Literature in English, North America Commons^™

"Keep The Inmost Me Behind Its Veil:" Nathaniel Hawthorne's Manipulation Of Boundaries As Lessons In Craft, Molly Mary Mclaughlin

Graduate Masters Theses

In a letter written after her husband's death, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne spoke of a veil Nathaniel Hawthorne had drawn around himself during his life. This complicated metaphor is an echo from Hawthorne's work and life, where the construction of boundaries that are solid but not opaque, allow the writer to conceal and draw attention to the cart of concealment without revealing what, if anything, is hidden. That Hawthorne carefully considered what he would and would not reveal is clear in many of his works, and in pieces like "The Minister's Black Veil," where the act of concealment draws rather than …

The Irish Odyssey Of James Mccarroll, Michael Peterman

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

From Monsters To Victims: Vampires And Their Cultural Evolution From The Nineteenth To The Twenty-First Century, Caitlyn Orlomoski

Honors Scholar Theses

Vampires are the latest fad to appear on pop-culture’s radar, dominating literature, film, and television, but this is not the first time they have latched onto the public consciousness. These bloodsuckers have been a constant presence in literature and film since the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the most influential vampire text of all time. Even before Dracula, vampires permeated Eastern European folklore, supposedly terrorizing small rustic communities in the dark of the night and acting as scapegoats for almost anything the locals could neither change nor understand. Since that time, vampires have represented society’s fears …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee

Dissertations

Discussions of the pastoral mode in American literary history frequently omit the complicated relationship between African Americans and the natural world, particularly as it relates to the South. The pastoral, as a sensibility, has long been an important part of the southern identity, for the mythos of the South long depended upon its association with a new “Garden of the World” image, a paradise dependent upon slave labor and a racial hierarchy to sustain it. For African Americans, the rural South has been both a home and a place of violence and oppression, particularly during the period of slavery through …

A Liberating Intent: The American Civics Curriculum In Illinois High Schools And The Development Of A Critically Constructive Citizenry, Gustavo David Albear

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Civics education and constructive criticality are not usually found within the same curriculum. In America the two concepts tend to be considered as antithetical in content and practice. Students and teachers do not approach education about the citizen‘s responsibilities with great necessity or urgency, and when they do approach the subject it is from the perspective of inherent rights that should not be questioned, since they are by birth granted, albeit only to some. The idea of criticality is also not considered to be part of the developmental need of a citizen, since the overall sentiment associated with it is …

Mobilizing Sentiment: Popular American Women's Fiction Of The Great War, 1914–1922, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines American women’s popular novels about the Great War published between 1914 and 1922, and offers a perspective that complicates our understanding of the American experience of WWI. Drawing on a historical framework that illuminates the subtleties of the nation’s the ever-shifting political stance in response to the European War, this study demonstrates how American response to the war was neither monolithic nor static. This study contributes to current efforts to recover women’s voices in the male-dominated terrain of war writing, and promotes the value of studying noncanonical texts. Rarely considered in scholarship of American war literature, women’s …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Care Of The Self And The Will To Freedom: Michel Foucault, Critique And Ethics, Stephanie M. Batters

Senior Honors Projects

Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

Stephanie Batters

Faculty Sponsor:  Stephen Barber, English

What do subjectivity, power and ethics have in common?  For French philosopher Michel Foucault, each of these concepts inherently resides within the others.  His works, spanning from the mid-1950s to his death in 1984, offer a profound theoretical approach to the complex questions that obtain between the individual and society.  Foucault’s works present careful and intricate theories about the relationships of the past with the present, the individual with society, and power with truth.  Many of his writings explore how the individual is made …

Persistent Revolutions In Colombia And Peru: A Comparative Analysis, Brandon Huson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis performs a comparative analysis of rural-based revolutionary movements in Latin America. The movements that are compared are the FARC, originating in Colombia, and the Shining Path, which emerged from the highlands of Peru. The comparison is meant to serve as a test for what variables are predictive of revolutionary success. Since these movements differ in their success in establishing permanent political, social and military movements in their countries over time, their dichotomous outcome can be used to point toward variables that warrant further consideration. Comparison of revolutionary movement makes sense in this case due to the similarities between …

Breeding Migrations, Survivorship, And Obligate Crayfish Burrow Use By Adult Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates Areolatus), Jennifer L. Heemeyer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Movements are risky behaviors to animals, and amphibians are no exception. Being unable to cover long distances quickly, amphibians may find migrations challenging, yet many if not most species exhibit cyclic annual migrations. Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates areolatus), are a relatively understudied species of North American amphibian listed as endangered in Indiana and Iowa, and considered a species of conservation concern throughout much of their range. To better understand the biology of this species, and in particular, to assess the role that movements play in affecting survivorship, I radio tracked 48 Crawfish Frog adults, in 2009 and 2010. My study encompassed …

Skunk Hammock, Britton Cody Lumpkin

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Skunk Hammock: Poems, a poetry collection by Cody Lumpkin, explores the confluence of man-made objects with the natural world. Lumpkin’s subject matter varies widely. From poems derived from the detritus of popular culture like Spam and Mr. Snuffleupagus to poems where prairie dogs and egging houses are the focus, Lumpkin works to render material poetic that is typically not seen as poetic. A number of his poems concern themselves with the perception of animals. Influenced by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, Robert Hayden, and Claudia Emerson, Lumpkin seeks to show animals not as mere symbolic vessels, but …

A Montage In Its Leaves, Andrew S. Nicholson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation consists of a series of lyric poems preceded by an introduction to those poems. The introduction gives a background to the method of composition and historical precedents to the poems, connecting the lyric poems to the writing and thoughts of William Blake, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Creeley. The poems are presented in three parts, and cover a variety of subjects, frequently favoring the presentation of subjective experience over an imagined objectivity.

The Father Birth, Alissa Nutting

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents' rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen's early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

"The Way Of The World Is To Bloom And Flower And Die": The Palindrome Of Knowing In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, Joseph Clark

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Meaning has been the topic of much commentary on Cormac McCarthy’s work. Critics posit an array of conclusions about meaning in his corpus, ranging from its impossibility to its excess. Much work concludes that if meaning exists, it is generated from an interplay between the natural world that McCarthy describes in his work and the characters who interact with it. With The Road, McCarthy offers his clearest presentation of meaning as it pertains to human knowing. In this presentation, McCarthy explores knowing through a beginning-in-ending, or palindromatic scheme; he arrives at the origins of knowing by reaching its terminus mirror. …

"Not Gone Or Vanished Either:" William Faulker's Use Of Memory And Imagination, Kevin Daniel Gleason

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines the role that memory and imagination play in three of William Faulkner’s novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. While most scholars perceive Faulkner’s characters as burdened, debilitated, and destroyed by the past, I argue that Faulkner presents a wide spectrum of engagement with the past which includes the potential for memory to serve as a tool of redemption and power. Henri Bergson’s notion of the fluidity of all time past, present, and future forms the center of Faulkner’s understanding of time, and in this paradigm, Faulkner’s characters are capable of creating and …

The Whiter Lotus: Asian Religions And Reform Movements In America, 1836-1933, Edgar A. Weir Jr.

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines the influence of Asian religions and thought on various reform movements in America, including anti-slavery, labor rights, the alleviation of poverty, women's rights, and the rights of immigrants. The interactions between these two forces will be uncovered and analyzed from 1836, the year Ralph Waldo Emerson's ground-breaking work Nature was published, until 1933, the year that Dyer Daniel Lum, the last individual discussed in this work, passed away. Previous studies have demonstrated that those who incorporated Asian religions and thought into their own lives and worldviews also affixed great importance on affecting society in a positive manner. …

Woman Or Warrior? How Believable Femininity Shapes Warrior Women, Jessica D. Mccall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation is an exploration of how femininity is constructed in the characters of warrior women. I define and apply my theory of believable femininity: the notion that in order for characters gendered female to be accepted by an audience, specific textual markers must render them submissive to a dominating male figure. I examine the following warrior women at length: Britomart and Radigund from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christine de Pizan's treatment of Amazons in her Book of the City of Ladies and Hippolyta's specific portrayal by de Pizan in comparison to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the …