Digital Commons Network^™

Ben Jonson And Shakespeare: 1623-1626, James E. Savage

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

Vol. 6 (1965): Full Issue, Journal Editors

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

John Milton’S History Of Britain: Its Place In English Historiography, Michael Landon

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

Platonism In The Works Of Edmund Spenser, A. Wigfall Green

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

Why Playing Video Games Is In Your Best Interest, Adan Salazar

Pop Culture Intersections

This article explores the world of video games and their potential to benefit one's well being. For decades video games have persevered in pop culture and have provided entertainment for countless people. The overwhelming popularity of video games has also sparked debate on how they can affect an individual. From extended screen time hurting vision to violent content affecting actions many claims have been made against video games. The truth is there is far more evidence supporting video games as a benefit towards users. Enriching social practices, providing therapy and implementation into classrooms are just a few of the ways …

"Nigerian Literature Is A Very Important Part Of World Literature": A Chat With Wale Owoade, Editor Of Expound, Wale Osoade, Sanjeev Sethi

The Review Review

Wale Owoade’s energy and enthusiasm percolates to every segment of EXPOUND Magazine. He has a gifted team that sharpens his vision and helps him curate a first-rate literary journal. In its short run, the journal has caught the attention of poets, writers and serious contributors the world over who look forward to its juried issues.

The Good Enough Teacher, Natalie Davey

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This paper puts forward a pedagogical model of care for K-12 educators that is specifically focused on alternative classroom educators. In conversation with educational theorists and psychologists, a model of care that is translatable to both teachers and students in non-traditional classrooms is presented. Looking first at Arlie Hochschild’s “emotion work” in the context of alternative classroom teaching, a link is made to Nel Noddings’s “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point. The author then riffs on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” the one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world …

Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a close reading of Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) by analyzing how these two black women authors wrote about sex work and black women sex workers in their novels. Black women writers in the mid-twentieth century were reluctant to write about black women’s sexuality as a result of discourses of racial uplift that rejected the white supremacist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. While not the focus of their novels, the inclusion of sex workers in their fictional narratives provide a complicated representation of a particular form of …

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

Animals And Literature, Lewis Carroll, Herbert George Wells, Carrie Lewis Miller, Firdavs Khaydarov, Odbayar Batsaikhan

All Resources

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of Animals and Literature. Contains Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells.

Re-Enchanted: The Rise Of Children's Fantasy Literature In The Twentieth Century (2019) By Maria Sachiko Cecire, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019), by Maria Sachiko Cecire

Faulknerian Echoes And The Grotesque In Mccarthy’S The Orchard Keeper, William Haynes

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Faulknerian Echoes and the Grotesque in McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper (August 2020)

William Leland Haynes, B. A., Texas A&M International University

Chair of Committee: Dr. Manuel Broncano

This thesis is an exploration of Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner’s craft through a focus on their works The Orchard Keeper and “Barn Burning.” This analysis charts the two dialoguing or conversing with each other across times through the art of their writings.

The basis of this project examines a key phrase from “Barn Burning,” where the problem of doing the right thing creates a conflict of identity within the story’s young …

Containing The Blemmye: Anxiety Towards Congenital Difference In The Old English Wonders Of The East, Jessica L. Carrell

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to illuminate early medieval anxieties about sex, procreation, and congenital physical difference by applying a lens of critical disability theory to the Old English Wonders of the East, primarily as it survives in the eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v. This thesis focuses on the textual and illustrative representation of one Wonder, the Blemmye—an approximately eight-foot-tall, eight-foot-wide androgynous humanoid, whose eyes and mouth are in their chest and who does not possess a head—as a historic embodiment of what disability meant in relation to the early medieval English worldview. This thesis considers the …

The Sacred Circle: Ostension In Native American Hoop Dancing, Emma George

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis examines the role of the semiotic concept ostension in folk dance, specifically in Native American hoop dance. Although the discipline of folklore is well-versed in ostension, folk dance has not been examined through this lens. I argue that dance is a form of ostension, of demonstrating a narrative, and this is especially apparent within Native American hoop dancing. I begin with a brief history of Native Americans in North America before discussing the origins of powwows, intertribal culture, and hoop dance. I then look at both the sacred nature and material culture of the modern hoop dance before …

Knowing The World: Shakespeare On Travel In As You Like It And Othello, David Summers

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

John Ogilby’S Atlas Chinensis: Anglo-Dutch Exchange And The (Re)Printing Of China, Carol Mejia Laperle

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project examines authorial representations of the morality of three functions of love magic: to induce, to disrupt, and to facilitate love in twelfth- through fifteenth-century Middle High German, Old French, and Middle English romances. Using a cultural studies approach with close textual analysis and informed by gender studies, it investigates medieval romance authors’ discomfort with love inducing magic and asserts that this discomfort is a response to the magic’s violation of free will, a central tenet of medieval theology. I find that authors condemn love inducing magic but mark specific instances acceptable through explicit clarification of divine approval. Love …

By Your Powers Combined: Heroic Solutions To Climate Catastrophes In The Fifth Season, Avengers: Infinity War, And Horizon: Zero Daw N, Kematat Matthew Medrala

Theses and Dissertations

Popular entertainment has become concerned with addressing issues of climate catastrophe in order to reflect the real concerns of its audience. Because these media narratives are produced by wealthy institutions that reach millions of people, it is vital to understand what these stories say about the causes of existential crises and their presented solutions. This thesis applies an ecocritical approach informed by environmental justice theorists and Marxist theory in order to analyze what a contemporary popular film, videogame, and novel have to say about addressing an oncoming ecological crisis. This analysis reveals that mass death among the disempowered is considered …

Glamour In Contemporary American Cinema, Shauna A. Maragh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

American cinematic glamour shapes hegemonic notions of femininity, beauty, performativity, sensuality, and sexuality for both female actresses and viewers. In addition, glamour has an economic component in encouraging women to buy products, such as clothing and makeup, to help them emulate their idols from cinema. Glamour is more than beauty and notoriety: it is achieved through careful stylization of tangible aspects—hair, clothes, makeup—and intangible, cinematic elements—performance, dialog, lighting, and camera techniques. In Classical Hollywood, traditionally white standards of beauty were often exalted as glamorous, and many leading roles were played by racialized white actresses; however, actresses of color were frequently …

Toward An Infrastructural Sublime: Narrating Interdependency In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Los Angeles, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This article examines the vibrant city infrastructures of Karen Tei Yamashita's 1997 novel Tropic of Orange in order to highlight interdependency as political and aesthetic value. The novel's emphasis on urban support systems—the oft-unnoticed roads, pipes, wires, and labor networks that allow the city to function—positions infrastructure as itself a critical lens, one that can reassess the relationship of ethnic American literature and subjectivity to the values of self-ownership, protest, and independence. By amplifying the overlooked support networks that underpin fictions of self-sufficiency, Yamashita's Tropic of Orange diverges from the narrative of self-ownership as liberatory endpoint. Instead, it recuperates the …

The Battle For Love Under The Governance Of Strict Social Codes, Nina Masin-Moyer

The Criterion

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” presents a grand, romantic, and heroic story between Palamon and Emily, who pray to Roman deities that represent the values and qualities that were important to men and women of that time. Conversely, “The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope is a mockery of this heroic style and tells a satirical tale of Belinda and Baron, each of whom pray to the powers of mystical creatures and trinkets, which are tangible manifestations of the rules that govern a gendered social order. Although Pope’s story is a satire of tales such as Chaucer’s, both comment …

'Where Many Paths And Errands Meet': Travel Writing In The Lord Of The Rings, Will Glover

Journal of Tolkien Research

In this paper I examine The Lord of the Rings through the lens of genre criticism. I take issue with the commonplace characterisation of the work as an ‘epic’ or a ‘romance’, a tendency that has restricted interpretations of the work and tied criticism of it too exclusively to that of medieval literature. I argue that the work should be viewed as a modern novel: an open-ended and capacious text comprised of numerous generic traditions, including the previously overlooked genre of travel literature. After establishing a working definition of travel writing, I analyse The Lord of the Rings's paratextual …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Exploring The Truths And Fabrications Of Sir John Mandeville, Jake Sanborn

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presents a unique and nuanced perspective of the Eastern World during the time of the Crusades. By critically analyzing the still-unknown author’s depictions of the Eastern lands and their peoples, I demonstrate that it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the status of Christianity during the late 14th century. The Travels comments upon the concepts of Eastern religions and cultural practices in a way that is remarkable and surprising — instead of reacting to such topics with hostility or aggression, the likely-Christian author of The Travels is willing to learn from those …

What The Riddle-Makers Have Hidden Behind The Fire Of A Dragon, Laurence Smith

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Classical mythology, folklore, and fairy tales are full of dragons which exhibit fantastic attributes such as breathing fire, hoarding treasure, or possessing more than one head. This study maintains that some of these puzzling phenomena may derive from riddles, and will focus particularly on some plausible answers that refer to a real creature that has for millennia been valued and hunted by man: the honeybee.

"Written By The Finger Of God": C.S. Lewis And Historical Judgement, Phillip Irving Mitchell

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Lewis’s distrust of scientific laws for history, rather than undercutting his practice of literary history, existed alongside a basic, cautionary trust in representing the past. His methods of history writing included offering an overall plot, developing characters and corporate quasi-characters, and making analogies with the present to increase readerly sympathy (or antipathy) with long-gone cultures. Despite his strong rhetorical tendency to generalize, Lewis did not place absolute faith in his historical narratives. They were made to be argued with, supplemented, and even over-turned. The article pays particular attention to three documents from Lewis’s career as a literary historian: 1) his …

Informing The Inklings: George Macdonald And The Victorian Roots Of Modern Fantasy, Edited By Michael Partridge And Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, Tiffany Brooke Martin

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

“Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives On J.R.R. Tolkien In The Great War, Edited By Janet Brennan Croft And Annika Röttinger, James Prothero

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Religion In George R.R. Martin's "A Song Of Ice And Fire" Franchise, Sydney A. Craven

Honors Theses

This thesis is a study of religion in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire franchise. Specifically, George R.R. Martin's use of medievalisms, his interpretation of the Middle Ages, when creating the religions in A Song of Ice and Fire.