English Language and Literature Commons^™

Eric Shanower And The Visual Mythography Of Age Of Bronze, Michael R. Hale

English Department Theses

Eric Shanower's groundbreaking comic series Age of Bronze is examined as a new kind of text, a mythographic text. By merging the classical Greek stories surrounding the Trojan War into a concise and linear graphic narrative, Shanower crafts a new kind of mythography through visual and textual media. This work aims to explore how mythography and comics intersect within Shanower's work.

The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

Literary conventionality and unoriginality have long been presumed to be markers of lesser literary quality. Scholars of women’s literature have argued that this assumption enabled the denigration of nineteenth-century American women writers, many of whose works markedly adhered to literary convention and evaded innovation. Following the work of such critics as Eliza Richards and Virginia Jackson in unearthing the contemporary literary contexts that framed female literary conventionality, this essay argues that the writings of Lucretia Davidson, an enormously popular poet, provides an important data point in our understandings of the social uses of literary unoriginality. Specifically, Davidson’s work suggests that …

Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates The Human Corpse In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Charles Hoge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores representations of the human corpse in nineteenth-century British literature and ephemeral culture as a dynamic, multidirectional vehicle used by writers and readers to help articulate emerging anxieties that were complicating the very idea of death. Using cultural criticism as its primary critical heuristic filter, this project analyzes how the lingering influence of folklore animates the human corpses that populate canonical and extra-canonical nineteenth-century British literature.

The first chapter examines the treatment of the human corpse through burial and mourning rituals, as specific developments within these procedures provide interpretive windows into how the idea of death was quickly …

The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwardian travel writing between roughly 1905 and 1914 serves as a bridge between the closing of the long Victorian period, the beginnings of modernism, and the changes to come in the twentieth century. The search for authentic experience characterizes travel writing in the Edwardian era. Significant cultural, technological, and social changes caused Edwardians to examine their perceptions about possibilities for authentic engagement with other places and people in their travels. As a result, Edwardian travel writers explore various methods by which to engage authentically with other cultures. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines a number …

Recovering Melville’S Hand: An Inaugural Report On Digital Discovery And Analysis At Melville’S Marginalia Online, Steven Olsen-Smith

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This installment of “Melville’s Hand,” a department of Leviathan originally conceived by Founding Editor John Bryant, is the first to appear in the journal since staff at Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO) printed newly documented marginalia in issue 10.3 of 2008. Through the vision of Bryant’s successor as Editor Samuel Otter and of Associate Editor Brian Yothers, the present installment also constitutes the inaugural printing of what we hope will remain an annual contribution by the online project to Leviathan (appearing in every June issue) for years to come. What gives us confidence that MMO will generate significant material …

British Fascism In The 1930s In Life And Literature, Jennifer M. Janes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Political and economic turmoil in 1930s Britain gave rise to a home-grown fascist movement led by the controversial Oswald Mosley. Literature of this period by Joseph O’Neill and Rex Warner mirrored the internal nature of the British fascist movement by depicting fascist-like societies embedded under or entrenched within the English countryside. Their metaphors of fascism rising as a solution to fear and disorder conjure the threat of fascism that was rising in Europe in that period. The metaphors are made more particularly relevant by the fact that the forces of Italian, German, and British fascism were not invasions from without, …

Playing Hell In Charleston - Daniel Payne, Clementa Pinckney And The Fight Against White Supremacy, Susanna Ashton

Publications

The men and women massacred while studying the Bible the other night in the Emanuel A. M. E. Church were, in their own way, raising hell.

That phrase might seem ill conceived or even disrespectful but it can be invoked here to honor their courage and the A. M. E Church’s long tradition of challenging white supremacy. Their private prayer this week was political simply because their mere existence challenged racial power. There is a long contextual history of race violence in America which gives us tools to see this event clearly but even more than that, there is a …

Rhetorics Of Invitation And Refusal In Terry Tempest Williams's The Open Space Of Democracy, Jill Swiencicki

English Faculty/Staff Publications

This essay aims to break through an impasse in scholarship about the uses and limits of invitational rhetoric for social change. After analyzing the arguments about invitational approaches to communication, the essay focuses on a case (concerning freedom of expression after September 11) wherein invitations to listen have been refused. In examining the refusal stage of the invitational encounter, I find that what interlocutors chose to do after being refused is as important as the gesture of invitation itself. The choice to publicize refusals to listen, for example, reveals previously unconsidered ways that invitational rhetoric succeeds in getting marginalized points …

American Dreams And Dystopias: Examining Dystopian Parallels In The Great Gatsby And To Kill A Mockingbird, Samuel Nathan Harris

Masters Theses

In this study I consider the recent trend of dystopian fiction in literature—both the broader genre of dystopias of the past century or so, and the contemporarily popular subgenre of young adult dystopian fiction—and examine whether certain American novels, while not typically considered dystopias, can fit into this genre or at least be established as having some parallels with works of this genre. Based on certain shared archetypes of the genre, such as “speculative myth,” a governing “ritual habit,” and a dissatisfied narrator or protagonist, I here propose that other American classics, specifically F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and …

Flannery O'Connor's Redemptive Violence In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club And Invisible Monsters, Caitlin Elliot

Masters Theses

Underground fight clubs, transsexuals, shotguns: these are the images that come to mind when one thinks of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction—for many critics and readers, merely the stuff of pulp fiction. However, many of Palahniuk’s novels use violence to critique American culture while offering hope for the redemption of his characters and society as a whole. Thus, the violence in his works serves a purpose beyond mere shock value. The function of Palahniuk’s violence, I argue, reflects the poetics of Flannery O’Connor. Her works contain culturally-driven narratives with strange and grotesque circumstances that lead her characters to moments of redemption, and …

The Romantic Egoist: Fitzgerald's View On Identity And Culture, Tara Bender

Masters Theses

"Who am I?” is a question that not only each individual asks himself or herself at various points in the process of maturation from childhood to adulthood, but also society itself as it changes and grows. During the 1920s, Americans were asking themselves these defining questions. F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the pre-eminent writers of that time period provides examples in his novels This Side of Paradise, Beautiful and The Damned, and The Great Gatsby of the immaturity of masculine figures. Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, and Jay Gatsby exemplify the struggle of men in the 1920s to develop their …

Kayardild Morphology And Syntax, By Erich R. Round (Review), Gregory Stump

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Specific Exceptions Driving Variation: The Role Of Orthography In Modern Hebrew Spirantization, Michal Temkin Martinez, Ivana Müllner

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper reports results from a production experiment examining the patterns of variation in the morphophonemic alternations present in spirantization in Modern Hebrew, a phenomenon to which there are many exceptions and diverse levels of variation. Real and nonce verbs were used to elicit variation in a sentence completion task as a follow-up to a perception experiment (Temkin Martínez 2010) which found gradient levels of acceptability in variation due to the presence of exceptionality. The diverse patterns of variation indicate that not all exceptions affect the same level of variation in alternation. Results of the current study suggest that levels …

A Culture In Change: The Development Of Masculinity Through P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith Series, Allison Thompson

Masters Theses

P. G. Wodehouse offers a serious and sustained critique of English society using the game of cricket as he follows the lives of two memorable characters, Mike Jackson and Rupert Psmith. Yet Wodehouse has frequently been accused of existing as too innocent of a bystander to understand the underpinnings of society, let alone to offer a critique. For example, Christopher Hitchens in a review of a Wodehouse biography by Robert McCrum states, "Wodehouse was a rather beefy, hearty chap, with a lifelong interest in the sporting subculture of the English boarding school and a highly developed instinct for the main …

The Many Paths Of Cyberspace: William Gibson's The Sprawl As Prototype For Structural, Thematic, And Narrative Multilinearity In New Media, Erik Marsh

Masters Theses

William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy helped set a new direction for science fiction, but his work is also a valuable tool for examining changes in the approach both readers and writers began to take to approaching literature as the text medium began its rapid evolution with the introduction of electronic hypertext. In this examination of Gibson’s fiction, a pattern of multilinear truth emerges, showing how Western culture began to fully embrace Postmodern approaches to truth claims as a default, how even a pre-electronic text can exhibit hypertext-like aspects, and how this shift in interpretive response to literature is important for Christians …

Mad To Be Sincere: Authenticity, Irony, And Kerouac’S Response To Modern Reality, Jonathan Michael Devin

Masters Theses

This project explores the qualities of sincerity, authenticity, and irony in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. The thesis asserts that that On the Road is neither ironic nor authentic, but, rather, that it both possesses aspects of traditional sincerity and anticipates the New Sincerity movement in contemporary literature. Through observing the characteristics of traditional sincerity and New Sincerity in the novel, the thesis amends the novel's critical position by showing a level of complexity, foresight, and nuance in the text. Ultimately, the thesis shows Kerouac's response to modern reality, presenting the limitations of authenticity and irony while esteeming the …

Revised Emblems Of Erin In Novels By John Mcgahern And Colum Mccann, Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

In “Cathal’s Lake,” a 1996 story by Colum McCann, “a big [Irish] farmer with a thick chest” lives by a lake, “which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard.” In By the Lake, a 2002 novel by John McGahern, an aging Irishman also lives by a lake, another enclosed space of tranquility, as is suggested in the opening lines: “The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was …

Fitzgerald's And Hemingway's Muses Of Disillusionment, Allison Rogers

English Department Theses

This paper examines how the main female characters in three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, and three Ernest Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea, function as muses of disillusionment for the protagonists of those works. First, I analyze the extent to which each of the protagonist's female complements can be defined as a muse in accordance with qualities ascribed to the ancient Greek mythological muses. Subsequently, I assess how each muse functions in her respective novel first to …

Josephine Lawrence: A Writer Of Her Time, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Using Stories As The Landscape Of Writing: A Case Study Of Mentor Texts In The Elementary Classroom, Christine Mcdowell

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate the way in which mentor texts are defined and implemented by four elementary classroom teachers within one school district, and how this mode of instruction allows for an increase in teacher autonomy while still addressing Common Core State Standards. This project focuses on each participant as they share a common goal in writing instruction while maintaining their teaching identity and curricular freedom.

One goal of this study is to provide the educational theory that supports mentor text instruction that is missing from the movement. Many teaching guides exist that explain the concept of mentor texts, …