English Language and Literature Commons^™

Witnessing The Web: The Rhetoric Of American E-Vangelism And Persuasion Online, Amber M. Stamper

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the distribution of religious tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised recordings of the Billy Graham Crusade and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have long made a practice of utilizing mass media to spread the Gospel. Most recently, these Christian evangelists have gone online. As a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites as a case study into the ways persuasion is carried out on the Internet. Through an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, and a virtual church—I investigate …

A New Way Of Living: Bioeconomic Models In Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias, Margaret A. Wells

Theses and Dissertations--English

The objective of this thesis is to explore the relationship between moralities and bioeconomies in post-apocalyptic dystopias from the Victorian era to contemporary Young Adult Fiction. In defining the terms bioeconomy and biopolitics, this works examines the ways in which literature uses food and energy systems to explore morality and immorality in social orders and systems, including capitalism and our modern techno-industrial landscapes. This work examines science fiction portrayals of apocalypses and dystopias, including After London: Or, Wild England and The Hunger Games, as well as their medieval and contextual influences. These works are analyzed in light of genre …

Randomness, Uncertainty, And Economic Behavior: The Life Of Money In Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Devjani Roy

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues that fiction produced in England during the frequent financial crises and political volatility experienced between 1770 and 1820 both reflected and shaped the cultural anxiety occasioned by a seemingly random and increasingly uncertain world. The project begins within the historical framework of the multiple financial crises that occurred in the late eighteenth century: seven crises took place between 1760 and 1797 alone, appearing seemingly out of nowhere and creating a climate of financial meltdown. But how did the awareness of economic turbulence filter into the creative consciousness? Through an interdisciplinary focus on cultural studies and behavioral economics, …

Wasted Women: Modern Oppression In T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", James Warwood

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

T.S. Eliot has frequently been criticized for his misogynistic treatment of women in his poetry. Few, however, have considered the role his portrayal of women plays in supporting his poetic themes. The narrative space of “The Waste Land” is dominated primarily by women, both contemporary and mythical, who illustrate the brutal relationship between men and women. This intensely personal relationship, however, is analogous to the relationship of the individual and society; like the individual, the women must make the decision to either speak out against their oppressors or keep silent and accept their circumstances. Either option places women at risk …

Minding The Gap : A Rhetorical History Of The Achievement Gap, Laura Elizabeth Jones

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Minding the Gap: A Rhetorical History of the Achievement Gap arose as an inquiry into the rhetorical congestion around the phrase achievement gap in public discourse. Having been used in support of multiple, often competing, education agendas, the phrase seems versatile almost to the point of emptiness, and yet it seemingly retains its persuasive power. Examining the history of the phrase, I reveal that the notion of the achievement gap is rooted in the logic of segregation and the rhetoric of disability, and serves to construct students in ways that paradoxically undermine efforts to expand access to educational opportunity. Although …

Blame : Marriage, Folklore, And The Victorian Novel, Corrie Kiesel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blame: Marriage, Folklore, and the Victorian Novel contends that the intersection of folk and legal discourses of responsibility and culpability shapes the way the Victorian novel imagines blame. Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of official legal discourses such as trial testimony and standards of evidence to the development of narrative form during the nineteenth century. However, by attending to folk modes for establishing blameworthiness in Victorian novels, I show that folk and legal standards of culpability are mutually constitutive. The legal system is designed to identify the culpable in a fixed process – codified in slow-changing statutes …

Translating Arthur : The Historia Regum Brittanniae Of Geoffrey Of Monmouth And Roman De Brut Of Wace, George Gregory Molchan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation primarily focuses on re-presentations of the foreign others in the twelfth-century chronicles Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Roman de Brut of Wace of the Isle of Jersey. Geoffrey and Wace, I argue, deploy a number of strategies in their narratives regarding the Matter of Britain that mainly though not wholly work to reinforce hegemonic versions of history through dehumanizing and demonizing the others that inhabit their narratives. The strategies that Geoffrey and Wace deploy towards the inhabitants of their narratives, I contend, operate within a framework that both celebrates and defends the Normans’ pretensions to …

From Russia With Love: Souvenirs And Political Alliance In Martha Wilmot’S The Russian Journals, Pamela Buck

English Faculty Publications

Although virtually unknown in literary studies today, Martha Wilmot's The Russian Journals remains an important text on the material circulation of things in an increasingly global eighteenth-century world.The Russian Journals describes her stay in Russia from 1803 to 1808 with family friend and powerful political figure Princess Dashkova. In particular, the souvenirs that she exchanges with Princess Dashkova shed light on how cultural and political connections were formed between Russia and Britain as well as how national identity was redefined on a more global scale.

Review Of "The Problem South: Region, Empire, And The New Liberal State, 1880-1930" By N. J. Ring, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Publishing The Victorian Novel, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

“Publishing the Victorian Novel” looks to the methods of book history and literary criticism to ask how we might understand the ways Victorian publishers and authors (alongside editors, publishers’ readers, librarians, and booksellers) worked together to make novels. Paying attention to both the material and literary aspects of this making, the essay examines a few different scenes of novel publication with a particular focus on the way Victorian novelists, publishers, and reading publics understood aspects of the publication process like the serialization of novels, the three-volume novel, and the authority of the novelist and publisher. In an attempt to capture …

Victorian Dreaming, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Storytelling In Comics: Who, When, And Where In “Here”, Michael W. Hancock

Comics and Graphic Novels

Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking short comic “Here” (1989) revolutionized storytelling possibilities in comics. It may be used within a short story unit to demonstrate familiar elements of fiction, including setting, plot, and character. Moreover, its inventive use of panels within panels to juxtapose past, present, and future can serve as a model for students’ visual rendering of multiple points in time within a single location.

(Mis)Classification And Creole Identity In Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness Of St. Rocque, Jillian Weber

Theses and Dissertations

particular, it examines The Goodness of St. Rocqueand New Orleans as a site of racial and ethnic confluence. Dunbar-Nelson deals closely with racial and ethnic identities of Creoles in New Orleans during the late nineteenth-century and attempts to show the ways in which markers of ethnicity and connections to other countries upset the black-white racial binary being forced upon residents of New Orleans by outside forces. Dunbar- Nelson uses spatial and sociocultural characteristics of space to comment on the ways in which classification is imposed upon her characters, but shows the disruptive and often dangerous consequences of this imposition. Through …

Erotic Transgressions: Pornographic Uses Of The Victorian, Laura Helen Marks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that while pornographic film asserts itself as the rebellious cousin to the literary and cinematic canon, it nonetheless relies on a particular Victorianness, transgressing and drawing on its perceived repressions and perversions for pornography’s own ostensible subversiveness. Through an analysis of pornographic adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this project shows that the rupture and rearticulation of social and corporeal propriety constitutes pornography’s persistent appeal. These predominantly American pornographic texts, spanning 1974—2012, appropriate canonical British …

The Attraction Of Imperfection: Depreciating Social Capital In Victorian Marriage Plots, Catherine Clair England-Plisiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the importance of social capital in British marriage plots. While most people imagine heroines of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels embody virtue, I argue that many of the most innocent heroines speculate that sacrificing good assets can produce better marriages. These marriage plots demonstrate that a heroine's reputation must be somewhat damaged before she receives her reward of marriage. In other words, these novels do not uniformly represent, or recommend, the preservation of a heroine's good reputation; rather, they implicitly suggest that some spoiling occur before the consummation of marriage. I study how this curious freckling of heroines' …

[Introduction To] Leadership And Elizabethan Culture, Peter Iver Kaufman

Bookshelf

Bringing together contributions from political, cultural, and literary historians, Leadership and Elizabethan Culture identifies distinctive problems confronting early modern English government during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

This diverse group of contributors examines local elites and church leadership, explores the queen, her councillors, as well as her struggles with Mary Stuart and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, raises questions about Elizabeth's leadership, and the advice she received as well as the advice she rejected.

Selected, influential works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Sidney, and Bacon are put in their Elizabethan and contemporary critical contexts, rounding off the study of Elizabethan …

The Emergence Of The New Woman In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story Of Avis, Alison Frances Reidy

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The following thesis focuses on two different nineteenth-century American texts: The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The main focus of this thesis is to explore the emerging New Woman figure in both novels. There is also notable consideration given to the traditional role of True Womanhood and its portrayal in both Chopin and Phelps’ novels. The research found in this paper is from close readings of The Awakening and The Story of Avis and the use of secondary sources such as books and literary criticisms pertaining to the topic. This thesis focuses …

Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries In Modernist New York, Sophia Bamert

Honors Papers

John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) follows dozens of characters through modern New York City. The novel is organized as a fragmented montage and, in this paper, I argue that transit functions as both a central theme and the structuring principle of the text. I compare Manhattan Transfer to works by Walt Whitman and William Dean Howells and draw upon spatial form theory to examine how experiences of urban transportation influence literary forms. Ultimately, I suggest that Manhattan Transfer's modernist form offers readers itinerant ways of perceiving the complicated networks of which cities are made.

Hybrid Rhythms, Antithetical Echoes, And Autopoiesis: Intersections Between Sound, Self, And Nation In The Poetry Of Yeats, Connor Stratton

Honors Papers

Current critical attention on poetry's aural features and possibilities is scant. My project on W.B. Yeats is a corrective, as his poetry exemplifies how sonic tools and sound structures perform or create meaning. Specifically, I concentrate on the intersection between Yeats's nationalist and postcolonial posturings and his aural forms. By exploring this intersection within the frameworks of 'antithetical nationalism' and 'hybridity', I reveal the rich range of sound's semantic possibilities in poetry.

“It’S Good To Be Shifty”: The Local Democracies Of Old Southwestern Humor, D. Berton Emerson

English Faculty Scholarship

This essay reassesses representative texts of the popular antebellum tradition known as Old Southwestern Humor—among them Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835), Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Durn’d Fool (1867)— arguing for a new point of departure from the level of locality and with special attention to democratic decision making. Most nation-oriented readings portray the humor of the Old Southwest either as a regional subset supplementing nationalization via print culture or as reactionary polemics rejecting the impingements of nation, market capitalism, urbanization, or modernity. This essay, …