English Language and Literature Commons^™

Fractured Identity - The Jagged Path Of Diaspora In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices, Lisa Lamor

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Representation of fractured identity issues is a thematic element powerfully present in the work of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Although identity is a commonly explored theme in general, it is through fragmentation in her novels that struggles are often identified and trauma is illustrated. Complex, fragmenting experiences of persons living in the Indian diaspora are frequently present in novels by Divakaruni along with continual employment of fracturing in terms of structure, imagery, plot, language, and character. In order to illustrate the presence of fracturization in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's literature, in this thesis I do an extensive textual examination of her first …

"The Colossal Vitality Of His Illusion": The Myth Of The American Dream In The Modern American Novel, James E. Ayers

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the American dream is a large-scale cultural myth, and that through an analysis of the dream’s mythic structure we can locate a paradigm according to which both American literature and American culture are organized. The American dream has maintained unique relevance across the historical, regional, and cultural diversity of the American nation, in part because it always remains abstract and resists firm definition. Nevertheless, by breaking the broad myth into its most basic elemental parts we can begin to see patterns across the many distinctive versions of the American dream, such that we can identify the …

An African American Discourse Community In Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, Kristi Richard Melancon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately …

Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory Of Fantasy Literature, Rich Paul Cooper

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a materialist theory of fantasy as the literature of estranged cognition, an entirely novel perspective that challenges all of the existing criticism on fantasy literature by proposing an outlook that emphasizes not impossibility, but infinite possibility. During the late-Victorian period, the form of the fairy tale shifted from the literary fairy tale to ‘fantasy.’ Three formal characteristics reveal that fantasy literature derives from the fairy tale: an indication, thematically or formally, that another dimension has been entered; the making and remaking of genres—stories—in dialectically overdetermined configurations; and a textual conflation between physics and ethics that results in …

"Show Me The Money!": A Pecuniary Explication Of William Makepeace Thackeray's Critical Journalism, Gary Simons

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established.

Thackeray's contributions to leading London …

The Time Machine And Heart Of Darkness: H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, And The Fin De Siecle, Haili Ann Vinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much work has been done on the relationship between fin de siècle authors H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. As Nicholas Delbanco explains, these writers lived closely to one another in Kent during the transition into the Twentieth Century. While scholars have stressed the collaboration between Conrad and Ford and the disagreements between Wells and James, fewer have treated the relationship of Wells and Conrad. Their most widely read works, The Time Machine and Heart of Darkness, share remarkable similarities that reveal common topical influences on both writers. Furthermore, I argue that Wells …

Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Mid-Victorian Anti-Catholicism, And The Turn To Secularism, Michael M. Clarke

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) is frequently interpreted as anti-Catholic, reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant plays a pivotal role in the novel, as Lucy Snowe’s perspective evolves from narrow sectarianism to a more open stance. Brontë accomplishes this reconciliation by elucidating the differences at their deepest level: at the point where Protestantism challenges and ultimately evolves into a separate set of institutions from Catholicism. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, this paper argues that, in its advocacy of the possibility of deep faith combined with religious pluralism, Villette anticipates modern secularism in the best sense of the word.

“Which Is The Wisest Course?”: Political Power And Prophetic Agency In Nineteenth-Century Mormon Rhetoric, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

This article enters the conversation about religion and communication at the crossing of two important but under-traveled paths: prophetic rhetoric and Mormonism. Mormon polygamy has a rich and controversial history that includes a series of public arguments and internal debates over how to navigate the historically radical religion through the political landscape of nineteenth-century mainstream America. Wilford Woodruff, president and prophet of the church when the government compelled the Mormons to stop the practice of polygamy, needed to end “plural marriage” without undermining the vitality of the church’s revelatory claims. I argue that Woodruff’s response breaks the limited rules of …

All Shall Be Well: Julian And Bartholomew, Ena Taylor

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The creative content of my thesis has been developed from a personal experience that became the catalyst, and source material for the creative part of the novella All Shall Be Well: Julian and Bartholomew. The essay, and the preface to the creative side, situates the thesis as a work of reflection and memoir combining with creativity, and proposes that threads of beliefs and feelings, represented in the social, and the cultural life of the English fourteenth century, are also relevant to, and for those to be found in contemporary society. This applies particularly to the importance of compassion in society, …

A Content Analysis Of American Civil War Historical Fiction For Upper Elementary Grades, Gwen L. Van Dee

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this study was to analyze the treatment of complex issues of the American Civil War in a fifth grade social studies textbook and historical fiction novels, written for upper elementary readers. The study focused on slavery and racial issues, the stresses of war on families, and the aftermath of war.

A content analysis was conducted, using the fifth grade textbook information as a baseline for concepts to be learned. A sample of American Civil War historical fiction books was gathered using the following method: the H W Wilson's Middle School & Junior High Core Collection database was …

Hope And Despair In Young Adult Science Fiction, Erin Stohlmeyer

Graduate Research Papers

As young adult science fiction evolves, it can be difficult to understand the themes and tones found within the genre. The purpose of this research was to discover the hopeful messages or the lack of hope in current young adult science fiction. The themes found during the research process included survival, the search for identity/humanity, post-apocalypse/governmental control, medical advancement (technology), and adventure. Thirteen novels written between 2005 and 20 IO were analyzed for themes and messages. Many novels were found to have vastly different societies, governments, and even landscapes. Some of the differences were due to war, climate change, and …

The Presence Of Gender Stereotypes In Children's Picture Book Illustrations, Jenahlee Chamberlain

Graduate Research Papers

Numerous studies have been conducted throughout the past several decades on the topic of gender stereotypes present in children's picture books. The purpose of this quantitative content analysis is to examine the portrayal of males and females and the representation of gender roles in children's picture book illustrations. This analysis of 43 children's picture books awarded the Caldecott Award or Caldecott Honor between 2001 and 2011 sought to determine whether or not 21st century award winning children's picture book illustrations portrayed gender stereotypes. Each title was analyzed using a content analysis form to test the three hypotheses for this study. …

A History Of The Pigtail Bridges In South Dakota, Krystol R. Frerking

Graduate Research Papers

The history of the Pigtail Bridges in the Black Hills of South Dakota is an interesting historical story that in children's non-fiction books has not told. Three questions that guided this research were what the best layout/design is for a children's book on the Pigtail Bridges, how does an author select the content for a children's book on a local history topic like the Pigtail Bridges, and what is the most appropriate text structure for this content? The purpose of this research project was to create a non-fiction children's book about the history of the Pigtail Bridges in the Black …

The Complex Past The Door: A Life Of James Liddy, Tyler Farrell

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Good Name Of The Dead: Peace, Liberty, And Empire In Robert Morehead's Waterloo Sermon, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On Sunday, July 2, 1815, a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, the Scottish Episcopalian minister Robert Morehead ( 1777-1842) preached a sermon- On the Good Name of the Dead [Ecclesiastes 7:1]-which displayed many of the components of a theory of Christian empire and combined them with the radically new approach to pulpit oratory that Morehead was helping to develop. The present essay offers a method of exploring the connection between ideology and rhetoric based on tools belonging to linguistic analysis rather than conventional historiography. Thus it is hoped that the evidential base available to historians may be extended. …

Holy Land Travel And The Representation Of Prayer In The Enlightenment, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Something about publicized supplication embarrasses critical readers, especially of the Enlighenment, who, since Samuel Johnson, have been trained to doubt if not the sincerity at least the efficacy of rhetoricized prayer. Milton was "nothing satisfied" with the preliminary eight stanzas of his unfinished lyric "The Passion;' for example, and printing it anyway has been cause enough for his critics to remain so. For one, the closest Milton gets to the scene of

the crucifixion is Jesus's tomb after the resurrection; he finds the "sad Sepulchral rock / That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store" ( 43-44; emphasis added). More …

Taking Note, Sadie Rawlinson

The Utah English Journal

“Modeling” is another way of saying “Be a good example”—only you do it with purpose. One of the earliest forms of modeling in my classroom was when I was desperately trying to get my ninth-graders to read during their Teacher Advisory (TA) class on Fridays when we had DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time. I tried everything from threats to bribes to apathy.

Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

Trauma And Transformation: The Political Progress Of John Bunyan: Book Review, Jeffrey Galbraith

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In these papers from the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, the life and writings of John Bunyan assume a less tidy shape than appears in standard biographies. Bunyan braved the consequences of defying the Act of Uniformity of 1662, yet Trauma and Transformation does not view the Dissenting author as possessing an identity galvanized by persecution. Nor, on the other hand, do the essays reduce Bunyan's religious sensitivity to a psychological disorder. Rather, the contributors to this collection work to excavate the gaps in the existing record of Bunyan's life. Notably, they address Bunyan's silence concerning …

Jonathan Edwards's Metaphors Of Sin In Indian Country, Joy A. J. Howard

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

T he move to Indian country was an uncommon one for a preacher of Jonathan Edwards's status and age, but the seven years he lived in Stockbridge preaching to Mohawks, Mahicans, and colonial settlers proved to be some of the most fruitful of his career. Jonathan Edwards accepted the position in Stockbridge after his Northampton congregation voted to dismiss him in 1750 and, after visiting the mission town multiple times, he was officially installed as pastor in August of 1751. Edwards valued Protestant mission imperatives, and although the pastorate was remote and he faced a significant language barrier between him …