A Monstrous [Un]-Becoming: Defining The Final Boy,
2025
Georgia Southern University
A Monstrous [Un]-Becoming: Defining The Final Boy, Rhys Crumpton
College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations
Through an exploration of horror theory, monster theory, queer theory, and disabilities studies, this thesis defines a 21st century archetype within the serial horror narrative, known as “the Final Boy.” This character is a manifestation of a queer, often neurodivergent man in peril at the hands of a monstrous society. This harmful socionormativity is narratively represented by a monster wearing the face of a man, one whom the Final Boy must subdue and overcome if he wishes to survive. The seven tenets found in this project highlight the fluctuating morality the Final Boy is forced to engage in per the …
Eros And The Sublime: Tools For Reaching Toward An Altered Ecological Consciousness,
2025
University of Montana, Missoula
Eros And The Sublime: Tools For Reaching Toward An Altered Ecological Consciousness, Aineka Carlson
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
This thesis explores connections between the Kantian sublime and Anne Carson’s ideas regarding “eros.” Since Kant’s Critique of Judgement was published in 1790, the Kantian sublime has grown in popularity and been utilized by theorists and creative writers alike. While the Kantian sublime is often associated with nature in popular culture, there are certain egocentric and phallocentric elements of this mode of thinking that might inhibit a biocentric mindset. Through a character study of Oryx from Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, this thesis draws relations between the subjugation of women, nature, and the ways in which the popularized …
“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions,
2025
Colby College
“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions, Aubrey R. Adkins
Honors Theses
This project begins from the understanding that song lyrics can have lasting impacts on the poetic work that proceeds from them, and can and should, therefore, be read as literature. In the cultural context of Southern Appalachia, a historically underserved and academically underrepresented region, this understanding is intertwined with Audre Lorde’s idea that “For women...[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence.” The women of Southern Appalachia, denied access to particular modes of expression as a result of external circumstances such as poverty and sexism, need poetry, according to Lorde, to take “tangible action” in their lives. What came before …
"You Can't Buck Against The Railroad" And The Anarchist Radicals Who Ceased To Be: The Honest, Bleak Portrayal Of Social Darwinism In Frank Norris's The Octopus,
2025
Montclair State University
"You Can't Buck Against The Railroad" And The Anarchist Radicals Who Ceased To Be: The Honest, Bleak Portrayal Of Social Darwinism In Frank Norris's The Octopus, Michelle Nicole Miani
Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when railroads were consolidating their control, their executives soon learned their power of controlling rates, and by extension, the entire economy. Dissecting the capitalist machine of the railroad corporations in California, Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus presents a fictionalized account of the very real circumstances of one fight against the monopoly, the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880 in the San Joaquin Valley. This thesis explores Norris’s presentation of the forces that drive humans to lack empathy for those around them as well as the forces that drive others to fight back …
My Happy Neighbor,
2025
Eastern Illinois University
My Happy Neighbor, Ty Rea
Creative Writing Club - Fan Fiction
This is an alternate universe, it is a fanfiction about how Ronald McDonald and Wendy's started their franchise and have had a family-like relationship with each other.
Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, And The Postnatural Human In Contemporary American Literature,
2025
University of Kentucky
Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, And The Postnatural Human In Contemporary American Literature, Shelby Roberts
Theses and Dissertations--English
Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, and the Postnatural Human in Contemporary American Literature investigates the ways in which ideas of futurity are articulated in narratives that conceptualize both the end of the world and post-calamity society through the lens of a pessimistic, queer approach to understanding the future. The purpose of this project is to not only build previous research in the configurations of the body in queer, gothic, and speculative American writing as a whole, but to enter into a developing conversation surrounding Appalachian literature through the idea of kinship (the broadening of relationships both chemical and postnatural) as …
Romantic Materialities And The Politics Of Care: Negotiating Movement In A More-Than-Human World,
2025
West Virginia University
Romantic Materialities And The Politics Of Care: Negotiating Movement In A More-Than-Human World, April J. Mcginnis
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)
This dissertation explores the ecological politics of movement in Romantic literature. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates the important role that walking played in nineteenth-century literary culture. Many authors from this period cast walking as a practice that frees up not only the body but the mind as well, as the steady rhythm of the feet lulls the walker into a state of self-absorbed introspection and heightened creativity. Because of this, walking was a celebrated part of the creative process for many writers. The freedom they celebrate is possible, however, only in spaces that are level, …
Virginia Woolf And The Lesbian Literary Tradition,
2025
Dominican University of California
Virginia Woolf And The Lesbian Literary Tradition, Hunter Candrian-Velez
English and Creative Writing | Senior Theses
Modernist English authors, such as Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando: A Biography, built upon a pre-existing and long tradition of underground lesbian literature dating back to Sappho in Ancient Greece. Before Woolf, female writers of the 19th century continued this tradition by establishing the literary trope of the “Victorian Romantic Female Friendship,” which would later take on different shapes and connotations with discoveries made in the early 1900s related to sexology and homosexual inversion. These discoveries would lead writers to code their work in the hopes of avoiding censorship and government punishment. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, …
All Red Inside: Embodied Metaphor In Clive Barker's Books Of Blood,
2025
Humboldt State University
All Red Inside: Embodied Metaphor In Clive Barker's Books Of Blood, Ian Vargas
Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects
The collection Books of Blood is an anthology series of short stories written between 1984 and 1985. Only two, the very first and last, have any unifying story. For our purposes we will be looking at stories in particular that exemplify the themes I am speaking about. Barker's writing often heavily focuses on the ways that the body stands outside the control of the individual, something that a person resides in and must always rely upon, but is not actually in their control in most senses. His horror explores the ways in which the human body is both the first …
Breaking The Boundaries Of The Binary: Non-Normative Gender Expression And Rebellion In 19th-Century Literature,
2025
Bucknell University
Breaking The Boundaries Of The Binary: Non-Normative Gender Expression And Rebellion In 19th-Century Literature, Anna Marie Wingard
Honors Theses
This thesis explores non-normative expressions of gender in three nineteenth-century novels: Valperga (1823) by Mary Shelley, The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846) by Julia Ward Howe, and The Awakening (1999) by Kate Chopin. Each novel’s protagonist displays gender expression that rejects nineteenth-century British and American ideals and is consequently exiled from society and faces death. The project diagrams trajectories of gender expression and identity by tracing adherence, failure, and consequences to illustrate how non-normative gender expression directly leads to social exclusion and death. The findings of this literary analysis suggest that nineteenth-century understandings of gender were rigidly policed and the novel served …
‘‘I Am Not This, Not Here, This Time’’: Claudia Emerson’S Infusion Suite As A Compelling Account Of The Lived Experience Of Cancer,
2025
University of Mary Washington
‘‘I Am Not This, Not Here, This Time’’: Claudia Emerson’S Infusion Suite As A Compelling Account Of The Lived Experience Of Cancer, Chris Foss
English & Linguistics Articles
Claudia Emerson’s Infusion Suite section within her poetry collection Impossible Bottle is a significant contemporary literary representation of cancer. In this twelve-poem sequence, Emerson dispenses with the typical martial metaphors so often used to represent this lived experience. Instead, she focuses on more mundane everyday moments in a way that acknowledges and respects the humanity of all those at the treatment center—especially that of the patients. Emerson refuses to airbrush out the daunting, debilitating aspects of cancer, but she also preserves space for light and life.
Alive For The Wake,
2025
University of Montana, Missoula
Alive For The Wake, Anna Kate Powell
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
In the year 2046, bacteria strain B. bibitor has rendered all petroleum hydrocarbon compounds unrefinable. Paramedic Amanda Bailey finds hope in the resilience of humanity but struggles when she learns the powers that be would rather concentrate their efforts on fighting B. bibitor—restoring infected hydrocarbons to their previously refinable (and profitable) nature—rather than investing in already-developed clean firm energies and renewable material manufacture.
Inoffensively Alice: Gender Politics In The Alice Series,
2025
University of Maryland, College Park
Inoffensively Alice: Gender Politics In The Alice Series, Eirian Gail Wells
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Contents,
2025
University of South Carolina
Contents
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
“Being Natural Is Simply A Pose”: The Concept Of Foucault’S Panopticon In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Orlando,
2025
Wilkes University
“Being Natural Is Simply A Pose”: The Concept Of Foucault’S Panopticon In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Orlando, Mya Corcoran
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Comparing The Representations Of Order And Behavior In James Joyce’S “The Dead” And Samuel Beckett’S Endgame,
2025
FLAME University, India
Comparing The Representations Of Order And Behavior In James Joyce’S “The Dead” And Samuel Beckett’S Endgame, Araav Thakker
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 27, 2025,
2025
University of South Carolina
The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 27, 2025
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Submission Guidelines,
2025
University of South Carolina
Submission Guidelines
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
The Great Wizarding Duel: Tolkien’S Possible Influence On Rowling,
2025
Marshall University
The Great Wizarding Duel: Tolkien’S Possible Influence On Rowling, Anna Jarrell
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Feeling Foreign / Foreign Feeling: Affect In Southeast Asian Diasporic Short Story Collections,
2025
Virginia Commonwealth University
Feeling Foreign / Foreign Feeling: Affect In Southeast Asian Diasporic Short Story Collections, Francys Aerin Fortes
Theses and Dissertations
Affect studies have long been saturated with scholarship investigating the fluidity of emotions, though a larger turn in the field now prioritizes the felt experiences of marginalized peoples. Sianne Ngai’s work is one part of this turn that seeks to unpack the effects of oppressive systemic forces on Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Sianne Ngai reexamined the nature of emotions in her seminal text Ugly Feelings (2005), particularly concerned with how negative feelings are disproportionately felt by marginalized bodies as a result of conditions of obstructed agency, systems of power, and wage labor capitalism. Drawing from Ngai’s writing, this thesis …
