English Language and Literature Commons^™

Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley

Masters Theses

Although Tennessee Williams does not openly champion the rights of women in his plays, he presents strong cases against their social alienation in a harsh and brutal world governed by men. Williams' emotional leanings, sensitivity, and intuition enable him to see life through women's eyes. In The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke, Williams astutely sounds the battle cry for women to fight against male oppression. He shows how Amanda Wingfield, Laura Wingfield, Blanche Dubois, Stella Kowalski, and Alma Winemiller are held hostage to the rules governing patriarchal society and become unhappy marginalized victims. The self-contained …

Conforming To Conventions In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Pride And Prejudice, And Emma, Veronica Olson

Masters Theses

A major part of Jane Austen's novels consists of a critique of the societal conventions that were prevalent in Regency England. Through a study of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, it can be seen that Austen marginalizes those characters who chose conformity to social conventions. Contrariwise, the characters who exhibit a greater degree of autonomy within their patriarchal culture become the focus of the narrative. In looking at societal conventions concerning money, gender roles, and class status in conjunction with Austen's portrayal of various characters in the three novels, Austen's own views about conformity to societal conventions are …

Reading And Critiquing : An Analysis Of Talk About Strong Books For Girls., Renita Schmidt, Amanda Thein, Kathryn F. Whitmore

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In exploring what makes strong books for girls, these authors begin by looking at their critical conversations with each other.

Transcending The Material Self: Reading Ghosts In Samuel Richardson's Novel Clarissa, Jeffrey G. Howard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For thousands of years, many people have retained a belief in the existence of those supernatural entities known as ghosts, and the question of their existence has been vital to the political, religious, and personal ideologies of many interested parties. This thesis will not join that discussion because the question of the ghostly existence cannot be answered in a manner satisfactory to all sides. It merely acknowledges that such a debate continues and that the conflict between belief and empiricist logic can expect no real resolution any time soon. The issue at the heart of this project, however, actually involves …

James Joyce And Post-Imperial Bildung: Influences On Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih, And Tsitsi Dangarembga, Robert Michael Kirschen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" functions as an axis around which writers from former British colonies--Salman Rushdie (India), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)--construct their own Bildungsromans. This nodal point is possible because Joyce's Bildungsroman represents a unique rendering of the genre which has proven useful for narratives of growth and development in newly independent nations. This dissertation focuses on a single narrative paradigm which acts as a common thread among the four authors. In each text (Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", Salih's "Season of Migration to the North", and Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions"), the use of …

Towards A Hibernian Hybridity: Joycean Appropriations Of Celtic Mythology And The Realization Of A Modern Irish Identity, Robert C. Ware

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In nineteenth-century Ireland, the Celtic Revival established an Irish identity in opposition to British colonialism through a nativist construction of true Irishness based on premodern, precolonial Celtic mythology, language, and culture. This created a primitive Irish identity situated in a binomial dialectic with a civilized British identity, establishing the Irish as an internal Other for the British imperial self. This effectively justified British colonialism as a necessary catalyst in a teleological progression intended to save Ireland from the uncivilized Irish. This thesis explores how Joyce’s appropriation of literary artifacts of Celtic mythology in “The Dead,” specifically the sovereignty goddess mythology …

Encounters Of The Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange And Identity The Tristans Of Medieval France, England, And Spain, Annie Knowles

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work examines multiple versions of the medieval Tristan story in France, England, and Spain. Beginning with a strong historical situation for the literary analysis, the work uses elements of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies to identify and understand the rhetorical employment of “Oriental” flourishes in the Tristans studied. The work focuses on these Eastern influences as manifested in the characterizations of the Saracen knight Sir Palomides and in the construction, depiction, and commentary upon elements of fin’ amor that permeate the texts.

This study establishes the feasibility of intercultural exchange in the …

"The Country Of Nine-Fingered People": The Southern Mountain Tradition And The Gothic In Faulkner's Intruder In The Dust And Dickey's Deliverance, Kathleen Peterson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the role of the Southern mountain tradition and the Gothic mode in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and James Dickey’s Deliverance. Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, it argues that Faulkner and Dickey appropriated already Gothic elements of Appalachian history in order to create the Gothic characters and settings that would allow them to explore major cultural anxieties of their time. Chapter One gives a brief overview of Appalachian history from the Revolutionary War through 1970. It examines both factual material and fictional portrayals, including the miners’ union strikes of the early 1900s, Mary …

Pois'ned Ale: Gertrude's Power Position In Hamlet, Erin Elizabeth Lehmann

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Hamlet has over 4,000 lines, and Gertrude speaks less than 200 of those lines (about 4% of the entire play), but her roles as a widow, wife, and mother drive much of the play’s action. This document brings together scholarship surrounding Gertrude’s roles within the play and new research into the historical cultural milieu of early modern England focused on working women to learn more about the cultural patterns influencing the creation of this character. What results is the assertion that analogues to Gertrude and her situation in Hamlet can be found in early modern widows who worked as printers …

How Many Headless Telamons, Torin Jensen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The poems in How Many Headless Telamons initially seek the impossible: origin.

This attempt begins with an examination of the metaphor and, by extension, the image.

In Works on Paper, Eliot Weinberger writes, “Metaphor: to transfer from one place to another. In Greece, the moving vans are labeled METAPHORA” (9). While granting the utility of metaphors in poetic language and thought, How Many Headless Telamons attempts to explore the dilemma of movement itself; that something is to be moved not only pluralizes location, but means that that which needs to move is not where it needs or desires …

Beauty And The Beast: Across Cultures And Time., Bridgette Johnson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis traces the fairy tale of Beauty and Beast across different cultures in classic versions of the tale to examine social and cultural factors and gender norms and compares those findings to modern retellings while examining the same themes as the classic tales.

The Craft Of Fiction: Teaching Technique, 1850-1930, Mary Stewart Atwell

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The Craft of Fiction, 1850-1930

This dissertation considers two models of authorship active in the British nineteenth century: one that viewed the writing of fiction as the province of genius unconnected with the world of work, and another that saw it as a practice requiring a set of learned skills. This distinction carried implications of class, since writing that was understood to be work could be a product subject to marketplace exchange, and also gender, since the "hack-writing" so despised by mid-century periodical writers was often discursively feminized. Though the model that privileged genius and disregarded the labor involved in …

Punishment And Praise: Grappling With Shyness In Children's And Young Adult Literature, Katherine Stein

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis examines the treatment of childhood shyness in literature for children and young adults. With over thirty examples and reviews of children’s and young adult texts, it describes how shyness is often regarded as a problem in common social models and becomes stigmatized. It reproves the often cruel and disdainful treatment of shyness in such literature and calls for a new look at the common childhood “ailment.”

Adult Realm V. Childhood: A Critical Examination Of The Victorian Realm’S Ideal Young Adult, Jewels White

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Alice in Wonderland is a story that represents the cultural shift in Victorian ideas and its vision of childhood. The character of Alice represents an ideal Victorian youth, but her inabilities, confinement, and limitations in Wonderland suggest a culture clash and changing times. The story of Alice, through its puns, miscommunication, confusing mannerisms, and cultural disconnection between Alice and the inhabitants of Wonderland, preach a rejection of the Victorian adult realm. The novel itself provides an alternative for children to be children rather than obedient little adults.

Happily Never After, Edward Buell

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

The research topic I addressed regarded the idealized concept of marriage and the “happy ending” seen in a majority of fairytales, compared to the darker Bluebeard tale that focuses on what happens after the marriage, a time frame rarely addressed. This tale places emphasis on material good as a means of entering marriages, which often causes members of the marriage to have limited knowledge of their spouse and the skeletons in their closets. This can lead to grave consequences such as loss of innocence, being placed in subordinate gender roles for women, and reliance on male saviors, all impacting both …

My Life Examined & Tweaked, Shana-Kay Smith

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

My project is an exploration into my love of poetry. It consists of a collection of twenty-seven poems that I have written and revised over the course of a year. Over that time period, I have worked on approximately forty-five poems, but I chose only twenty seven for my final portfolio. To demonstrate what my writing process is like, I have kept a book (separate and apart from the final portfolio) of all my thoughts, inspirations, drafts and revisions for the poems I write, so that the growth of each can be seen.

The majority of my poems are in …

April 26, 2013: Postcolonial Environments/Transnational Aesthetics At Notre Dame (5/3/13), Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

What Are The Properties Of Editorial Cartoons That Heal?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On 23-24 April 2013, I attended a conference called “Images of Terror, Narratives of Insecurity: Literary, Artistic and Cultural Responses.” The conference was held by Project CILM–City and (In)security in Literature and the Media, and the organizers “aim to examine how literature, art and culture have dealt with notions of insecurity and to what extent they have provided significant challenges and responses to hegemonic discourses.” Visit this website for more information about the project and visit this site for more information about the conference.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how …

Do You Fit The Alloy Mold? The Homogenization Of Structure And Audience In The Television Adaptations Of 'Gossip Girl,' 'Pretty Little Liars,' And 'The Vampire Diaries', Caitlin Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which the television adaptations of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries become more homogenized during the adaptation process, thus contributing to an implied exclusivity from which Alloy, Inc.—the media and marketing company that owns these products—might benefit. This paper points out the ways in which the three products become structurally similar to one another during the adaptation process through the implementation of soap opera conventions. An exploration of consumption and class in each of the three works reveals an emphasis on class-based exclusivity in the adaptation process. Finally, a focus on …

Gerry Canavan On Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders In The Neoliberal Age: No Dads: Cuckolds, Dead Fathers, And Capitalist Superheroes, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.