English Language and Literature Commons^™

She Chose Her Fate: The Genderqueer Women Of Tolkien And Freedom Beyond The Patriarchal Binary, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Grace Moone, Leah Hagan

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“The Gift Which Was Withheld I Take”: The Rape Of The Sun Maiden In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Kristine Larsen

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

From Once To Future Queen: Revitalizing Guinevere In Recent Arthuriana, Michael A. Torregrossa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

Painting “The Most Beautiful Of All The Children Of Ilúvatar”: Aesthetic Beauty In The Silmarillion And Its Illustrations, Marie Bretagnolle

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

Witches, Prophets, And Outcasts: Liminal Women In Mythopoeic Fantasy, Supriya Baijal

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Human-Nonhuman Friendships Through Feminist Animal Studies: An Exploration Of Sunny And Della’S Cross-Species Friendship In Nnedi Okorafor’S The Nsibidi Scripts Series, Akshitha Javahar

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“Her Hair Was Held A Marvel Unmatched”: The Significance Of Long, Blonde Hair In Tolkien’S Imagination, Sara Brown

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

Keynote: Still Perilous, Still Fair: Perspectives On The Legacy, Or How (Not)Éowyn And (Not) Galadriel Made The Magic Work, Leslie Donovan, Janet Brennan Croft

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

Welcome And Announcements, The Mythopoeic Society

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Join us for a screening of the Welcome and Announcements video and have a cup of coffee before we get started!

"Things That Were, Things That Are, And Things That Yet May Be": The Matter Of Time In The Faërie Realms Of Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Noelia Ramos

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s feelings and relationship to Celtic themes are more nuanced than a simple binary of aversion versus passion. As he professed to Stanley Unwin—"Needless to say they are not Celtic!" (Letters #19)—his stance encompassed both resistance and fascination. His essay On Fairy-Stories, originally delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, can be seen as an early foundation for concepts later developed in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). In this context, the concept of fiction and the secondary world—particularly regarding the nature of time—is notably prominent, drawing parallels to the Celtic Otherworld.

This study aims to analyze …

Beyond World War I: Post-War Trauma In Agatha Christie’S The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Alayna Puckett

All Theses

This thesis reexamines Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles as a literary response and representation to World War I, arguing that it deserves recognition as a novel of wartime trauma rather than being confined solely to the realm of popular detective fiction. Influenced by Christie’s firsthand experiences as a wartime nurse, the novel subtly weaves themes of personal wartime experience and trauma into its plot, characters, and setting. Christie’s protagonist, Mr. Hastings, represents the returning soldier attempting to reintegrate into society, while Hercule Poirot—a Belgian refugee—embodies the war’s broader displacement and disruption. Set during World War I in a …

Assessing The Accessibility Of Queer Romance Book Covers As Digital Thumbnails: An Analysis Of Color Contrast, Colorblind Safety, And Typography Legibility, Madelynn Sare

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

This research investigates the digital accessibility of queer romance book covers displayed as thumbnails online, focusing on the balance between creative freedom, genre appeal, and inclusive cover design. Using a dataset of 100 highest-rated queer romance titles from Goodreads (2020–2024), the study evaluates accessibility by examining color contrast ratios against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, assessing colorblind safe design with Adobe Color, and measuring typography legibility through a custom-developed scale. Findings reveal that many covers fall short of WCAG color contrast requirements, yet a majority are colorblind safe, indicating that relatively minor design adjustments can significantly improve digital accessibility …

My Achilles Years., Ash William Bittner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a historically and rhetorically grounded creative project exploring the traumas of war. This project is divided into three broad chapters, each using a different (and relevant) approach to cover the content contained within that chapter. The first chapter relies on that historical grounding, exploring the history of PTSD as it is currently understood, before exploring ancient Greek poetry and theater and both the historical and military contexts for each, before finally discussing modern warfare and the “Forever War” of the American War on Terror that lasted for nineteen years. With the historical grounding set, it moves into …

The Substance Of Reality: Moral Perfectionism In Shakespeare's Hamlet., David Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a selection of and close reading of key passages, I offer an interpretation of Hamlet that seeks to illuminate the play as an important work of moral philosophy, and to situate the play within a strand of moral philosophy named moral perfectionism by Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Hamlet is a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, but when read with attention to moral perfectionism, the play yields additional layers of meaning. Hamlet is a “philosophical drama” that navigates the “moral calling of philosophy”—a text that seems to, almost uncannily, elicit the audience to think reflectively, to ask fundamental human questions along …

Alevi-Bektashi Ballads: Malady, Melody And Remedy, Mustafa Cingoz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This research focuses on how ballads play a central role in the cultural and spiritual life of the Alevi-Bektashi community in Türkiye. These ballads, performed by folk poets known as aşık (minstrel) with the stringed instrument bağlama are the inseparable elements of their daily life and sacred rituals. As rooted in the path of Ali, the fourth Caliph of Islam, and the teachings of 13th-century Sufi saint Haji Bektash Veli, Alevi-Bektashi ballads express shared emotions, struggles, and hopes. Therefore, my point of view argues that these ballads do more than preserve the Anatolian ballad tradition. They create a sense of …

In A Safe-Space Of Her Own: Alice's Journey Through A Traumatized Wonderland To Find Attunement And Recovery, Cheston A. Axton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass’s 160-year existence, Lewis Carroll’s seven-year-old protagonist has experienced many changes and alterations. With an ever-growing pop culture interest, Alice’s original narrative has undergone numerous adaptations, with each new variation diving deeper into the impact of trauma on Wonderland.

This thesis continues this existing discourse by examining Wonderland’s capacity to facilitate recovery in the aftermath of severe trauma. Through this research, the traumatic experiences of Alice, from Christina Henry’s The Chronicles of Alice: Alice and American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns, are examined concerning their effect(s) on her construction of Wonderland, as …

End Times: American Mortality, Death Materiality, And Social Death In The 1990s, Jordan A. Savage

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The United States in the 1990s was marked by pervasive representations of death in popular culture. As death imagery became increasingly visible in entertainment, there was a growing detachment from the embodied, biological realities of death, a tension intensified by the ongoing AIDS crisis. This project explores how death is politicized and how decisions about who lives and dies are shaped by power. I draw on a constellation of theoretical frameworks that collectively illuminate the operations of state-sanctioned death and social abandonment. These include Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which examines the management of life by state power; Giorgio Agamben’s …

Operation: Twisted Arm, Paul Burdiss

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This science fiction novella explores the postcolonial tensions that can exist between a settler population and the native population of the land they have colonized. It uses the science fiction genre to translate modern issues into a fully fictionalized setting and is written in novella form to best fit the form of the story. This novella is accompanied by a Critical Introduction which explains the methodology and rationale for many of the choices made in its construction, and references both literary works read in preparation for this project as well as works by other writers regarding fiction writing techniques. The …

Teaching With The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4, Rui Torres, Kathi Inman Berens, Maria C. Zamora, Lyle Skains, John Murray

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article surveys the four ELCs – Electronic Literature Collections (2006- 2022), reviews pedagogical approaches to teaching ELCs, and situates ELCs and electronic literature pedagogy into higher education’s course management systems. ELCs’ increasing accessibility serves its global audience and centers the ethical values of diversity, equality, and inclusion. The ELC4’s user experience design manifests these values. The article discusses the history of the Collections’ experience design. Volume Four (2022) expanded reader accessibility and linguistic diversity by including video playthroughs and collecting 132 works from 42 author nationalities in 31 languages. This article surveys those evolving design changes. It engages a …

A Verdant Reading: On The Agency Of The Nonhuman Landscape In Apocalypse Now (1979), Christian Jil Benitez

Kritika Kultura

lack of sensitization, and fanatic adherence to tradition allow the illegal practice of prenatal sex