Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …

Christian Allegories And Social Change In Southern Literature: A Comparative Study Of Mason Tarwater And Atticus Finch In Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away And Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Marlee Ruark

English MA Theses

This thesis compares Mason Tarwater of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away and Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to better understand how each author comments on Christian allegories and social change within their novels. This thesis argues that To Kill a Mockingbird promotes social change through the Christian values of good Samaritanism, nonviolence, and inclusion, while The Violent Bear It Away promotes a problematic Christian message. This thesis identifies how both novels utilize religious allegory. In O’Connor’s novel, the paradoxical and violent prophet figure, Mason Tarwater, uses violence and division to evoke change, while in …

Destruction And Resiliency: Decolonizing Settler Knowledge In Native American Literature Through The Peoplehood Matrix, Renissa R. Gannie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the complex dynamics of settler colonialism and the construction of peoplehood within the Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Jemez Pueblo, Anishinaabe, and Blackfeet culture through a comparative analysis of literary works focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Frances Washburn’ Elsie’s Business, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, and Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather; these authors employ narrative strategies to depict the destructive impacts of settler colonialism on indigenous identities and communities. Drawing upon postcolonial and indigenous literary theories, this research uses a comparative framework to analyze the diverse …

Novelizing The Feminist Biography, From Nancy Milford's Zelda To The Present: What Are The Ethics Of Sourcing?, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation arose out of two parallel tracks: the desire to novelize my own feminist biography of Elizabeth Robins and the awareness -- especially made acute in the essay on Emma Tennant's two treatments of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes material by Diane Middlebrook, "Misremembering Ted Hughes" -- that for a novelist to base fiction on historical subjects risks not merely critical exposure; it also has its ethical and sometimes legal complications.

Anyone of a certain age remembers or can mark the impact of Milford's study of Zelda Fitzgerald, published 1970, the finalist in several book awards and scores …

"An Infinite Advantage": A Kierkegaardian Analysis Of Anxiety And Despair In Post-War American Literature, Jeremiah Davis

Dissertations and Theses

“An Infinite Advantage”: A Kierkegaardian Analysis of Anxiety and Despair in Post-War American Literature uses a theistically informed existentialist lens to examine issues of selfhood as depicted in American literature from the mid-twentieth century. During this period in America, the changing nature of religious worship led to an uncertain understanding of what it meant to be an individual. With examinations of characters from five novels published in the period, I explore how Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy can help us better understand how Christian authors from the period attempted to define what makes up a self and how a self is to …

Deadly Emotions: The Argument For Tempered Feeling In British And American Literature Of Sentiment, Miranda Anne Liebsack

Dissertations and Theses

This project focuses on late eighteenth-century literature of sentiment, specifically examining the man and woman of feeling characters in The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and Volume the Last (1753), both written by Sarah Fielding, The Man of Feeling (1771), written by Henry Mackenzie, The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown, and The Coquette (1797), by Hannah Webster Foster. I use the following terms to analyze these texts: sensibility functions as the ability to feel great emotion, emotionally and physically; sympathy is the ability to connect with another with emotions, and sentiment is tempered emotion based in morality …

Indigenous And Western Sciences In Carlos Hernandez's The Assimilated Cuban's Guide To Quantum Santeria, Joy Sanchez-Taylor

Publications and Research

This chapter examines Carlos Hernandez’s The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria as an example of how authors of alternative futurisms can draw on Indigenous knowledge to destabilize Eurowestern perceptions that Western science is more modern and rational than Indigenous knowledge. Joy Sanchez-Taylor argues that Hernandez combines references to Santería and quantum physics to demonstrate parallels between Indigenous knowledge and Eurowestern “rational” science. Ultimately, references in Quantum Santeria to ideas of spiritual healing and nonlinear time demonstrate how authors like Hernandez are working to restore Biskaabiiyang, or a return to self, within science fiction.

Extranormal Sorcery In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Harleyquinn Wahl

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Art, Propaganda, And Truth, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

This essay explores how British and American writers and theorists in the first half of the twentieth century thought about art, propaganda, and truth. Focusing largely on literature written during the First and the Second World Wars, this essay shows that very few authors defined their art as propaganda or truth and instead used words like “political,” “resistance,” “information,” and “anti-fascist” to describe their wartime writing. However, while authors might have eschewed the term propaganda, that does not mean that they avoided producing it. As this essay illustrates, what many authors wrote would now be considered “propaganda.” Moreover, even if …

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

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.

Descended From Cain: The Biopolitics In Beowulf, Jia-Ying Liu

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

No abstract provided.

Living “Long In A Cold Land”: Ecofeminist Perspectives On Environment, Culture, And “Othering” In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness, Bethany Pineda

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

No abstract provided.

Robinson Crusoe Crusades Against Traditional Ideas Of Heroism, Sabrina Hess

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.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 25, 2023, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Ruslan And Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit Of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, And Morals, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This article discusses the Russian precursor to Humbert’s explicit “kingdom by the sea”: Pushkin’s mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL). An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin’s work underpins Nabokov’s own transnational position as a writer whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita’s cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and “brothers”-rivals finds in Pushkin’s RL a synthesizing subtext. Moreover, Pushkin’s play …