Digital Commons Network^™

Shakespeare And Boyhood: Early Modern Representations And Contemporary Appropriations, Marvin Tyler Sasser

Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates that Shakespearean boyhood, both in early modern plays and contemporary reimaginings for young readers, critiques patriarchal and hegemonic ideals through the rhetoric and behavior of boy characters. Although critics have called Shakespeare’s boy characters indistinguishable, I find that they provide Shakespeare a unique resource to offer persuasive skepticism about heroic conventions, education, and political instability. This project begins by examining the lexical network of boy in order to chart its uses in early modern England. The subsequent three chapters establish how Shakespeare uses boys to comment on a range of ideal manhoods, such as the chivalrous …

Ghettoizing Black Women's Literature : A Socio-Historic Study Of Black Women Writers And The White Publishing Industry, Kimberly Wiley Luna

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper contributes to the conversation of race/publishing by concentrating on black women’s literature, exploring how it has been produced over the course of the last one hundred years and the impact of the white/black divide which has created a power structure where white publishers are able to assert control over black women’s writing. The focus is on three commercially successful female African American writers— Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove. All three women were published by mainstream New York publishing houses made up of primarily white editors and publishers.

The research in this paper is informed by editorial …

Wandering, Idleness, And The Nineteenth-Century Tales Novel, 1836-1895, Molly C. O'Donnell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In "The Late-Victorian Romance Revival" (2008) Anna Vaninskaya questions if "one [can] even speak of the mixing or hybridization of genres in a particular work if the genres themselves had not yet been conclusively defined" (60). This question serves as a warning to genre studies scholars seeking to tease out new observations from history. This dissertation, however, seeks to do just that. Employing multiple theoretical approaches, my study of what I dub the tales novel finds links between diverse Victorian works. Bearing a resemblance to a collection of stories, with seemingly disparate narratives, the tales novels also demonstrate plot interdependence. …

Daniel Denicola, Professor Of Philosophy, Musselman Library, Daniel R. Denicola

Next Page

In this issue of Next Page, Professor of Philosophy Daniel DeNicola reveals his appreciation for mysteries, especially those focused on manuscripts or works of art, and how his incessant childhood habit of reading the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast led his parents to buy him a set of "Children's Classics" and his very own encyclopedia-sold in installments at the supermarket.

From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the experience of largely single women in London’s house of correction, Bridewell Prison, and argues that Bridewell’s prisoners, and the nature of their crimes, reveal the state’s desire for dependent, sexually controlled, yet ultimately productive women. Scholars have largely neglected the place of early modern women’s imprisonment despite its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of common English women. By examining the historical and cultural implications of early modern women and prison, this thesis contends that women’s prisons were more than simply establishments of punishment and reform. A closer examination of Bridewell’s philosophy and practices shows how …

Contextualizing The Writings Of J.R.R. Tolkien On Literary Criticism, Sherrylyn Branchaw

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Tolkien's writings about literary criticism, which are focused on Beowulf, fairy stories, and his own works. Whereas his writings have often been taken to mean that analytic scholarship is not valid and should not be pursued, my essay takes the intellectual climate of the time into consideration and offers an alternative interpretation, according to which he did not mean to forbid these studies outright and indeed intended that scholars should continue writing them. The essay ends with a call to academics not to be discouraged by his strong language from producing analytic studies.

Developing An Image-Based Classifier For Detecting Poetic Content In Historic Newspaper Collections, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Maanas Varma Datla, Spencer Kulwicki

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

"Developing an Image-Based Classifier for Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspaper Collections" details and analyzes the first stage of work of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery project team. Our team is is investigating the use of image analysis to identify poetic content in historic newspapers. The project seeks both to augment the study of literary history by drawing attention to the magnitude of poetry published in newspapers and by making the poetry more readily available for study, as well as to advance work on the use of digital images in facilitating discovery in digital libraries and other digitized collections. …

Communists And The Classroom: Radicals In U.S. Education, 1930-1960, Jonathan Hunt

Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Research

Concern about Communists in education was a central preoccupation in the U.S. through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on post-secondary and adult education and on fields related to composition and rhetoric, this essay offers an overview of the surprisingly diverse contexts in which Communist educators worked. Some who taught in Communist- sponsored "separatist" institutions pioneered the kinds of radical pedagogical theories now most often attributed to Paulo Freire. Communist educators who taught in "mainstream" institutions, however, less often saw their pedagogy as a mode of political action; their activism was deployed mainly in civic life rather than …

Making Waves: Bacon, Manley, And The Shifting Rhetorics Of Opulent At(A)Lantis, Alex Cahill Nielsen

ETD Archive

In the modern critical environment, there has been a renewed interest in the role that proto-feminist and feminist satires have played in the development of cultural commentary and the modern novel. Lesser-studied works have seen several new approaches applied by critics such as Rachel Carnell, Rebecca Bullard, and Ruth Herman, who have focused on the role of the genre of "secret history" in the popular growth of the novel as a form for political dissent. Secret history, which can offer revelatory glimpses into the contemporary scandals and governance of the female authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a …

Adams County History 2015

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

To The Contrary, Beth Daniell

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Author of one of the most important volumes on literacy and spiritual practice finds that four key insights have guided her work, all of them consonant with AEPL members’ practices.

Robert Southey On Portugal: Travel Narrative And The Writing Of History, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Robert Southey was once referred to by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch as “one of the best known of the unread poets” (9) in a study that deliberately focused on what he considered Southey’s largely failed poetic quest: “Southey’s grand failures,” he explained, “are more interesting than his modest successes and far more illuminative of Romanticism and Romantic myth-making generally” (9). In an oblique way, my focus in this essay is likewise another of Southey’s grand failures-- his planned, but never finished, History of Portugal. This ambitious project, despite remaining mostly unwritten, occupied much of Southey’s time in the early years …

More Than Death: Fear Of Illness In American Literature 1775-1876, Sarah Schuetze

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives about personal and collective experiences with disease train American readers to fear illness while warning them against the dangers of being afraid. Such narratives depict the way illness ravages the physical body, disrupts interpersonal relationships, and threatens to dismantle social or municipal organization. In other words, the story of sickness is a story of terror-inducing dis-order. I study disease with a lens informed by cultural and disability studies to show that what makes disease historically and culturally significant is its power—through the body—to dis-order relationships, society, and knowledge. Anxieties about this dis-order …

The Ethics Of Mourning: The Role Of Material Culture And Public Politics In The 'Book Of The Duchess' And The 'Pearl' Poem, Tarren Andrews

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project is a socio-historic analysis of two late 14^th century dream visions: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the Pearl poem. Utilizing Robert Pogue Harrison’s concept of objectifying grief through ritualized communal mourning, this thesis examines the ways in which mourning literature functioned as consolatory device, and a form of public performance for the powerful patrons who commissioned the pieces. By engaging with pre-existing communities of grief, material culture, and courtly discourse these poems perform the work of mourning while simultaneously enacting modes of public performativity that stress the ethics of grieving, and suggest that, for royal patrons, …

Eng 4950-001: Literary History And Bibliography, John Allison

Fall 2014

No abstract provided.

Detecting Arguments: The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Nineteenth--Century British Detective Fiction, Katherine Anders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation argues that within the mid- to late-nineteenth-century British detective novel, the abductive arguments used to build circumstantial evidence (indirect evidence), or "clues," form the method of the detective, but those arguments are not logically certain. In order to resolve the mystery of the detective novel, to discover how the crime was committed and who committed it, circumstantial evidence proves insufficiently conclusive, so confessions, a more logically conclusive (direct) form of evidence, begins to appear frequently in detective novels. Confessions conclusively confirm the events of the crime, the guilt of the criminal, and reveal the inner workings of the …

A Document In Death And Madness: A Cultural And Interdisciplinary Study Of Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings On The Death Of Opelia, Jennifer Leigh Tipton

Dissertations

In the nineteenth century the character of Ophelia transformed from a minor role in Hamlet into one of the great muses of the Romantic period. Ophelia’s rise to an archetype of feminine madness was not a result of Shakespeare’s pen alone, but of the accumulation of interpretations of her character from actresses, artists, critics, writers, musicians, and social attitudes toward women. This paper focuses on nineteenth-century interpretations of her death, specifically art song.

A brief survey of the nineteenth-century European cultural and social climate pertaining to Ophelia is included in the paper:

*Shakespeare in France and Germany

*Nineteenth-Century Actresses in …

An Investigation Into The Traits Of And Strategies Used By Highly Effective Teachers, Stephanie J. Ciolli-Stewart

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the traits of and strategies used by highly effective teachers. Two research questions were presented in this study: What are the traits of highly effective teachers? and What strategies are used by highly effective teachers? Elementary school principals in the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation in Evansville, Indiana, were asked to recommend one to two highly effective teachers. After a thorough review of principal recommendations, participants were considered based upon gender, years of experience, and grade level or subject area taught. Once the participant selection process concluded, dates for six onsite classroom observations …

Restoring, Rewriting, Reimagining: Asian American Science Fiction Writers And The Time Travel Narrative, Joanne Chern

Scripps Senior Theses

Asian American literature has continued to evolve since the emergence of first generation Asian American writers in 1975. Authors have continued to interact not only with Asian American content, but also with different forms to express that content – one of these forms is genre writing. Genre writing allows Asian American writers to interact with genre conventions, using them to inform Asian American tropes and vice versa. This thesis focuses on the genre of science fiction, specifically in the subgenre of time travel. Using three literary case studies – Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” Charles Yu’s How …

Whithersoever Thou Goest: The Discourses Of Exile In Early Modern Literature, Joshua Seth Lee

Theses and Dissertations--English

Exile is, as Edward Said so eloquently put it, “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” Exiled peoples operate on the margins of their native culture: part of it, but excluded from it permanently or temporarily. Broadly speaking, my project explores the impact of exile on English literature of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. English exiles appear frequently in literary studies of the period, but little attention has thus far been focused on the effect of exile itself on late medieval and early modern authors. Historical studies on exile have been more prevalent and engaging. My project builds on this …

“Of The Woman First Of All”: Walt Whitman And Women's Literary History, Vivian Delchamps

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.

Undermining The Angelic Restrictions Of First-Wave Feminism: What The New Woman Did, Didn't, And Wouldn't Do, Jane Kristen Asher

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation provides an intertextual reading of Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895), Victoria Cross's The Woman Who Didn't (1895), and Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't (1895) in order to historically and culturally contextualize these popular New Woman novels in social-purity feminism, the marriage debate, and reticent sexual politics of the late-nineteenth century. By examining the ways that The Woman Who heroines discursively and thematically engage with first-wave feminism and by focusing on this dialectical exchange of feminist ideas and practices as they were manifested in feminist publications and campaigns at the turn of the century, I argue …

Critique And Theory In The History Of The Modern Humanities, Paul Jay

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

What role has poststructuralist literary, critical, and cultural theory played in the making of the humanities, particularly in the period between 1968 and the present, and what role should theory have going forward as we come to terms with the corporatization of higher education, with its stress on practical skills, vocational training, and on measuring concrete learning outcomes? Exploring these questions requires confronting - and linking - two key issues currently at the core of sometimes-fierce debates about the humanities in the West, and particularly in t he US. T he first issue has to do with whether or not …

Science Fiction In The United States, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

“Lifted Moments”: Emily Dickinson, Hymn Revision, And The Revival Music Meme-Plex, Sarah Wadsworth

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay focuses on Dickinson’s poem “The Soul has Bandaged moments - ” (Fr360), placing it in relation to several interrelated hymns (Independent, Unitarian, and gospel) that share a common pattern of imagery deriving from the popular “Crowning Day” motif. Through a linked sequence of paired readings, it shows how connections between two loosely related texts sharpen and become meaningful when the two texts are brought into dialog with a third text. Juxtaposing three overlapping pairs of lyrics—first by Daniel Webster Whittle and William Channing Gannett, then by Philip Doddridge and Emily Dickinson, and, finally, by Gannett and Dickinson (with …

Teaching Pride And Prejudice: A Pedagogy, Jodi Wyett, Laura Gray, Lisa Ottum, Crystal B. Lake, Cynthia D. Richards, Sally Lamping

Pride and Prejudice: The Bicentennial

This informal round-table discussion focuses on the different strategies for teaching Jane Austen from educators across Southwestern Ohio.

Eng 3702-001: American Literature: Mid-19th Century To 1900, John Allison

Fall 2013

No abstract provided.

The History Of Shakespeare In American Education, 1620-1930, Joseph P. Haughey

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Shakespeare’s role in American education from colonial times through the Progressive Era. The history is divided into four overlapping historical periods, each represented in its own chapter and derived from four different sets of primary sources. The first chapter provides a synopsis of Shakespeare’s presence in American education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then, through case studies of the records of two nineteenth-century university literary societies – the Hasty Pudding Club of Harvard University and the Sherwood Rhetorical Society of Kalamazoo College – examines the role extracurricular activity played in first introducing Shakespeare at the …

Interpretation, 1980 And 1880, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they actually emerge from historicist self-critique. Specifically, these contemporary critics view the historicist projects of the 1980s as overly influenced by disciplinary models of textual interpretation models that first arose, we show through our reading of the Jolly …

Nailing Down Truths: Evental Historiography In Fors Clavigera, Sari Lynn Carter

Theses and Dissertations

The theoretical framework of this study is intended to explore the potential Alain Badiou's theory of event, truth, and faithful subject may provide for understanding literature. This study applies this framework to John Ruskin's late and lesser-known work Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-1884). Both Ruskin's fragmented style in Fors Clavigera and his notion of historical truth developed therein have been read as madness and as reactionary romanticism. I examine key metanarrative moments in Fors Clavigera where Ruskin reflects on his historiographical choices and methods. Through my analysis, I show how Badiou's theory provides …