Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

47,525 Full-Text Articles 30,292 Authors 42,045,981 Downloads 323 Institutions

All Articles in English Language and Literature

Faceted Search

47,525 full-text articles. Page 104 of 1409.

Prophets Instead Of Priests: Diagonal Orientations & Coming-Of-Age Queerness In Jane Eyre And Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Emily G. Flanders 2025 Colby College

Prophets Instead Of Priests: Diagonal Orientations & Coming-Of-Age Queerness In Jane Eyre And Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Emily G. Flanders

Honors Theses

This project asserts that the moment in which a girl leaves the trajectory of the expected in favor of the unknown in order to pursue her discovery of self is when her coming-of-age narrative becomes queer. This is demonstrated through Jane in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. Jane and Jeannette’s respective coming-of-age narratives–that is, them creating their fully embodied selves, the girl they believe and know themselves to be–happen off the expected life path in the liminal, in-between, undefined space of the queer oblique. There are moments …


“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions, Aubrey R. Adkins 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 …


Women Spinning On The Edge: Finding And Redefining The “Spinster” In The Witches Of Discworld, Kathryn Ann Fitzmaurice 2025 Eastern Illinois University

Women Spinning On The Edge: Finding And Redefining The “Spinster” In The Witches Of Discworld, Kathryn Ann Fitzmaurice

Masters Theses

The word “spinster” has undergone a series of evolutions over the past seven hundred years, first coined to describe the occupation of women engaged in the spinning of plant and animal fibers into thread and yarn in the Middle Ages and later a legal marital status designation used until the 21st century. The connotation associated in social contexts became pejorative. This project’s tracing of the word spinster is used to set up the broader scope looking at how the spinster can be viewed as an archetype, what we can learn through the lenses of gender and feminist theory, and …


Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 15, Spring 2025, English Department 2025 Suffolk University

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 15, Spring 2025, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.


Is This It: Doubts About Transcendence In The Twenty-First Century Novel, Owen S. Avery 2025 Connecticut College

Is This It: Doubts About Transcendence In The Twenty-First Century Novel, Owen S. Avery

English Honors Papers

This thesis explores how twenty-first-century novels grapple with the possibility of transcendence, communication, meaning, feeling, and emotional authenticity in our increasingly digital world. In my grouping of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Tao Lin’s Taipei, and Megan Boyle’s LIVEBLOG, I identify a shared urge towards accessing feelings and sincerity in an age of irony and skepticism through a variety of different formal strategies. I propose the concept of “internet realism” to describe Lin’s and Boyle’s attempts to capture how digital mediation affects communication, meaning, and sincerity. In these works, I highlight …


Panem’S Pitfalls: Reading The Hunger Games As A Critique Of Noncritical Media Consumption, Madison Phipps 2025 South Dakota State University

Panem’S Pitfalls: Reading The Hunger Games As A Critique Of Noncritical Media Consumption, Madison Phipps

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I utilize Collins’ YA dystopian series The Hunger Games to demonstrate that YA literature merits our attention as a valuable jumping point from which young adults can develop critical reading and thinking skills as well as develop enhanced media literacy. My first two chapters, in addition to situating Collins’ works within a long history of dystopian fiction, demonstrate how these works engage with the potential pitfalls of noncritical consumption in our media-saturated world. And in the third and final chapter, I examine how the series provides pathways to resistance and the potential for revolution.


Coffee Shops And Community, Julia A. Franz 2025 Kennesaw State University

Coffee Shops And Community, Julia A. Franz

Emerging Writers

This paper focuses on the role of coffeehouses as community hubs through a comparative analysis of two locations of a locally owned coffee company in Georgia. It examines how the physical design and values of each shop offer unique forms of social interaction. The St. Simons location encourages spontaneous, intergenerational conversations; while, the Brunswick shop strengthens pre-existing community ties among working families and retirees. The profile explains how, by incorporating local history, sustainable sourcing, and communal spaces, the coffee company shows how design and principles shape social dynamics. This profile highlights how coffeehouses can serve as more than commercial spaces …


The Sword And The Serpent, Gina Dittmeier 2025 Hollins University

The Sword And The Serpent, Gina Dittmeier

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

This project provides insight into the monstrous bridegroom trope in fairytale and its influence in modern fantasy literature. The monstrous bridegroom trope has several different variations, but all of these variations result in a young and innocent woman marrying a monster. Through my critical essay, I look at this trope through a modern feminist lens, exploring the different variations of the trope in fairy tales, modern fairy tale adaptations, and fantasy literature. The essay brings in modern ideas of toxic masculinity and toxic femininity and applies them to the fairy tale inspiration of fantasy literature. The monstrous bridegroom trope and …


Mágico Nunca Se Muere: Una Historia De Un Amor Unconditional And Unstoppable, Belén Silvia Yudess 2025 Scripps College

Mágico Nunca Se Muere: Una Historia De Un Amor Unconditional And Unstoppable, Belén Silvia Yudess

Scripps Senior Theses

This novella explores how traditions of silence, family dynamics, adolescence and storytelling influence identity formation and self-perception for Mexican-American women. Situated within the AIDS pandemic, this story aims to show how even within a world riddled with grief, hatred, and fear siempre hay espacio para las risas y el amor.


The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2025 Edition], Bank Street College of Education. Children's Book Committee. 2025 Bank Street College of Education

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2025 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee.

Children's Book Committee

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2024. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.


"His Injustice Stirred In Me Ambitious Wishes": Women's Education In Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Kathleen Sickinger 2025 Montclair State University

"His Injustice Stirred In Me Ambitious Wishes": Women's Education In Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Kathleen Sickinger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis will explore Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette and how it functions as an insight into the complicated ways in which Brontë’s Victorian world felt towards women’s education. The text focuses on the life of Lucy Snowe, a character often considered to be one of Charlotte Brontë’s most autobiographical, and her experiences in an all-girls’ school in the Brussels-inspired town of Villette. Education plays a large role in the events of Lucy’s life, which the novel explores, along with detailing the experiences of the characters of Ginevra Fanshawe and professor M. Paul Emmanuel. Despite their different conceptions of and relations …


Cultural And Counter-Cultural Contexts In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club And Cristina GarcíA'S Dreaming In Cuban, Melinda M. Ninewise 2025 Montclair State University

Cultural And Counter-Cultural Contexts In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club And Cristina GarcíA'S Dreaming In Cuban, Melinda M. Ninewise

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the cultural and counter-cultural narratives presented in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, examining how these works impact the literary canon and redefine the immigrant experience through a distinctly female lens. Both novels share themes of generational conflict, fragmented identities, and the struggles of communication shaped by cultural and linguistic divides. While these works feature distinct cultural backgrounds, Chinese American and Cuban American respectively, the authors challenge patriarchal norms by privileging female voices and presenting nuanced portrayals of mother-daughter relationships. The analysis highlights shared literary techniques and thematic parallels, including identity …


"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 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 …


Full Ride To College, But At What Cost?: Colonial Subjects At Imperial Educational Institutions In Binti And The Fifth Season, Martha Zornow 2025 Old Dominion University

Full Ride To College, But At What Cost?: Colonial Subjects At Imperial Educational Institutions In Binti And The Fifth Season, Martha Zornow

English Faculty Publications

A marginalized young person, often of a different physiognomy from those wielding power, sees the 'ivory tower' in her universe as a path to the learning, respect, power, and agency not available to her in her home environs. At their educational institutions, while their Blackness is not the basis for their outsider status, the Othering they experience mirrors that experienced by Black students at predominantly white universities in the real world. Theorizing the Colonial Role of Educational Institutions Following Thomas Macaulay's notorious' Minute on Education'(1835), educational systems have played a vital role in reaffirming the balance of power between the …


Where Do I Fit In Cuny? A Course Toolkit, anna grevenitis 2025 City University of New York (CUNY)

Where Do I Fit In Cuny? A Course Toolkit, Anna Grevenitis

Open Educational Resources

This teaching toolkit was developed as a result of the CUNY 1969 Teach-in that took place in Summer 2025. The assignments here ask students to reflect on and retrace their story of why they are here – freshmen college students at Baruch College, and what needed to happen for them to be sitting in our classroom at this time.


Tawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia And Carlyle’S Confused South America, Marisa Palacios Knox 2025 The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Tawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia And Carlyle’S Confused South America, Marisa Palacios Knox

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

Scholars have highlighted Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849) as a point of no return for Carlyle’s descent into a full-throated advocacy of racism, imperialism, and proto-fascism. His 1843 article “Dr. Francia” on the late Paraguayan dictator has garnered much less critical attention than the provocative “Occasional Discourse,” but it simultaneously anticipates the latter essay and offers an alternative representation of Carlyle’s ideas—and Victorian ideas more generally— about shifting categories of race and imperialism before they congealed. Instead of positioning himself as the authoritative interpreter of Francia, Carlyle highlights his own uncertainty, taking as a central premise …


Epilogue: Every Þrose Has Its Thorn On Poison, The Cure, And Other Pharmacological Prickles; Or, Why Are You So Far Away?, David Ben-Merre Ph.D., Manu Samriti Chander Ph.D. 2025 SUNY Buffalo State University

Epilogue: Every Þrose Has Its Thorn On Poison, The Cure, And Other Pharmacological Prickles; Or, Why Are You So Far Away?, David Ben-Merre Ph.D., Manu Samriti Chander Ph.D.

English Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Global Englishers Language Teaching Perceptions And Practices Of Vietnamese Preservice English Teachers, Vu Hoai Nhan Dang 2025 Graduate School

Global Englishers Language Teaching Perceptions And Practices Of Vietnamese Preservice English Teachers, Vu Hoai Nhan Dang

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This mixed-methods study explores how Vietnamese preservice English teachers perceive and practice Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT). In Phase 1, 100 third- and fourth-year preservice teachers completed a 24-item perceptions questionnaire, and six of them participated in in-depth interviews. Mean questionnaire responses were at the “Agree” level (M = 3.52 on a 5-point scale), indicating broad acceptance of GELT while still revealing gaps in training and materials, especially in using English varieties, integrating intercultural communication, and implementing GELT-oriented activities. Building on these findings, Phase 2 invited 30 volunteers from the original cohort to complete pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, while six …


The Role Of English Proficiency In Pragmatic Transfer : A Comparative Study Of Compliment Response Strategies In Chinese Efl Learners’ L1 And L2, Xinyi Zhang 2025 Graduate School

The Role Of English Proficiency In Pragmatic Transfer : A Comparative Study Of Compliment Response Strategies In Chinese Efl Learners’ L1 And L2, Xinyi Zhang

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigates the correlation between English proficiency and pragmatic transfer in the compliment responses (CRs) of Chinese EFL learners. It aims to (1) compare the CR strategies used in L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) across different English proficiency levels, and (2) examine how proficiency influences the degree of pragmatic transfer in L2. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. Thirty Chinese English learners were divided into three IELTS-based proficiency groups (Advanced, Upper-Intermediate, and Intermediate). They completed a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) with eight scenarios varying in topics and interlocutors’ social status in both languages. Responses were coded using Holmes’ …


“The Old Lie”: The Effect Of Classical Heroism On The Wwi Soldier, Sage Fikse 2025 Belmont University

“The Old Lie”: The Effect Of Classical Heroism On The Wwi Soldier, Sage Fikse

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Before the outbreak of World War I, poet Wilfred Owen studied Greek and Roman literature, which presented him with idealized notions of patriotism, glory, and sacrifice. Influenced by classical texts such as The Iliad and the writings of Horace, these ideals of heroism left him unprepared for the brutal realities of anonymous warfare and for what it meant to be a “hero” in the twentieth century. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen draws on his classical education to challenge the romanticized ideals of heroic sacrifice and glory. However, through the poetic nature of his death, dying exactly one …


Digital Commons powered by bepress