Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Partnering Is Such Sweet Sorrow: Establishing Campus And Community Collaboration To Host William Shakespeare’S First Folio At Kansas State University., Casey 'D Hoeve

Collaborative Librarianship

Between October 2014 and February 2016, Kansas State University partnered with academic, Manhattan city community, and local business organizations to host an exhibit displaying William Shakespeare’s First Folio. University and community organization came together to collaborate and host over 14 programs showcasing the works of William Shakespeare, along with providing educational lectures to the community regarding Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Libraries were able to secure funding to obtain modern Shakespeare materials, filling in critical humanities collection gaps, along with illustrating modern adaptions of Shakespeare’s works to students. The exhibit was a resounding success, attracting more than 4,000 attendees and …

An Awakened Woman With A Room Of Her Own, Erica Garcia

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In the early 1900’s, women were obviously being oppressed considering they lacked the right to vote, to an education, and to freedom. Through bold women who spoke out against the said oppression, women were able to work together to fight for equality. By digging deeper into the literature of the time period, the point of view of an oppressed woman is more easily seen and can therefore be better understood. Women among Woolf and Chopin, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt helped move along the passing of the 19th Amendment with assistance from the NAWSA. Once women got the ball rolling …

There And Back Again… And Again, Dylan Spilinek

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The goal of this research project was to analyze literature to understand the time period the piece was written in. J. R. R. Tolkien claimed that his children’s story, The Hobbit, held no historical allegories that related to his time period. However, analyzing The Hobbit shows how Tolkien’s personal life held many areas that influenced his writing, and those who read his tales.

Tolkien was inspired by Beowulf’s epic hero plot and Christian beliefs as seen by his character, ideologies and symbolic objects, and by his naturalistic mindset reflected by the story’s species relations and underlying themes. This childhood …

A Quandary Of Errors: The Problem Of Innocence In Paradise Lost, Mandy Moore

Undergraduate Research Awards

When Milton’s Adam and Eve fall in Paradise Lost, everything changes: the earth tilts, the animals begin to eat each other, Sin and Death enter into the world. The course of history for all of Adam and Eve’s children depends on that single moment. Whether their Fall is fortunate or catastrophic, it does cost them not only their beautiful paradise but also their innocence, their pure existence. That they were innocent to start with seems obvious—Milton reiterates over and over, in as many ways as possible, that Adam and Eve remain innocent until they Fall. However, in several scenes …

Hearsay Evidence: Legal Discourse, Circumstantiality, And The Woman In White, Matthew Finley

Global Tides

In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Walter Hartright begins the narrative by stating that, because “the Law is still … the pre-engaged servant of the long purse,” he has arranged the novel to reveal the truth (5). The author, then, puts the law on trial by engaging the interplay between legal questions of witness credibility and testimonial evidence and their impact on social factors such as class and gender. The law’s emphasis on externality leads the system to privilege the snakelike Fosco over the heroic Walter, Laura, and Marian, signaling the courts' capital offence. Although the novel is …

The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …

The Scholar Magician In English Renaissance Drama, Ashley M. Minnis-Lemley

Scripps Senior Theses

In this paper, I will explore the rise and fall of the scholar magician or sorcerer, both as a popular dramatic subject and as an arc for individual characters, and the ways in which these figures tied into contemporary fears about the intersection of religion and developing scientific knowledge.

Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, And Technology In Modern Literature, Leah Hutchison Toth

Theses and Dissertations--English

“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying …

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Satire And Synthesis: Parody And Satire Of Victorian Education In The Works Of Lewis Carroll, Cameron D. Sedlacek

All Master's Theses

Education is an integral part of any society. Victorian England saw drastic reform in the method of childhood education, shifting from religious to secular forms of rote memorization. An analysis of the works of Lewis Carroll reveals significant instances of parody, pastiche, and satire on these styles of education and their corresponding reform. Unlike traditional satire, however, Lewis Carroll’s satire does not simply criticize these targets, but utilizes a strategy of synthesis to illustrate strengths and weaknesses of various conflicting educational ideologies and to suggest ways of adopting methods from all available options.

Jonson's Old Age: The Force Of Disgust, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning And Reputation In Othello, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This article offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside arithmetic textbooks for merchants and soldiers. It argues that Othello dramatizes a problem that also haunts the pages of these math books: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth grounded in status, military prowess and sexual purity. Othello’s loss of faith in his wife and the disintegration of his sense of self both depend on Iago’s manipulation of two competing models of reputation: one based on martial valor and sexual purity (reputation as honor) and …

“The Finest Production Of The Finest Country Upon Earth”: Gender And Nationality In The Writings Of Nineteenth-Century British Women Travelers To Portugal, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Critical attention to the writings of nineteenth-century British women travelers has repeatedly stressed their value as evidence of the writers’ attempts at overcoming the constraints of nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity that constructed women as inferior or ancillary (Frawley; Robinson; Foster; Dolan; Middleton); it has also often emphasized the importance of reading them within contemporary discourses such as imperialism, colonialism, or nationalism (Blunt; Frawley; Foster; Mills; Siegel). This essay focuses on three accounts by nineteenth- century British women travelers to Portugal— Marianne Baillie’s Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824); Julia Pardoe’s Traits and Traditions of Portugal …

"Don't Read This!": Lemony Snicket And The Control Of Youth Reading Autonomy In Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain, Brittany A. Previte

Senior Independent Study Theses

This independent study investigates adult authority in youth literature in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Examining both sensational literature known as “penny dreadfuls” and the didactic magazines The Boy’s Own Paper and The Girl’s Own Paper, this project analyzes how rhetoric enforced middle class ideology outside of the classroom and shaped the youth reading experience. In an urbanizing, industrializing Britain, anxiety about social mobility ran high, and youth consumption of penny dreadfuls received suspicion due to their supposedly subversive content. This study argues that penny dreadfuls actually reinforced the social order, mirroring didactic literature in their construction of conservative adult authority. In …

Guarded Optimism, Cynical Fatalism: An Intertextual Analysis Of Selected Victorian Novels And Their Modernist Reinterpretations, Michelle L. Strickland

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The Victorian and modern eras are known for being a time of great change. Victorian authors focused their works on the social, political, and religious upheaval that the country was experiencing during the period. They felt a strong sense of pride in their country, and there was always a sense of hope in their writing. These views are what draw the modern author to retell Victorian novels; yet, the modern writer removes the Victorian sense of hope and replaces it with the sense of the disillusionment which engulfed their era. In this paper, I examine the concept of intertextuality, the …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.