English Language and Literature Commons^™

Tension Within Immigrant Identity In South Asian And Asian Characters In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Everything I Never Told You, And Disgraced, Dania Abdelsalam

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the ways American fiction in the past two decades marked a renewal of the study of the immigrant experience. By examining this renewal, I argue that the conversation is no longer focused on the treatment of assimilation but moves into the psychological shock that transpires after assimilation is achieved. This shock is a critical condition of belonging to two opposing identities. Using Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced (2012), I clarify that these works present protagonists from South Asian and East Asian …

“Life Swarms With Innocent Monsters” : The Monstrosity Of Gender Inversion In Bram Stoker’S Dracula, Natalie Diane Cottrill

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has elicited a range of different interpretations from critics over the years. Readings range from covering issues of race and colonization to science and religion, and everything in between. These interpretations all feature different anxieties relevant to fin de siecle culture, a title given to the period of transition at the end of the nineteenth century wrought with anxiety and conspiracy about what might come next. One of the sources of this unease stemmed from the rapid change in what constituted women's social roles, as well as developing definitions of gender and sexuality. This socio-cultural concern …

Anti-Semitism In American Realist Literature: Edith Wharton’S Sim Rosedale - A Thorn In American Identity, Elizabeth Pantirer

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

How does canonical American literature from the early twentieth century reflect the American Jew and anti-Semitic sentiments? How do these novels portray the American Jew as a threat to American identity? In this thesis, I answer these questions and argue how American literature is a product of its culture demonstrating and reproducing fears and accepted ideologies. These fears perpetuated and solidified anti-Semitic stereotypes and alienated Jews from society. In my research, I examine how literature acts as a cultural product specifically homing in on particular anti-Semitic stereotypes which represent a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fear of "otherness." This analysis will draw …

“Mutually Exclusive” : Exploring Gender And Sexuality In Shakespeare’S Twelfth Night, Caitlin Moran Casey

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The thesis explores the treatment of gender and sexuality in William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will. By examining Shakespeare’s exploration of gender identity and sexual fluidity, this thesis investigates the nature of these elements in relation to the overall theme of the text. While traditionally thought of as mutually exclusive elements, sexuality and gender are juxtaposed throughout the text, causing characters to reflect on their own identities.

Magic In The Classroom: The School Story And The Implications Of Discipline In Harry Potter, Megan Thompson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Set against the history of the school story in children’s literature, the Harry Potter series reinvigorates the genre. Specifically, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone addresses the significance of socializing disciplines within children’s literature while also demonstrating the effects that education has on individuality and maturation through the roles of the characters throughout the series. Perhaps much of what lends Rowling’s work its magical ability as compared to the traditional school story is its free use of traditionalism, as seen in fairy tales, in its narrative style.

Rowling’s writing gestures towards the need for imagination in order to decode a …

Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott

English

This project aims to examine gender as perpetuated in the “Wonderland” trope, paying specific attention to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. At the surface level, these works seem like they don’t have much in common—they come from different cultures, different time periods, and different social contexts. However, to say that these stories are too dissimilar to compare is simply incorrect as both deal with the transitional periods of young girls who are approaching adolescence. Because both stories contain an alternate world in which the main little girl character wanders into and journeys through, …

The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie

English

Tragedy is one of writing’s earliest genres, and yet, why do we involve ourselves in the subject and write our own grief for the rest of the world? This thesis explores the act of tackling the subjects of mental illness and bereavement through the use of memoir, and simultaneously to analyze the use of such subject matter in contemporary fiction. Through creating a memoir of my own charting my journey through mental illness, familial death, and suicide, and analyzing the memoirs and works of those who have been through comparable experience, this thesis illuminates how grief is depicted in the …

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration Of The Voiceless Women In Victorian England Through Three Plays Of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo

English (MA) Theses

This essay establishes the Christian myth within Wilde’s three plays, calling attention to the gender politics that he fought against in the Victorian era. Through Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband I will prove the Christological myth that each play adopts and establish Wilde’s ability to make the religion “transformational.” Wilde’s productions of characters like Salomé, Mrs. Allonby, Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Hester are examples of the “fallen woman” of Victorian England. The treatment of women by women will illuminate the passiveness of the Victorian Woman and their compliance with the patriarchal norm. This norm continues through …

Mirrors Of Our Own: Multiracial Representation In Children’S Picture Books, Kiana Foster-Mauro

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States multiracial population is a fast-growing portion of our population. As the multiracial population grows, so does the need for multiracial representation within books. This study analyzed the representation of multiracial individuals in children’s picture books for ages newborn-8. I identified 75 board and picture books published in the United States between the years 2009 and 2019 that feature mixed race characters. The identified texts were analyzed in a critical content analysis using a framework based upon Critical Race Theory. Through this framework, I examined how multiracial characters in the texts are portrayed, the power dynamics, and what …

Byron And Don Juan: A Case Study And Queer Reading Of The Closeted Libertine, Caitlin Stanfield

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the major theme of homosexuality throughout the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron, ultimately focusing on his 1819 iteration of Don Juan. It presents historically relevant information regarding the sodomy laws, religious sermons, anti-sodomite publications, and other obstacles that, I argue, prevented Byron from expressing his sexuality openly. The queer Byron, of course, exists elsewhere. Through close readings of Byron’s correspondence and of his verse, my thesis argues that we can read Byron’s highly coded, homoerotic jargon for what it is, shedding new light on the active but concealed homosexual community of nineteenth-century England.

Experimenting With Adulthood: Liminal Play In Young Adult Literature., Kylee Auten

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Play is an unavoidable element of literature intended for younger audiences. Many scholars have taken up the task of describing, analyzing, and criticizing displays of play in young adult (YA) literature. Involved in discussions of play are the concepts of performance and innocence. Another way of examining play is through the characters’ state of liminality. Their in-between status provides them with the possibility to push against social expectations, escape the realities of their daily lives, and subvert authority figures. Because characters occupy both childhood and adulthood in terms of societal expectations, they possess some positive and some negative qualities of …

Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres: Utilizing Genres To Explore Literary Themes Through Genre Fiction, Michael W. Rickard Ii

English Theses

Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre’s elements are used to further explore the elements of …

The Psychological Effects Of Patriarchy And Courtship: Eighteenth Century Women’S Mentalities In Pamela And Clarissa, Peter J. Laporta

English Theses

I plan to analyze the effects of a patriarchal courtship system on female mentalities during the English eighteenth-century. Samuel Richardson's first two novels, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), will be used toward this end based on their epistolary format. The usage of these letters and journals will be pivotal to the evidence based on the characters creating a written nexus of their minds and bodies through their writing. I plan to lay out the ways in which the reader can emotionally feel and understand both Pamela and Clarissa's breakdown …

Lexical Complexities In The St. Louis Dialect Island, Larry Lafond, Kenneth Moffett

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The Greater St. Louis “dialect island” poses interesting problems for dialect documentation, partly because Greater St. Louis is a transitional area where many overlapping linguistic influences have left their mark, and also because is an area with new immigrant communities, racial divides, and an aging population.Using a sample from survey and interview data from 815 participants over a seven-year period, we examine lexical diversity in Greater St. Louis, comprising counties both in Missouri and Illinois. We discover that both age and place are robust indicators of lexical selection in Southern Illinois and St. Louis. Our findings provide a concurring rationale …

The Typewriter And The Literary Sphere: An Analysis Of Turn-Of-The-Century Literature, Emma K. Holdbrooks

Honors Theses

My thesis explores the typewriter’s impact on early 20^th century American literature. By providing authors with the means to produce work accurately and effectively, the typewriter changed the process of writing. Typewriters also created job opportunities for women, who often served as typists. The typist became the foothold position that changed America’s perception of women in the work force and helped usher in a new social concept, “the New Woman.” To illustrate my claim, I show how the typewriter allowed poets like E. E. Cummings to experiment with spacing. Cummings made the typewriter’s standardization of text and spacing into …

“Part Of That (Man’S) World”: Analyzing “Cinderella” And “The Little Mermaid” Fairy Tale Variants Through A Feminist Lens, K. Morgan Mitchell

Honors Theses

Fairy tales are often reduced to nothing more than the moral lesson that can be taught to children. However, when we move past the impulse to search for the simplified moral of the story, we can begin to ascertain the impact of fairy tales on different audiences. This thesis uses both impact theory, which yields a close reading of the textual and cinematic evidence, and reception research, which provides an opportunity to discuss the significance of the material by speculating about the message that readers receive. Under consideration are four variants each of the “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” fairy …

The Social Cut Of Black And Yellow Female Hip Hop, Erick Raven

English Theses - Archive

Korean female hip hop artists are expanding the definition of femininity in South Korea through hip hop. In doing so, they are following a tradition first established by Black female musical performers in a new context. Korean artists are conceiving and expressing, through rap and dance, alternative versions of a “Korean woman,” thus challenging and attempting to add to the dominant conceptions of “woman.” This Thesis seeks to point out the ways female Korean hip hop artists are engaging dominant discourse regarding skin tone, body type, and expression of female sexuality, and creating spaces for the development of new discourses …

A Major Motion Picture Or Just A Picture? An Analysis In Movie Tie-Ins Vs. Original Cover Art, Vivian Nguyen

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

It has been believed that the needs of consumers who are primarily readers versus moviegoers greatly differ; those who are readers are more likely to purchase a book that features the original cover art, while those who are mostly moviegoers gravitate toward movie tie-in covers. This paper examines the accuracy behind that belief by calculating the number of book sales from NPD BookScan, as well as collecting survey data from participants across all reading activity levels.

Analysis revealed that though there is a slight difference in amount of preference based on reading group, overall participants overwhelmingly preferred the original cover …

The Deconstruction Of Patriarchal Narratives In Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, Caleigh Pope

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The concept and criteria of what constitutes the American long poem has been debated by critics for years. Ntozake Shange redefines what is traditionally considered the long poem by experimenting with form and voice in her poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The inclusion of stage directions, dancing, and chanting contributes to reimagining the long poem. Shange distinguishes her work from traditional western poetry using these features, all part of her newly christened genre the choreopoem, an art form that does not contain traditional epic features but instead draws inspiration from theatre. …

The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Much of scholarship regarding the presence of war in literary modernism has foregrounded psychic trauma endured by veterans of World War I. The returning soldier is often figured as representative of the war’s infiltration of the homefront. The common argument claims that the erosion of the distinction between war and peace (as well as private and public) is a mirror image of the veteran’s wounded psyche. This thesis, however, argues that peace and war in the West have always been indistinct. The body politic is, in actuality, constituted by a perpetual civil war. Furthermore, the novels of William Faulkner, because …