Of Eden: John Clare And The Politics Of Place And Past, Amanda Labriola

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Virgin Beauty Queen: Gender, Productivity, And Modernity In Martin Mcdonagh's Ireland, Hannah Green

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

A Dickensian Utilitarianism, Zachary Allentuck

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper argues that Charles Dickens' political and world views were in sympathy with Utilitarianism, as defined by Jeremy Bentham. The Utilitarianism Dickens attacked in A Christmas Carol, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit was not real utilitarianism; it was utilitarianism appropriated by England's middle-class.

Plays And Punks; Or, Aphra Behn And The Restoration Woman, Amanda J. Thompson

Theses & Honors Papers

In many ways, the Restoration Period in England (1660-1700) is defined by its interest in sexuality. Following the Interregnum (1649-1660), sexuality became a mechanism to distinguish royalists from the “puritanical followers” of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), particularly through the emergence of the libertine (Novak 56). Libertinism “made the senses a primary source of knowledge,” which challenged “conventional morality” through ritualistic fornication, drunkenness, and adultery (Staves 20). Men, like John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) wrote bawdy poetry celebrating their sexual conquests. Libertines were also regularly featured in Restoration drama, with playwrights like William Wycherley (1640-1716) and George Etherege (1636-1692) …

The World Of The Cat's Table: Literature Through Production Design Analysis, Andrea J. Johnson

Senior Honors Projects

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje is a rich piece of literature that has a diverse set of characters confined to one pivotal location, a ship. Just as the novel builds a world around its characters, in this project I attempted to build a space around immersive design choices.

Production Design is a visual response to analytic reading. By taking a written piece or concept and creating the physical/visual atmosphere for the work, a production designer’s job is to create the overall look and tone of a creative production, be it for a film, play, or museum space. This is …

Diagnoses By Gender: The Consequences Of Treatment Of The Mentally Ill In Virginia Woolf's The Waves And Mrs. Dalloway 2016, Erika Nichole Jackson

Master's Theses

“Insanity is purely a disease of the brain…The physician is now the responsible guardian of the lunatic, and must ever remain so.” Sir John Charles Bucknill (1897)

Mental illness has consistently been and continues to be a subject that is viewed as taboo by society, especially when it comes to diagnosing a patient. Instead of acknowledging a person’s actions, thoughts, and words, society continually disregards mental illness as something that is negative and to be feared. The fact that this area of medicine can be difficult and distressing makes it all the more important to continue research. It is true …

'The Letter Killeth': The Obscurity Of Language And Communication In Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure 2016, Victoria T. Corning

Master's Theses

While the epistolary novel is a genre closely associated with 18th century England, 19th century Victorian literature also incorporates letter writing as a significant form of communication. Written messages convey what can often not be said out loud, as it is easier to hide behind a pen and paper, write in solitude, and be absent when the letter is read by the recipient. Impulsive and emotional thoughts and feelings can be written down immediately and then later edited, which makes writing an unstable form of communication. Is the author conveying true feelings or concealing true feelings? Layering multiple modes of …

Suffering In The Human Experience: An Examination Of The Book Of Job And King Lear, Allison Denton

English Department Student Scholarship

This thesis uses the Old Testament figure of Job and the Shakespearean character King Lear to examine how suffering calls us to question life and its meaning. These works were chosen because of their authors' demonstrated value of life despite their protagonists' pain. This project originated from a desire to answer questions about the meaning of life that had arisen during four years of study at the College of the Holy Cross.

Close Reading Workshop, Nida Islam

Senior Honors Projects

Close reading is an in-depth analysis of a text’s features (e.g., syntax, punctuation, tone, and vocabulary) to acquire a comprehensive understanding of a piece of literature. At the National Council of Teachers of English Conference in 2001, Robert Scholes, a retired professor of English at Brown University, voiced his concern about the lack of ability in freshly enrolled college students to engage with the intricacy of texts. Jane Gallop, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, further argues the interdisciplinary benefits of close reading and attests to the consequences of students’ inability to perform intense reading of literature. As a …

The Adventure Of The Immortal Detective: Adaptation And Audience Investment In The Cases Of Sherlock Holmes, Corey Hayes

Masters Theses

In the last ten years, popular culture has seen a number of visual interpretations of the character and cases of Sherlock Holmes. From the films starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law to the BBC show Sherlock and the CBS show Elementary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective is currently at the forefront of the public mind. However, these new on-screen interpretations of the character represent merely the tip of the Holmes iceberg, and the dedication of their fans is just a continuation of the intense popularity that Doyle’s detective has enjoyed since his earliest appearances in print. All of …

The Ritualization Of Violence In The Magic Toyshop, Victor Chalfant

English (MA) Theses

This dissertation will explore the way Philip treats puppets and masks as pseudo-sacred objects in order to maintain control in Angela Carter’s work The Magic Toyshop. To show the implications of the pseudo-sacred, I will use Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard that examines the way primitive cultures are able to maintain order through particular religious beliefs and collective violence against a scapegoat. My critical reading of the text will look closely at how Philip uses the pseudo-sacred to build up the community. When the pseudo-sacred is finally called into question the community is threatened. Although Philip attempts …

Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse

Honors Theses

Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …

“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from Socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19th century gender roles, especially in regard to women’s communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters’ revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker’s novel, the women’s violent deaths in the …

The Threat At Court: Subversive Uses Of Translation, Transcription, And Tradition In The Henrician Court, Rebecca Marie Moore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to consider the use, at the Henrician court, of the strategies of translation, transcription, and tradition to cushion and to code the presentation of dangerous and radical ideas. Each of these strategies allows the authors deniability, while nonetheless allowing them to communicate clearly with their readers. These writers speak in a code that can be interpreted by anyone at court, but use that code to create just enough distance to avoid overt confrontation with the king. This is further complicated, though, by the king’s own deeply influential role in the creation of that code. Each strategy also …

[Re]Visiting The Rime: A Case Study Of Adaptation As Process And Product With The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Sally Ferguson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis combines adaptation theory with ecology to examine Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and its adaptations; it argues further combinations of adaptation with evolutionary theory and ecological ideas could allow for a better interpretation of many texts. The adaptation Rime of the Modern Mariner (2011) by Nick Hayes and the appropriation Perelandra (1943) by C.S. Lewis will also be present in individual chapters to examine the texts' interactions with each other as they evolve and how each work represents the combined theory.

A Lusty Bacheler: The Language Of Sexualization And Status In The Squire’S Portrait, Jessica D'Aquin

Senior Honors Theses

Chaucer scholars often neglect the Squire in their treatment of the Canterbury Tales, making it is necessary to reassess the Squire’s relation to the Roman de la Rose and the ways in which he is satirized through the parallels between his portrait and the Roman. Upon further examination of the Squire’s portrait, it becomes apparent that the Squire is part of a larger satiric discourse on people who use their vocation for personal gain in the Canterbury Tales by means of comparison to Fausemblant of the Roman. Through careful scrutiny of the language of the Squire’s portrait, this thesis analyzes …