English Language and Literature Commons^™

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Urgent News From The Front, Jennifer J. Gray

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is an original work in the genres of fiction and poetry. It consists of three short stories and a chapbook of poems. My work focuses on the ways we find to survive, to create meaning, and to connect to ourselves, to those around us, and to the world in which we live.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

Poe's Entangled Fiction: Quantum Field Theory In "The Colloquy Of Monos And Una" And "The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt", Jean A. Little

Theses and Dissertations

When seen among the constellation of Edgar Allan Poe's works culminating in Eureka, "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," take on an important role as vehicles for scientific contemplation. Similar to early quantum physicists, such as Einstein and Schrödinger, Poe uses macro-level analogies to explore the unity of individual entities, which becomes an important tenet of his explanation of the universe. His thought experiments also resemble those of modern physics in their approach to reality as probabilistic, an idea that finds its echo in quantum field theory, which distinguishes between observed particles and their …

Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And The Hermeneutics Of The Archive, Benjamin Lynn Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of …

How Do Law Students Develop Writing Expertise During Summer Internships? An Interview-Based Study, Jonathan Francisco Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

Many law students are required to take first-year writing courses. With the increased emphasis in legal education on practical skills training (Sullivan et al. 2007), legal writing scholars have begun exploring how these writing courses equip students with practical skills (Felsenburg and Graham 2010; Cauthen 2010). However, these scholars have not explored how summer internships serve as opportunities for students to practice the skills they gained in the classroom. Following the lead of writing studies scholars who examine the transition from classroom and workplace writing (Russell and Fisher 2009; Devitt 2004, Wardle 2004; Winsor 1990), this study explores how the …

Out Of The Best Books: Mormon Assimilation And Exceptionalism Through Secular Reading, Lauren Ann Fields

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between Mormon assimilation, exceptionalism, and their endeavors in secular reading by analyzing Out of the Best Books (OOBB), a 1964–71 five-volume reading guide and reading program on secular reading established by the Mormon Church for its women’s organization, the Relief Society. Examining the approaches to secular literature in the OOBB program suggests that Mormons can respond to their competing desires to separate and assimilate by making efforts that fulfill both aspirations simultaneously rather than moving exclusively in one direction. Yet OOBB’s efforts to achieve both objectives did not amount to an entirely seamless …

Language And Inter-Racial Harmony: The Battle For English As Singapore Lingua, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Against the backdrop of world religious violence, Singapore is as a beacon of inter-ethnic harmony: A 2015 poll, carried out in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, returned the unanimous verdict that it was Singapore that had made the most social progress among the four Chinese ethnic Chinese societies. In 2014, the Pew Research Center ranked Singapore at the top of their Religious Diversity Index. The nation's bilingual policy is critical to the integration of the multi-racial communities of Singapore. This position is highlighted in a discussion of how, in the early years after independence in 1965, the Singapore government …

Coming Out Of The Coffin As The Posthuman: Posthuman Rhetoric And Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Series, Rebecca Ann Garcia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this article, I argue that the vampires in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels illustrate clearly the posthuman self in its connection beyond itself to other vampires, humans, and non-humans. Learning to co-exist becomes problematic in Harris’ series, where we encounter a “new” representation of vampire. These vampires have come out of the coffin, and their revelation allows us to explore how they can be viewed in connection to the human world and how their transcendence can be seen as a move toward posthumanism, as its particular blend of body and community help demonstrate what the self expanded could be. …

Rogues In The Postcolony: The New Picaresque And The Making Of Modern India, Stacey Balkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rogues in the Postcolony looks at Indian picaresque novels that respond to and productively complicate dominant historical narratives by adapting formal conventions of the picaresque novel and by foregrounding the experiences of historically obscured figures, or “rogues.” The project is structured in such a way as to read colonial and postcolonial India through the lens of marginalized persons such as poppy farmers and, more recently, the citizens of Bhopal who continue to struggle with the toxic legacy of the Union Carbide fertilizer factory in their city. I argue that the unreliable narration and non-teleological structure of the picaresque form parody …

Hope For Susan: Moral Imagination In The Chronicles Of Narnia, Emily Rose Kempton

Theses and Dissertations

The fate of Susan Pevensie has been one of the most controversial and interesting topics of debate about The Chronicles of Narnia since readers realized that she was no longer a friend of Narnia. Many critics have condemned C. S. Lewis for being sexist, thus making the stereotypically feminine Susan with her love of parties, nylons, and lipstick ineligible for salvation. This thesis proposes to look at Susan's choices and fate from the perspective of moral imagination. It argues that Lewis did not bar Susan from heaven to belittle femininity, but rather to comment on the consequences of choice, belief, …

From Epistolary Form To Embedded Narratological Device: Embedded Epistles In Austen And Scott, Tonja S. Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

The perception that the epistolary form was rejected by novelists during the Romantic Era has largely been accepted by scholars. However, in looking at the period's two most prominent authors, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, we see that the epistolary form remained vibrant long after its supposed demise. Throughout their careers, both Austen and Scott employed embedded letters as a tool to create authenticity. Both Austen and Scott use what I call "literary letters" to create a sense of realism in their novels that contributed to the rise of the novel. Scholars often claim that Austen eschewed the epistolary form …

Death As Meridian: Paul Celan's Translations Of Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" And "Let Down The Bars, Oh Death", Alyssa Devey

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Celan's translations of Emily Dickinson's poems Because I could not stop for Death and Let down the Bars, Oh Death illuminate the global metaphor inherent in both poems' exploration of death. Celan's The Meridian speech, coupled with Dickinson's poems I saw no way and Tell all the truth, suggest that language can move in different directions across a globe at the same time. When these different lines meet, they reach a meridian of the spiritual and the material. As Celan translates Dickinson's two poems, he uses this global metaphor to place more emphasis on death and to further illuminate …

The Archon(S) Of Wildfell Hall: Memory And The Frame Narrative In Anne Brontë’S The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Alyson June Fullmer

Theses and Dissertations

In the first chapter of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gilbert Markham invites his reader to join him as he attempts to recall the past. Because Gilbert uses the journal of another to supplement his own memories, the novel's frame narrative structure becomes saturated with complex memory-based issues and problems. Thus, the complicated frame narrative provides fertile ground for exploring the novel through memory. In studying the frame narrative, scholars have typically devoted their criticism to Gilbert and how he shapes the frame. Few scholars afford the other primary narrator of the novel, Helen, any power in shaping …

The W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Lecture: Who Wrote The Scots Musical Museum? Challenging Editorial Practice In The Presence Of Authorial Absence, Murray Pittock

Studies in Scottish Literature

James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, published in six parts in Edinburgh over the period 1787-1803, is now inextricably linked to its greatest contributor, the poet, song-writer and song-collector Robert Burns. This lecture builds from Murray Pittock’s recent editorial work on Johnson’s collection, forthcoming in the new multivolume Oxford Edition of Robert Burns, based at the University of Glasgow. The lecture shows that the apparently-innocent question “Who wrote the Scots Musical Museum?” is a complex one, raising very fundamental questions about the nature of authorship and editorship in the necessarily collaborative and social enterprise of song publication, and it …

Tam O' Shanter And Aesthetic Cultural Nationalism, Gerard Lee Mckeever

Studies in Scottish Literature

Drawing on recent debates about Burns and Scottish romanticism, particularly comments by Murray Pittock, Nigel Leask, and Ian Duncan, discusses the pivotal scene in Robert Burns's poem "Tam o' Shanter," in which Tam's vision of the witches' carnival is framed by the window of Alloway Kirk, and argues that this can be read as a framing and aestheticization not only of folk heritage, but of a national self-image, a recalibration of nationhood.

James Hogg's The Brownie Of Bodsbeck: An Unconventional National Tale, Barbara Leonardi

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses James Hogg's historical novel The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), set in the time of the religious Covenanters in late 17th century Scotland, with particular attention to the central woman character, Katharine Laidlaw; traces contemporary comment on the novel; and contrasts Hogg's distinctive portrayal of marriage with its use by other writers (particularly Scott) to plot national (and historical) reconciliation, arguing that Hogg uses the marriage plot to critique the emergent ideology of the national tale.

"A Flame That Is Burning The World": Edwin Muir, War, And History, Margery Palmer Mcculloch

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the impact of successive wars on the Scottish poet, translator and critic Edwin Muir (1887-1959), with especial focus on his experiences in post-World War II Prague and his response to the threat of nuclear warfare and human annihilation.

Recovering The Reformation Heritage In George Mackay Brown's Greenvoe, Richard Rankin Russell

Studies in Scottish Literature

Suggests that attitudes to Presbyterianism and the Scottish Kirk in much 20th century Scottish literary criticism have been too negative, and explores the religious heritage and selected writings of the Orcadian poet and novelist George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), a Catholic convert, to argue that Brown's best-known novel, Greenvoe (1972), draws not only on Catholic, and older pagan, symbolism, but also on aspects of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition.