English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Great Radical Dualism: Locating Margaret Fuller’S Feminism In Nathaniel Hawthorne’S Fiction, Renee Michele Vincent

Senior Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to establish a foundation built on the congruencies between Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, with the aim of addressing two major points: first, the implications of universalizing gender in the context of identity politics; and second, to show how gender universality is challenged within Hawthorne’s fiction and Fuller’s prose. Given that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters depict a range of personal variability, the act of synthesizing Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory with Hawthorne’s fiction functions to link the personal with the political. The overall goal of this study is to substantiate both writers within …

"Our Door Is Always Open": Aligning Literacy Learningpractices In Writing Programs And Residential Learningcommunities, Julia Voss

English

Writing studies has considered college students' literacy development as a chronological progression and as influenced by their off-campus connections to various cultural and professional communities. This project considers students' literacy development across disciplines and university activity systems in which they're simultaneously involved to look at the (missed) opportunities for fostering transfer across writing courses and residential learning communities as parallel—but rarely coordinated—high-impact practices. Rather than calling for the development of additional programs, I argue for building/strengthening connections between these existing programs by highlighting shared learning outcomes focused on literacy skills development and learning how to learn.

Shakespeare's Dowry: Subjectivity And Resistance In The Taming Of The Shrew, Romeo And Juliet, And The Merchant Of Venice, Homer Lee Simms

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation analyzes dowry in three Shakespeare plays—The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. The analysis aims to show that the dowry negotiations and agreements are the most important component of the patriarchal structure of marriage depicted in Shakespeare’s plays. Since dowry agreements signal the impending transition from feme sole to feme covert, they are appropriated by the women in the three plays under consideration as the first stage in a process to assure subjectivity after their marriages. To maintain subjectivity, Katharina, Bianca, Juliet, Portia, and Jessica seek to create and occupy a liminal …

Separate Ways Or Til Death Do Us Part?: Divorce In Victorian Literature, Ashley L. Felder

Honors Theses

Divorce laws changed radically across the Victorian period (1837-1901), making divorce more accessible, particularly for men. Considering how those changes affected the portrayal of divorce in early, mid, and late Victorian novels, this study analyzes the literary representation of divorce in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), contextualizing this analysis with literary criticism and legal history. No matter how accessible divorce became during the nineteenth century and no matter a character’s reason for wanting to end his/her marriage, divorce is not presented as a legitimate option for characters …

The Broadsheet- Issue 18, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• BookTube
• Two New English Courses
• A Day in the Mind of an English Major
• O’Brien Center Professional Development Retreat
• Discovering the Goodreads App
• The NaNoWriMo
• Challenge Career Night Reflections

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Virginia Woolf’S Fictional Biographies, Orlando And Flush, As Prefigures Of Postmodernism, Jacob C. Castle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody …

The Ontology Of Immanence: Arriving At Being In Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, Rachel R. Gilman

Theses and Dissertations

In response to the economic and political upheaval of World War I, Scottish Modernism explored the cultural and linguistic changes of a nation trying to identify itself amidst a world-wide conflict. Scholars and critics have considered Nan Shepherd's fiction in this context—focusing on issues of gender, female identity, language, and land—but have yet to look seriously at her work The Living Mountain and its contributions to the Modernist movement. More recently, critics like Louisa Gairn and Robert MacFarlane have called attention to Shepherd's small but powerful text in an ecocritical and philosophical light, reframing her contribution to issues of Scottish …

Finding Inspiration In Darkness: The Exploration Of Obscurity In Romanticism Through The Works Of Lord Byron And Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Sarah E. Seal

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through the works of Lord Byron and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, I explored the function of the themes of darkness and obscurity in Romanticism. There was a clear connection between the inclusion of these themes and the rejection of the Enlightenment period, which is what I focused on in this thesis. I discovered that the Romantics found inspiration and beauty in the darker, stranger aspects of the natural world, while rejecting the logical and rational beliefs of the Enlightenment.

Being Together Subversively, Outside In The University Of Hegemonic Affirmation And Repressive Violence, As Things Heat Up (Again), Jodi Melamed

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Obey, Consume, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Power Fantastic: How Genre Expectations Mediate Authority, Angela Rose Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reconciles academic and popular uses of the term genre, concluding that genre is a transmedial, mutable, associative, recognized system regulated through tacit understandings of prestige and power in a given Social space. The study employs a digital humanities method (dependent on digitally facilitated data analysis), conducting descriptive discourse analysis on collected online discussions from fan spaces concerning the fantasy genre and matters related to fantasy. In this way, I construct an image of the fantasy genre, and genre in general, as a multimodal space in which material freely passes between traditional and new media and participants actively negotiate …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

Infusing The Arts Into Science And The Sciences Into The Arts: An Argument For Interdisciplinary Steam In Higher Education Pathways, Christopher W. Thurley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This article presents an argument for the integration of science into English courses in order to emphasize the usefulness of a Science, Technology, Education, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) education. The idea for this approach arose after the implementation of a divisional initiative to create learning communities with a STEM cohort of students called Student Persistence and Retention via Curricula, Cohorts, and Centralization (SPARC³). The author’s involvement in teaching a science-infused English course for this program inspired the argument that follows, which outlines why/how the sciences should learn from the humanities and why/how the humanities should learn from the sciences. The …

Final Ma Portfolio, Lindsey Balla

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four works completed at the graduate level at Bowling Green State University. The first research paper explores the effects of social media and texting in adolescent students. The second examines Psychoanalysis in the context of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The third compares the texts Northanger Abbey and "The Grey Woman," and the fourth research paper explores effective methods of providing feedback to student writing at the secondary level. This portfolio is a compilation of work and research completed as a capstone project for MA in English with a specialization in teaching English.

Preface To Ssl 42:2, Patrick G. Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Preface articulating the purpose of the SSL symposium series and the symposium on Spatial Humanities, and a brief introduction to the other articles in the issue.