English Language and Literature Commons^™

Misassembled Monsters, Jenn Brown

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is a narrative of personal and material history. Through my work in painting, sculpture, and installation, I seek to share my story of emotional armoring in an attempt to connect to an audience. In my work, I look to my personal memories of growing up in a small, midwestern town and armoring myself with emotional barriers against its social construct of “normalcy.” Inspired by Medieval suits of armor and the characteristics of Goth culture throughout history, I employ my work to present the stage of a theatrical battleground. Creating each of my pieces is a fight for the …

Eomer Gets Poetic: Tolkien's Alliterative Versecraft, James Shelton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Throughout Tolkien's professional career he dealt with a great number of texts that had varying views on the heroic, the romantic, the everyday world, and the role of Faerie. One consistent tendency among them, though, is to treat the past, and particularly Anglo-Saxon heritage, with a great deal of respect while trying to find ways to incorporate themes or ideas from that time into his own imaginative subcreations. Tolkien's use of alliterative verse serves to re-contextualize an ancient heroic ethos in a way that shows how heroism has changed, and must change, for the modern world. This paper examines Tolkien’s …

Envisioning Shadows In Romantic Ekphrasis And Early Photography, Joseph Kevin Tuvera Sebastian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis seeks to investigate ekphrasis as a mode of description and as a rhetorical strategy that produces literary affect. In particular, it considers the Romantic poet John Keats’s ekphrastic works to argue that he employs visual strategies of obscurity, which are rooted in

Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime, in order to register the formation of Poetic Consciousness. These visual strategies are observed in literal obscurity, which is expressed in shadows as a poetic conceit; they are also demonstrated in what this thesis terms notional or poetic obscurity, which involves mental abstractions that engage the imagination by challenging it …

"Swallowing A World": Globalization And The Maximalist Novel, Benjamin S. Bergholtz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the maximalist novel is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. To support this claim, I analyze the ways in which four maximalist novels—William Gaddis’s J R (1975), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014)—both map and formally mimic different elements of globalization. Each of these novels, I argue, is organized around a significant feature or, to put it simply, “effect” of globalization. This organization is so extensive that not only the vast majority …

Virginia Woolf And The Flâneuse: A Geocritical Approach To Mrs. Dalloway And The Voyage Out, Kayla Dean

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Using the theoretical framework of Geocriticism, Psychogeography, and the literary concepts of the flâneur and flâneuse, I argue that Virginia Woolf’s female walkers have a unique aesthetic experience from the male walker of literature. Although this experience differs because of the strictures on Victorian and Modernist women in cities like London and Paris, I rely on the framework of both literary walkers to refute scholars who question the existence of the flâneuse. Through works like Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, “Street Haunting,” “Kew Gardens,” “Literary Geography,” and A Room of One’s Own, I contend through a mix of traditional scholarship …

Dying Worlds: Environment, Ecology, And Empire In British Literature 1878-1919, Susanna Williams

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that models of approaching environmental crisis in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British literature have been obscured by a false, mid-twentieth century, American-centered genealogy of environmentalism. As Victorian scientists made discoveries about deep time, entropy, and tidal drag, scientific and popular writers in the following decades came to terms with ideas about an earth made unfit for human existence and humans’ imminent extinction. Writers grappled with feelings of loss and grief, and they felt disoriented by time scales and energetic processes that were beyond the scope of a single human life. This overwhelming information required them to take a …

Female Gender Stereotypes And Inequality Within Ursula Vernon’S Jackalope Wives And David K. Yeh’S Cottage Country, Breanna D. Perrin

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

Historically, fairy tales attempt to bring forth issues of femininity, typically surrounding domestic violence, oppression, as well as unequal gender relations. This paper attempts to utilize Ursula Vernon’s Jackalope Wives, as well as David K. Yeh’s Cottage Country to exemplify the ways in which modern fairy tales conform and reject previous notions of what it means to be a woman within fantasy. Furthermore, through analyzing content presented within both texts, this paper acknowledges their differing, yet failed attempts to abolish gendered stereotypes within literature, raising concern as to whether such social issues are so easily overcome.

A Review Of Silence In Modern Irish Literature, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

A Review Of The Critical Thought Of W. B. Yeats, Matthew Gibson

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Yeats, Philosophy, And The Occult, Gregory Castle

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

Yeats’S White Vellum Notebook, 1930–1933, Wayne K. Chapman

International Yeats Studies

This essay examines the present state of affairs concerning “one of the great literary manuscripts of our time, the great vellum notebook” that Sotheby’s advertised and sold for the first time in 1985. That sale and a subsequent one in 1990 are related to the contents of the notebook as ascertained from finding aids used by the editors of the Cornell Yeats series, including Chapman, as well as from the examination of extant microfilms of the notebook, the location of the original having been lost. Particularly useful for new and on-going textual-genetic studies in Yeats collections at the National Library …

India In Yeats’S Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee And Kālidāsa, Ashim Dutta

International Yeats Studies

W. B. Yeats’s interest in India persisted throughout his variegated life and career, starting in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the final decade of his life. This article concentrates on his early years when he first came to terms with Indian philosophy, religion, and literature via the Vedāntist-Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee and the work of the fifth-century Sanskrit playwright Kālidāsa. With a view to examining critically Yeats’s creative engagement with, and appropriation of, these disparate materials, this article closely reads a discarded 1880s poem on Chatterjee’s teaching and its later 1929 version, “Mohini Chatterjee,” as well as his early …

Yeats's Re-Enchanted Nature, Seán Hewitt

International Yeats Studies

W. B. Yeats identified anti-Enlightenment principles as being central to his generation’s artistic project. Characterizing the worldview he was writing against, he argued that “the mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanized nature” (OBMV, xxvii). By charting the processes by which he reimagined nature and the poet’s (and poem’s) position in relation to it, we can begin to understand Yeats’s developing ecological relationships as a matrix for his shifting understanding of mysticism (and vice versa). Focusing in particular on the prefatory texts to The Shadowy Waters, this article …

International Yeats Studies, Issue 2

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

Leaving Neverland For Narnia: Childhood And Gender In Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, And The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Calabria Turner

English MA Theses

British gender expectations are often epitomized in mature adults, either in society or within novels, but in Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe gender roles are interpreted by the child protagonists. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan inhabits the world of the Neverland, but the gender roles of Victorian England follow them from London to the home below the tree where Peter, Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys reside in a pseudo-domestic sphere. Peter often engages in literal discussion of what it means to become an English man, while Wendy lives …

Invisible In 'The Archive': Librarians, Archivists, And The Caswell Test, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This presentation, "Invisible in 'The Archive': Archivists, Librarians, and The Caswell Test," was given at the 53rd International Congress for Medieval Studies, on May 11, 2018. It argues that medievalists, and humanities scholars more broadly, have erred in writing and theorizing about "the archive" as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers. Building on the work of M. L. Caswell, Eira Tansey, Amy Hildreth Chen, Myron Groover, and other scholars of library and information sciences, it proposes that humanities scholars adopt what I call "The Caswell Test."

Based on the famous "Bechdel Test" for gender representation in …

American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines three autobiographical texts written in post-World War II America (1959-1973) that take as their subject a straight white man’s reflection on and engagement with the exercise of male power and the forces, both internal and external, that shape the degree to which he is “self-made,” i.e., an autonomous agent able to exert his will within a life domain (domestic, public, and war). Each of these writers engages in surveillance not solely of their own power, but also of the men who influence their experience, using their observations to critique, assert, and question the gendered realities and expectations …

Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the …

Player-Response: On The Nature Of Interactive Narratives As Literature, Lee Feldman

English (MA) Theses

In recent years, having evolved beyond solely play-based interactions, it is now possible to analyze video games alongside other narrative forms, such as novels and films. Video games now involve rich stories that require input and interaction on behalf of the player. This level of agency likens video games to a kind of modern hypertext, networking and weaving various narrative threads together, something which traditional modes of media lack. When examined from the lens of reader-response criticism, this interaction deepens even further, acknowledging the player’s experience as a valid interpretation of a video game’s plot. The wide freedom of choice …

Literary Beasts: Use Of Animal Imagery In The Canterbury Tales, Morgan Kentsbeer

English and Creative Writing Independent Study Projects

Through this paper I am going to argue that animals from the Middle Ages held more worth and were often considered to be more important than their modern counterparts. This gets shown through the three types of ways that animals are used within The Canterbury Tales. First, they are used as allegorical shorthands that imply more meaning with a fewer amount of words; this concept is primarily shown in “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Secondly, animals are crafted into characters but still end up being used as tools by other characters or Chaucer himself. For this, …