Literature in English, North America Commons^™

The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter: The Life And Work Of Celia Laighton Thaxter, Haley J. Parker

Honors Theses and Capstones

Living on the edge of the American empire, Celia Thaxter explored the dimensions of her life in ways that transcended, yet never fully abandoned traditional gender boundaries by cultivating her lifelong relationship with nature through creative expression. The lighthouse keeper's daughter constructed her identity based on the experiences that shaped her on the very edge of civilization. Coming of age on the Isles of Shoals, Celia reveled in flexibility and unrestricted freedom of her natural environment isolated from the cultural spheres on the mainland that reinforced the ideology of domestic femininity. This ideology was dominant in the 19th century in …

Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, And The Discursive Production And Policing Of Gender, Alan J. Bandyk, Alan J. Bandyk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis utilizes the works of Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said in a discourse analysis of influencers and writers in the right wing "manosphere." The figures analyzed herein are Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh. Their rhetoric aims to create a discursive woman who embodies traditional notions of gender and sex that de Beauvoir critiqued in 1949. The constant adherence and reference to a mythical past exhibits ways of thinking that coincide perfectly with Jameson's own theoretical work with the term and its inherent false nostalgia. Tate's and Walsh's efforts also fall into discursive attempts at …

"Her Best Teacher, Comforter, And Friend": The Gendered Politics Of Labor In Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story Of Experience, Mena Bova

Scripps Senior Theses

"I only ask for a chance to be a useful, happy woman," exclaims main character Christie Devon in the opening pages of Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience. Unsurprisingly, much of Work is focused on labor: over the book's span of twenty years, Christie participates in many forms of work, from waged labor to domestic labor to religious labor. While much of the existing scholarship about Work focuses on Christie's experiences in the world of external, waged labor, this thesis contends that Christie's experiences with domestic labor has been a historically overlooked area. Using a social reproduction …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Editor's Preface, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Self-Consciousness And Alienation In Pirandello's One, No One, And One Hundred Thousand, Francesco Satta

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

No abstract provided.

Swashbuckling Politicians, Silas Fier

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

No abstract provided.

Wilfred Owen And Shell Shock: The Initial Sympathetic Understanding Of Ptsd, Rachel Eubanks

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

No abstract provided.

Submission Guidelines, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 26, 2024, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Colonial Body-Logic In George Orwell's Burnese Days: A Contrapuntal Critique, Riley Mays

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

No abstract provided.

Troubling Waters: Anthropocene Marine Gothic In The 19th-Century Anglo-American Fiction, Phoenix Guqing Wang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The 19th century witnessed intensifying marine ecological disruptions by colonial, industrial, and imperial activities. Meanwhile, current scholarship acknowledges the significance of the 19th century in tracing the emergence of the “Anthropocene” – a loose shorthand for ecological damages that are planetary in scale. This thesis aims to analyze how gothic imagination of the marine space unravels the linkages between the two temporally intersecting phenomena. Drawing on ocean studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, and gothic studies, I theorize what I call “Anthropocene marine Gothic discourse” to understand how 19th-century Anglo-American writers attend to the marine space to grapple with planetary ecological concerns …

Unreliable Narrators; Origins And Impact, Lauren Fetzer

Honors Program Theses

Unreliable narrators can be found in every source of information. They mediate the text for the reader and raise our perceptions of stories, news articles, and forms of receiving facts. While they can be seen in a variety of different genres and forms of literature over the span of many decades, the understanding and acceptance of unreliable narrators have shifted over time. During the late nineteenth century, many authors utilized neutral narrators, intended to be without opinions or bias, when discussing social issues. In Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: a Girl of the Streets the narrator is not the main …

Little Miss Sure Shot: Essays On A Young Woman Journalist's Search For Fulfillment, Mallory Schmitz

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Dostoyevsky And Wright On Becoming The Underground Man, Zain Alam

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the parallels between Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground, focusing on their shared use of the "Underground Man" archetype to critique philosophical and societal structures. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man embodies the contradictions of Determinism and Rational Egoism in 19th-century Russia, exposing the flaws of these ideologies through satire. In contrast, Wright recontextualizes this character to address racial injustice in mid-20th-century America, using Fred Daniels' descent into a literal underground to highlight systemic oppression. By comparing these works, the thesis demonstrates how both authors utilize the underground as a metaphorical space …

Author And Authorship In Arthur Miller’S Death Of A Salesman: Willy Loman's Attempts To Author A Nostalgic, Fictitious Past Lead To His Downfall, While Linda Loman’S Miller-Authored Warnings Fall On Willy’S Ever-Deaf Ears, Allison Stein-Jackter

Dissertations and Theses

Throughout the 20th century, the American male protagonist’s obsession with and longing for a past that never existed brings about his own downfall. In Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman nostalgically fantasizes about a bygone era, the pre-war days of glory and greatness, but as he attempts to recreate his presumed former prestige in a post-war world, the fantasy unravels, with not only death and destruction in his dream’s widening, illusory wake, but the unraveling also presents itself in the recognition that Willy’s carefully crafted memories are works of fiction. Decades of literary research focus on Willy’s …

‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

Penelope: Our Cunning Hero, Rossana Leal

CMC Senior Theses

In the literary world, Homer’s Odyssey has served as a fundamental text in the Western canon. It was influential to great writers such as Virgil and Dante, along with being a significant influence in Ancient Greek religion. The subject of both mystery and celebration, Homer remains one of the most prominent authors in literary history. His work has received several interpretations over the years. This thesis takes a feminist and modern approach to the epic poem, focusing on Penelope as the protagonist of the epic and argues for her status as not just an equal partner for her husband, but …

Let Your Head Hang Down: A Narrative Examination Of Cultic & Conspiratorial Romance, Kyle Macy

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

A response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may …