Literature in English, North America Commons^™

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Anatomic By Adam Dickinson, Heather Houser

The Goose

Review of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic.

Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier

College Honors Program

This thesis examines the relationship between gender and heroism in the Beowulf tale and two of its modern retellings. It includes an exploration of the medieval gender roles of the original epic using Seamus Heaney and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations. This thesis also addresses the ways in which some characters disturb gender binaries and social roles — especially in the case of Grendel’s mother. The second and third chapters focus on two retellings of the Beowulf text respectively: John Gardner’s Grendel , told from the perspective of the monster Grendel; and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife , which is …

More Human Than Human: Artificial People In Literature And Media, Taylor P. Amalfitano

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein over two hundred years ago, many of the main themes of alienation and revenge featured in Shelley’s novel reappear in HBO’s Westworld in 2016. This thesis establishes a genealogy for the stories of artificial people and analyzes the relationship between human beings and artificial life, as it is portrayed in speculative fiction and popular media. The popularity of robots and cyborgs is associated with people’s fear of technology, but their stories are often used as an allegory to explain aspects of the human experience that are unknown or difficult to understand. As artificial intelligence becomes …

The Language Of Rats: Unwelcome Animals And Interspecies Connection In Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Kieran Leigh Lyons

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Language of Rats: Unwelcome Animals and Interspecies Connection in Global Contemporary Fiction consists of three essays examining the representation of what I call unwelcome animals in contemporary Anglophone novels from the United States, Nigeria, and India. These animals often live alongside humans yet are perceived as threats or annoyances. Literary depictions of this fraught relationship reveal, and sometimes critique, the intellectual structures that shape how we understand and represent interspecies connections. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the interspecies dimensions of contemporary fiction by bringing together the fields of environmental criticism, animal studies, postcolonialism, and U.S. Southern studies. …

"And Gladly Wolde He Lerne": Facilitating Discussion Based Learning About Medieval And Regency Literature Through Interactive Technologies, Emma Vallandingham

Honors Projects

A series of reading guides for Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Frankenstein, that utilize interactive technologies to facilitate student engagement with and discussion of the texts. Each reading guide consists of an overview of the text, relevant historical context, and reading and discussion questions for students to answer. Some reading guides also have corresponding answer guides that provides sample answers as well as hints and tips for answering the questions.

Super Heroes V Scorsese: A Marxist Reading Of Alienation And The Political Unconscious In Blockbuster Superhero Film, David Eltz

Kutztown University Masters Theses

As superhero blockbusters continue to dominate the theatrical landscape, critical detractors of the genre have grown in number and authority. The most influential among them, Martin Scorsese, has been quoted as referring to Marvel films as “theme parks” rather than “cinema” (his own term for auteur film). Despite this, these films often possess considerably challenging views in regards to social justice, and continue to interface with the pervading theme of alienation in increasingly abstract and progressive ways.

This thesis considers four films (1978’s Superman, 2000’s X-Men, 2013’s Captain America: Winter Soldier, and 2018’s Black Panther) from a Marxist perspective, viewing …

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain

Honors Theses

This thesis explores themes of monstrosity in Maria Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife in connection with issues of women's bodies and feminism. It analyzes prominent female characters in the novel and the relationships of their bodies to patriarchal authority, showing how and why bodies are deemed monstrous. It discusses the role that motherhood plays in patriarchal society, as well as explores alternatives that the novel offers to this system.

Decorating The Performative Body In Tender Is The Night, Alyssa Q. Johnson

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

In Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald uses clothing and fashion to heighten the sense of time period as well as to enhance the ways in which the world, on both sides of the Atlantic, was changing. However, changes on the surface frequently do not reveal a change in underlying motivations for dress. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald uses clothing in symbolic ways that allow characters to perform roles to achieve their goals. Through the ways bodies are shaped in the novel, Fitzgerald reveals that clothing, shopping, and perfectly bronzed skin have the power to make great economic …

Going Slumming In Mexico: Rereading Primitivism In Katherine Anne Porter’S Flowering Judas And Other Stories, Annika M. Schadewaldt

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in-Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of …

A “Defect Of Justice”: Congregationalism, The Calvinist Problem, And The Unitarian Solution In Sylvester Judd's Margaret, Benjamin M. Woods

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop …

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

The Rise Of Totalitarianism, Colonial Mimicry, And Gender And Sexuality In The Twentieth Century English Literature, Shahin Hossain

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Shahin Hossain provides an alternative reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin

Undergraduate Theses

The novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are nothing if not haunted. Though the authors themselves remain, in many ways, diametrically opposed, their works remain inextricably entangled due to the looming specter of history that hangs over their pages. Perhaps more-so than any other writers in the 20th Century, these two towering figures of American fiction took seriously the task of unpacking the migrainous burden of history. Read together, they offer differing perspectives on the nature of writing one's own past, and how this is informed by race and class. Specifically, Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded …

“This Is A True Story”: Paratextual Prefaces And Their Fictive Truths Across Literature, Rebecca Stokem

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Scholar Gérard Genette defines the term “paratext” as accompanying components of a text like titles, forwards, illustrations, footnotes, etc. Genette claims these “productions” affect the “reception” and function as a liminal space between the “inside and outside” of a written work (1-2). Many texts and other works of fiction, across years and genres, use their paratexts to create fictitious histories that surround their main stories. The success of this rhetorical strategy, a convention that I call “fictive truth,” depends heavily on the paratexts’ reception from its audience. These genre conventions are traceable through canonical Western literature, from texts like Walter …

Front Matter, Toyon Literary Magazine

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Seeing Into The City Of Glass: An Analysis Of The Postmodern Worldview As Displayed By Postmodern Detective Fiction, Katelyn Niehaus

WRIT: Journal of First-Year Writing

This article looks at postmodern detective fiction, particularly City of Glass by Paul Auster, and analyzes how this genre reveals implications of various aspects of the postmodern worldview. Predominantly, it looks at the aspects of pluralism and creating reality and how postmodern detective fiction portrays numerous implications of these aspects.

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …

Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres: Utilizing Genres To Explore Literary Themes Through Genre Fiction, Michael W. Rickard Ii

English Theses

Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre’s elements are used to further explore the elements of …

The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Much of scholarship regarding the presence of war in literary modernism has foregrounded psychic trauma endured by veterans of World War I. The returning soldier is often figured as representative of the war’s infiltration of the homefront. The common argument claims that the erosion of the distinction between war and peace (as well as private and public) is a mirror image of the veteran’s wounded psyche. This thesis, however, argues that peace and war in the West have always been indistinct. The body politic is, in actuality, constituted by a perpetual civil war. Furthermore, the novels of William Faulkner, because …