English Language and Literature Commons^™

When Students Write Literary History: Regionalism, Populism, And Literary Value In A Gold Rush Magazine, Tara Penry

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

At my urban university in the Intermountain West, English majors enter a course called Literature of the American West with expectations formed from a global media culture of genre paperbacks and Hollywood films. They are skeptical about the literary value of popular forms such as westerns. Some fear that anything written for wide distribution and money must violate what Henry James called the artist's "conscience." James well knew his own answer when he asked about the nineteenth century Western writer Bret Harte some thirty years after the westerner's first success, "Has he continued to distil and dilute the wild West …

Nothing More Delicious: Food As Temptation In Children's Literature, Mary A. Stephens

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Although many critics and theorists, including Roland Barthes, have discussed food in literature, little attention has been paid to the food-as-temptation story in children’s literature. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline food is used as temptation for child protagonists, a tool to lure them into doing evil deeds or being generally mischievous. Some characters, like Alice, act as the tempters as well as the tempted, while others, like Edmund, wait passively for rescue. Coraline breaks this …

Weaver Of Allegory: John Bunyan's Use Of The Medieval Theme Of Vice And Virtue As Devotional Writer And Social Critic In The Holy War, David Madsen

Masters Theses

The literary artistry of Bunyan's The Holy War is overshadowed by the longstanding popularity of his greatest-known work The Pilgrim's Progress. However, The Holy War displays an impressive intricately-woven story with several complex strands of allegorical meaning. One such strand is its emphasis on the theme of virtue and vice in literature of the Middle Ages. In The Holy War, Bunyan applies this thematic thread from the Medieval Psychomachia and morality plays to his allegory in seventeenth-century Restoration England. The present research begins with an exploration of allegory as story with emphasis on Bunyan's role as storyteller in general and …

Sexual Iconoclasm In Early Modern Drama, Lynnette Macomber

Honors Theses and Capstones

My thesis examines the relationship between sexuality and the destruction of images – iconoclasm – in the context of post-Reformation English theatre by analyzing three plays: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, and Aphra Behn’s The Rover. I argue that the idea of sexual iconoclasm is not only present in these plays but also contributes to the discussion of the religious and sociopolitical contexts (and perhaps commentary) of these plays and early modern theatre in general. So what exactly is sexual iconoclasm? In short, it describes the destruction of sexual images, and by sexual images I …

What Makes A Monster And What Makes A Man? Exploring The Relationship Between The Creator And The Creation In Three Gothic Novels, Veronica B. Rosenberger

Student Publications

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray all tell tales of both men and monsters. Identifying which characters fit into which category, however, requires further analysis. Each story presents its own interpretation of the creation process pursued by very different creators and yielding very different creations. Victor Frankenstein is motivated by pride, scientific curiosity, and the hope of healing the human faults to build a huge creature out of corpse parts that becomes so ugly in life that no one can treat …

“Under The Seams Runs The Pain”: Four Greek Sources And Analogues For The Modern Monster In Anne Carson’S Autobiography Of Red, Joshua M. Carmel

Student Publications

This work seeks to explore the monster figure in its evolution from the Classical to the contemporary literary canons. Using Geryon, a three-headed and red-hued monster, as the central figure and Carson’s 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, it evaluates the underpinnings of the alienated “other” and attempts to shed light on its role in modern society.

Red Rose, Sara Lauren Purifoy

Student Publications

Red Rose follows the narrator’s innermost thoughts and feelings of abruptly being immersed into a culture very different from her own. While hiking with her brother, a second year environmental Peace Corps volunteer, to visit the home and garden of a Nicaraguan native, she reflects on the changes she sees in her brother and her inability to communicate in a foreign country. She struggles to overcome her feelings of linguistic isolation while still being fascinated by the culture around her. The piece ends on a lovely image of universal understanding.

Memory, Deconstructed And Reconstructed An Ontward Expression Of An Inward Reality, Jessica Rochford

Honors Projects

Opening Paragraph

Lieux de Memoire, or "places of memory," are symbolic sites of national identity. Defined in Le Grand Robert de la langue franfaise, the term is attributed to French historian Pierre Nora. Nora has compiled two large project anthologies and several individual books of essays by various authors that identify and reflect upon symbolic sites of great national importance throughout France. Nora's various collections of work, span over "seven volumes, six thousand pages") and "more than one hundred and thirty authors" (Le Goff 118). The particular project of Nora's that I will focus on, titled Realms of Memory: The …

Just Another Girl, Julia D. Marshella

Student Publications

A non-fiction piece that explores the causes of the author’s depression while in college. While she is able to pinpoint specific events that have led to her unhappiness, she realizes that accepting her life in spite of these obstacles will allow her to move forward.

Cold And Calculating, Kathryn E. Slezak

Student Publications

This nonfiction essay investigates the relationship between eye contact and power in different situations. It brings up the idea that animals and humans are less different than often thought to be, and how body language is transcendent. It uses this underlying theme to investigate the author’s changing relationship with her father.

Everything, Hannah M. Frantz

Student Publications

This is a memoir piece that details a tumultuous period in my life between departing for my study abroad experience in Rwanda and Uganda, struggling with what I encountered there, and then attempting to reintegrate into the same life prior to my departure. Specifically, it focuses on my time in northern Uganda, and a women I met in an IDP (internal displaced persons) camp who really made me think about what my role should be both there and at home. This piece explores a number of themes including guilt, blame, and, ultimately, a certain amount of forgiveness.

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 21, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“In Defense of Gopher Prairie: Main Street as a Critique of Urban Culture,” by James Nixon, Glasgow University

“Red in Retrospect”: A Review of Sinclair Lewis Remembered, edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer, by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“You Should Remember This”: A Review of The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman, by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Cass: Anatomy of a Moniker,” by Charles Pankenier

“Twin Farms Today,” by Susan O’Brien

“Sarcastic but Sympathetic, Babbitt is Premier Middle-Class Novel,” by Mark Roth

“Barnaby Conrad, Lewis’s Secretary, Dies …

Response: An Invitation To A Too-Long Postponed Conversation: Race And Composition By Octavio Pimentel, Cruz Medina

English

Octavio Pimentel’s “Racism and Composition: Redesigning the Composition Classroom to be more Culturally Inclusive” critically provokes pedagogical and programmatic questions by focusing on pressing issues of race and language within a historical context relevant to the field of rhetoric and composition.

Rant, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Unspeakable Desire To See, And Know": Paradise Regained And The Political Theology Of Privacy, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

In this essay, Eric B. Song considers the artistic, religious, and political value of privacy in Paradise Regained. The topic of privacy condenses Milton's thinking about gender and sexuality, domesticity, the fraught work of publishing intimate truths, and the relationship between Christian and Hebraic modes of religious polity. The depiction of privacy in Paradise Regained relates not only to Milton's earlier poetry and prose but also to twentieth-century theories of private and public life that contrast classical and modern societies. The productive friction between Milton's religious convictions and his advocacy for personal liberty speaks to controversies that persist in present-day …

English Convents In Exile, 1600–1800, Part 1 (Book Review), Jaime Goodrich

English Faculty Research Publications

Caroline Bowden, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, and Nicky Hallett, eds. English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800. Part 1. Vols. 1 3. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. cxviii + 1265 pp. $495. ISBN: 978 1 84893 214 2.

Placed People: Rootedness In G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, And Wendell Berry, David Harden

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines how G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry answer one of the central questions of modernity: "What are people for?" Their answers are crucial to a humanities that is increasingly individualistic and fragmented. Charles Taylor and other virtue and communitarian philosophers are used to help explain the connections between these three authors. Examining how the writings of Chesterton, Lewis, and Berry confront the increasingly commercial, materialist, utilitarian, ends-justify-the-means culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will help underscore the relevance of such literature to our current humanities. The authors deserve to be considered because they …

Clandestine Schemes: Burney's Cecilia And The Marriage Act, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay reads Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) alongside the debates surrounding the 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act in order to show how the novel responds to and participates in one of the most divisive public controversies of the Enlightenment. In doing so, the essay challenges the view of Burney as a conservative defender of patriarchal culture, while highlighting the balances that she strikes between individual freedom and filial duty. The novel criticizes secret matches not only because they challenge the legitimate authority of parents and guardians, but also because they enable men to undermine women’s consent. …

Lost In The Labyrinth: Review Of I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick By Laurence A. Rickels, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Persistence Of Narrative: Archetypal And Thematic Parallelism In Milton And Shelley, Douglas Stephens Iv

Other Undergraduate Scholarship

The literary connections between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Milton’s Paradise Lost are relatively obvious to anyone familiar with both works. Less obvious is the fact that an astonishing number of character roles and thematic components translate directly between the two works. The characters of Frankenstein continually switch in and out of these clearly archetypal roles, but careful study reveals that the underlying parallels hold true throughout. The question at hand is whether the parallelism evident in the relationship between the books is a result of thematic referentialism or if there is a deeper historical and mythopoeic significance. That these …