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Revolutionary Imaginings In The 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald By Amy Garnai, Jennifer Golightly

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

"No Preaching, I Say!" : A Rhetorical Analysis Of E.D.E.N. Southworth's Temperance Motives And Motifs, Janine Marie Butler

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

E.D.E.N. Southworth, while relatively unknown today, was a popular and successful American writer who published over fifty stories throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, including The Hidden Hand, Cruel as the Grave, The Lost Lady o f Lone, Ishmael, and Self- Raised. This thesis brings together literary, sociocultural, and rhetorical studies to analyze how Southworth instilled her devout Christian morals and temperance messages in a number of sensational stories that were marketed to a general audience of American readers, including many drinkers. This paper primarily utilizes Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation (as detailed in "The Rhetorical Situation," published in Philosophy …

"You Write Like A Girl" : Analyzing The Rhetoric Of Gender Bias In The Literary Establishment And Implications For Student Writing Development, Julie Robin Dalley

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Using Lloyd Bitzer’s model of the rhetorical situation, I have parsed current rhetorical statements made by prominent female authors, such as Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Francine Prose, to examine their claim that the literary establishment practices gender bias against women’s writing. The main speakers argue that literary gatekeepers -such as critical review journals, editors, publishers, awards juries, and academic institutions - marginalize women’s writing through systemic patriarchal institutional mechanisms. Joanna Russ, in her 1985 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, deconstructs the ways in which women’s writing is biased against by literary institutions: …

The Transformative Power Of Voice In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Nicole L. Scimone

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is first and foremost a play about voice, particularly about the voice of flower-girl-tumed-lady Liza Doolittle. Though the voice is not Liza’s true self, it is the way the Liza’s identity can be expressed, and thus an important marker of identity transformations in the play. This work explores three different ways in which Shaw discusses voice in the play: as singing instruction, scientific methods for recording voice, and vocalizing automata and dolls.

First, the play is deeply influenced by Shaw’s background in singing instruction from his childhood. Shaw learned voice study from his mother’s beau, a …

Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution Of Life, The Disavowal Of Death, And The Zombie Syndrome, Ian Andrew Lepkowsky

English

Title: Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution of Life, The Disavowal of Death, and The Zombie Syndrome Statement: I am studying social media as a symptom within a culture of fetishism, where social media has become a substitute for human interaction under the concepts of fetishism outlined by Marx, Freud, Kaplan, Debord, and Baudrillard because I want to find out why people have fetishized social media so that one can understand how to rectify the underlying issues causing the fetish. In the past decade, social media has become fetishized by a select group of users, characterized by hours a day spent …

Interactive Aphra: Skyping Behn Into Your Classroom, Cheryl Wanko

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Beginning by asking how teachers manage the presence of the author in their literature classrooms, this article describes the classroom experiment of interviewing Karen Eterovich, an actor who portrays Aphra Behn, using Skype. It describes the planning and scripting processes, explains the particular interests of this group of students, and assesses the final activity. Questions arose about topics for the interview, appropriate ways for Behn to respond, and the need for a script. The pedagogical opportunities for preparing students as interviewers and of expanding their understanding of performance, historical reenactment, and the construct of the author are discussed. Possible extensions …

Brian Friel’S Modern Irish Drama: Writing The Past, Present, & Future, Brian F. Mccabe

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Postcolonial and historicized readings of Irish literatures describe the evils of colonialism, and the ways it has distorted nationhood and nation-building to serve the ends of greedy empires. But, what happens to a nation or nations in the vacuum after a major colonial power abandons the colony or is driven out? [excerpt]

Editorial Collaboration And Control: Laura Riding And The Seizen Press Years, Christina Cain Whitney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the founding of Seizin Press in 1927, Laura Riding began a new epoch in her career as poet and literary theorist. Along with her partner, Robert Graves, Riding worked among and with important literary tastemakers of the Modernist era, such as Gertrude Stein, Len Lye and James Reeves. Riding's demanding and intense editorial and collaborative style resulted in some unique and fascinating works, such as the bizarrely beautiful Life of the Dead and the egomaniacal The World and Ourselves. Beyond close literary examination of the above works, this study looks at the pressures both within the Seizin Press …

Emerging Imagery: The Great Famine In Nineteenth Century Irish Lit, Barbara A. Pitrone

ETD Archive

The critical debate surrounding the Great Famine in Irish Literature centers on the notion of a perceived silence. While some scholars claim that there is a literary void in Irish Literature following this cataclysmic event, others wonder whether language is even capable of describing the extreme physical, emotional, and psychological suffering that is inflicted upon the victims when such tragedies occur. Centuries of imperialism and colonialism had created a class divide so wide and an Irish economy so fragile that when a calamity such as famine occurred, it was the poverty-stricken, predominately Irish-Catholic peasantry that suffered most. Poor and illiterate, …

Generative Space: Embodiment And Identity At The Margins On The Early Modern Stage, Sallie Anglin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In "Generative Space: Embodiment and Identity at the Margins on the Early Modern Stage," I argue that the early modern stage provides a space in which emerging, marginal and unsanctioned identities can be shaped through the physical interactions between characters and their environments. Spaces that are marginalized on the stage, set apart from the main action of the play, or considered culturally or environmentally offensive, harbor figures that are not socially accepted or alloto exist legitimately outside of those spaces. This is in some ways liberating to the characters, but at the same time their identities are contingent upon the …

Witnessing The Web: The Rhetoric Of American E-Vangelism And Persuasion Online, Amber M. Stamper

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the distribution of religious tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised recordings of the Billy Graham Crusade and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have long made a practice of utilizing mass media to spread the Gospel. Most recently, these Christian evangelists have gone online. As a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites as a case study into the ways persuasion is carried out on the Internet. Through an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, and a virtual church—I investigate …

Werewolves As Translation: Bisclovret, Melion And Alphonse, Jessica L. Auz

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Who's Allowed To Ride The Short Bus?: Un-Defining Disability, Hannah Widdifield

Honors Theses

However easy it may be to do, criminalizing - or less maliciously, categorizing - disability does not make it easier to accommodate. Clumping people with "special needs" together does not meet those needs any more efficiently and labeling those needs as "special" is vague and ineffective. The disabled aren't pegged into their roles for practical reasons, but because of inherited stigmas that are continuously encouraged by institutional policies, popular culture, and art. My thesis is in part an attempt to uncover and articulate a personal and social history of disability. In it I try to puzzle out how misconceptions regarding …

The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, And Mechanized Bodies In Victorian Culture, Jessica Kuskey

English - Dissertations

While recent scholarship focuses on the fluidity or dissolution of the boundary between body and machine, "The Body Machinic" historicizes the emergence of the categories of "human" and "mechanical" labor. Beginning with nineteenth-century debates about the mechanized labor process, these categories became defined in opposition to each other, providing the ideological foundation for a dichotomy that continues to structure thinking about our relation to technology. These perspectives are polarized into technophobic fears of dehumanization and machines "taking over," or technological determinist celebrations of new technologies as improvements to human life, offering the tempting promise of maximizing human efficiency. "The Body …

Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin

Digital Initiatives and Special Collections

Willa Cather's 1931 essay "My First Novels [There Were Two]" is an often-cited statement on place in the author's literary oeuvre. In the essay, Cather distances herself from her first novel 'Alexander's Bridge' (1912) and its imitative, Jamesian motifs and setting. Her second novel 'O Pioneers!', she writes, was a kind of second "first" novel, one written "entirely for myself" and preoccupied with the story of "Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska." As Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Robert Thacker and Emmy Stark Zitter have argued, "My First Novels [There Were …

Eng 5000-001: Introduction To Methods And Issues In English Studies, Angela Vietto

Fall 2012

No abstract provided.

Eng 5006-001: Bernard Shaw And The Avant-Garde, Chris Wixson

Fall 2012

No abstract provided.

Between Theory And Reality: Cosmopolitanism Of Nodal Cities In Paweł Huelle’S Castorp, Ania Spyra

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

FIVE YEARS BEFORE the publication of his novel Castorp, the Gdansk writer Pawel Huelle published a short piece of the same title in the essay collection Inne historie (1999), the title of which-translated as either "other stories" or "other histories"-consciously plays with the difficulty of writing a history of Gdansk, a theme to which almost all of the short pieces in this collection somehow return. The essay tells the story of a literary correspondence between a Lvov pastor and the writer Thomas Mann, in which Mann voices regret over some unelaborated ideas and abandoned storylines in The Magic Mountain. …

The Illusion Of Influence : Gender And Class Conflict In Three Gothic Works By Louisa May Alcott, Katie Elizabeth Dowson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In “The Illusion of Influence: Gender and Class Conflict in Three Gothic Works by Louisa May Alcott,” the works A Modern Mephistopheles, A Long, Fatal Love Chase, and Behind a Mask are analyzed as representative works of Alcott’s gothic fiction in terms of how they reflect the changes that were taking place in mid-nineteenth century America, as society developed from a sentimental culture to one that was theatrical. In Chapter One, I focus on the ways in which Alcott’s gothic heroines embody a blend of sentimentality and theatricality and how each looses or gains influence over others as a result …

You Sir Are A Fine Young Gentleman. Thank You, My Lady: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Eighteenth Century Conversations Regarding Gentility And Gender, Kati Overbey

Masters Theses

This study rhetorically analyzed the eighteenth century work of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator using Kathleen Turner's framework for rhetorical history as social criticism integrating text and context. Ten essays from The Spectator as well as ten essays from The Female Spectator were selected based on content and subject matter regarding manners and gentility. When Turner's framework for analysis was applied to the essays, defining characteristics of gentility were revealed. A presentation of the results of the textual and contextual analysis of these twenty selected essays is provided. An analysis of the …

On The Move: Games And Gaming Figures In Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, Douglas Anthony Guerra

Dissertations (1 year embargo)

In this dissertation, I analyze the way that gameplay, considered broadly, both facilitated and informed representations of agency in the nineteenth century. In effect, games were archives of possibility made procedurally discrete, rendering modes of action and agency legible in ways that are suggested, although differently engaged, in their somewhat less ephemeral cousins: books. Understanding that both games and books emerged from within similar fields of cultural production and often marketed themselves to the same audiences, I argue that taking a technical and materially historical approach to games helps us to explore major literary works of the period to startlingly …

Eng 5006-001: Virginia Woolf And Feminism, Ruth Hoberman

Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Picturing The Wake: Arcimboldo, Joyce And His ‘Monster,’, Václav Paris

Publications and Research

This essay considers Finnegans Wake through the lens of Arcimboldo's art. Drawing on surrealism, French theory, and close readings of parts of Joyce's most difficult book, it shows the work to be visually richer and stranger than we imagined.

Deterritorialization, Pure War, And The Consequences Of Indian Captivity In Transnational Colonial Discourse, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

The genre of the captivity narrative has operated as a vital circuit for transnational colonial discourse since its inception. Throughout the age of discovery, accounts of the captivity became an indispensible means of connecting the European metropole to foreign lands in Asia and Africa, as well as North and South America. The development of the Indian captivity narrative within the Atlantic context functioned as an effective tool for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the New World and its Indigenous inhabitants. In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which the captivity narrative functions as a colonial apparatus vital …

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

A Review Of "The Reformation Of The Landscape: Religion, Identity, & Memory In Early Modern Britain And Ireland" By Alexandra Walsham, Nicolle M. Jordan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jeffrey D. Burson The Rise And Fall Of Theological Enlightenment: Book Review, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

A peculiar artifact of many decades of materialist historical study is the reinforcement of a highly imaginary, cinematic envisioning of the French eighteenth century. Eager to debunk, demythologize, or otherwise demote anything even remotely religious, historians relish pictures of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille or a D. W Griffith. In the rendering of continental Enlightenment now favored among fashion-forward academic professionals, the poor, the intellectual, the oppressed, and the angry increase in number and fervor while the overfed monks, the ermine-draped clerics, and the impudent aristocrats gobble up every last resource. Then, in …

The Invisible Other: White Trash In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! And The Hamlet, Bryant Edwards Trihey

Theses & Honors Papers

The idea of a “white soul” and the protection of its purity was prolific during William Faulkner’s adolescence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is why he feared the establishment of a hybrid mix of races, especially one that tarnished whiteness. This thesis exams whiteness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet. The findings on this thesis indicate that only white trash can fix the problem that is white trash, which means that white trash is not even safe from itself. Faulkner finished Absalom, Absalom! with further avowal of his fear of the tainting of the white …

Eng 3702-002: American Literature: Mid-19th Century To 1900, John Allison

Fall 2011

No abstract provided.

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …