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Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas 2023 Old Dominion University

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …


Does Shakespeare Believe In Sudden Conversions For His Villains?, Robert B. Pierce 2023 Oberlin College

Does Shakespeare Believe In Sudden Conversions For His Villains?, Robert B. Pierce

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


“My All The World”: Constance, Motherhood, And Petrarchanism In Shakespeare’S King John, Anne McIlhaney 2023 Webster University

“My All The World”: Constance, Motherhood, And Petrarchanism In Shakespeare’S King John, Anne Mcilhaney

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


“Hell Is Empty And All The Devils Are Here”: Westworld’S New Prospero And His Isle Of Calibans, Jared S. Johnson 2023 Thiel College

“Hell Is Empty And All The Devils Are Here”: Westworld’S New Prospero And His Isle Of Calibans, Jared S. Johnson

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


A Double Time In Romeo And Juliet: Juliet’S Rapid Maturity, David George 2023 The University of Akron

A Double Time In Romeo And Juliet: Juliet’S Rapid Maturity, David George

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


“She Never Yet Was Foolish That Was Fair”: Whiteness As Erasure In William Shakespeare’S Othello, Kathryn Croft 2023 The University of Akron

“She Never Yet Was Foolish That Was Fair”: Whiteness As Erasure In William Shakespeare’S Othello, Kathryn Croft

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


Introduction, Emily Isaacson 2023 Heidelberg University

Introduction, Emily Isaacson

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.


A Difference Of One's Own: Race, Sex, Modernism, Ryan L. Tracy 2023 CUNY Graduate Center

A Difference Of One's Own: Race, Sex, Modernism, Ryan L. Tracy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Difference of One’s Own” demonstrates that deconstructive conceptions of race lie at the heart of the modernist canon’s experimental representations of selfhood. Drawing on recent and canonical scholarship in Modernist Studies, Black Studies, Deconstruction, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, and Feminist Studies, I look at moments in modernist-era literature where the need to represent racial blackness, whether as a descriptor that defines one’s self-identity or the identity of another person, fails to draw a coherent line of difference between people, communities, selves, and importantly, the literatures that are thought to adhere to hard and fast racial distinctions. “Part I: …


Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright 2023 CUNY Graduate Center

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …


The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro 2023 CUNY Graduate Center

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …


Ambivalent Scales: Methods For Reading Scenes Of Sexual Violation, Natalie Ruby 2023 CUNY Graduate Center

Ambivalent Scales: Methods For Reading Scenes Of Sexual Violation, Natalie Ruby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The importance of unveiling rape in the #MeToo era has unintentionally obscured encounters that lack the clarity of “yes” or “no.” However, desire can be ambiguous even in unambiguous cases of assault. Feminist activists and scholars have started to address ambiguity by arguing for a new epistemology of rape, what Linda Alcoff calls “grey rape.” In this thesis, I interrogate the “grey” embedded in ordinary sexual encounters by looking at ambivalence as an example of everyday desire evident across the seduction plot and the novel tradition. Rather than seeking to make consent more inclusive to oppressed groups, I read between …


Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates Of The English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668, Nathan D. Nikolic 2023 CUNY Graduate Center

Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates Of The English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668, Nathan D. Nikolic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main question my dissertation attempts to address is: what role did the expansion of English colonial trades play in the transformation of English society and government between the Petition of Right and the early years of the Restoration (1628-1668)? My thesis is that during this period, colonial expansion rose to the level of a general national interest and that many early seventeenth-century texts index the complexities and tensions of this development. As a small but very organized group of merchants, peers, and MPs mobilized the military and financial technologies of colonization to support Parliament’s war against Charles I, their …


Translating The Hobbit (2023) By Mark T. Hooker, Arden R. Smith 2023 Valparaiso University

Translating The Hobbit (2023) By Mark T. Hooker, Arden R. Smith

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Arden R. Smith, of Translating The Hobbit (2023) by Mark T. Hooker


Shakespeare’S Prince Of Denmark: Political Pandering In Hamlet, Moriah Theriault 2023 Brigham Young University - Provo

Shakespeare’S Prince Of Denmark: Political Pandering In Hamlet, Moriah Theriault

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare's Hamlet contains frequent cultural ties and insights into Danish tradition that depict intentional effort to represent Danish culture. These accuracies can be seen in the description of the castle in Elsinore, the deep-seated conflicts between Christian forgiveness and revenge, and the traditional cannon salutes featured in Hamlet. Shakespeare created these connections to Danish culture for a political maneuver to win the favor of King James and his wife, the Royal Queen Anne of Denmark.


Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham 2023 Brigham Young University

Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Though the writings of Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera are “incommensurable” in many ways, I find “commesurablilities”––the kind of commensurabilities the Susan Stanford Friedman seeks out across the planetary landscape of modernism––in the way they negotiate a new creative identity in a modern environment with the bang clash of history and present ringing in their ears. I see this commensurability in at least three key features: 1) Woolf and Ihimaera each gave birth to new literary movements: Woolf was mother to high British Modernism with experimental techniques such as free indirect discourse and the relegation of plot to the background; …


Henrietta Maria: Royalist Women’S Representations Of The French Catholic Queen, Kim Hansen 2023 Brigham Young University, Provo

Henrietta Maria: Royalist Women’S Representations Of The French Catholic Queen, Kim Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

By the mid-15th century, the royal marriage of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria incited enough conflict to spark civil war, as the English struggled to reconcile between the long-established image of female English domesticity and a pervasive cultural expectation for equality between marriage partners. Any form of equality in the royal marriage called the absolute power of the king into question, as it would imply that his actions had included her direct involvement, and even at times were more representative of her, not his, views. Letters captured at the Battle of Naseby confirmed fears that the queen …


Paradise And Paradiso: Echoes Of A Fortunate Fall, Kathryn Alley 2023 Liberty University

Paradise And Paradiso: Echoes Of A Fortunate Fall, Kathryn Alley

The Kabod

Presented at the National Collegiate Research Conference at Harvard University, January 2023.


Frights And Forests: The Hellish Landscape Of The Dark Forest, From Sleepy Hollow To The Forest Of Arden, Minna Nizam 2023 Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Frights And Forests: The Hellish Landscape Of The Dark Forest, From Sleepy Hollow To The Forest Of Arden, Minna Nizam

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

This paper seeks to explore forest settings in fantasy, and its hellish landscapes. From the headless horseman in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, to the frights and horrors of mythical creatures in fantasy settings placed in forests. The purpose of this study is to dive deep into the fear of the forest, its early days in storytelling, to more modern renditions. Sources used will be primarily books, and texts within books, such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, and much more.


Mythopoeic Awards Discussion, David Lenander, David Emerson 2023 Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Mythopoeic Awards Discussion, David Lenander, David Emerson

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.


Seven Minutes In Hell: Hells In Fantasy Games, Nyssa Gilkey 2023 Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Seven Minutes In Hell: Hells In Fantasy Games, Nyssa Gilkey

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Join Nyssa Gilkey on a tour through several different fantasy video game depictions of hell. We’ll spend about seven (-ish) minutes looking around each hell or underworld before moving on, touring Helheim in God of War and God of War: Ragnarok, Hades and Elysium as portrayed in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey DLC, and the Duat of ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed: Origins DLC. With sufficient time and interest, we can tour other fantasy depictions of hell. Participants will be able to ask questions and discuss throughout the journey.


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