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Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns

English - Dissertations

In Jailbreakers, Villains, and Vampires: Representations of Criminality in Early-Victorian Popular Texts, I analyze moments of discursive dissonance that emerge through the juxtaposition of early-Victorian theories of criminality and representations of criminals in popular culture. In the 1830s and 1840s in England, methods for managing criminals underwent a series of revisions that corresponded to shifts in prevailing theories about the nature and course of criminal behavior. Assumptions that criminality was volitional, or that it originated in an individual's deficient self-discipline, gradually shifted into perceptions that criminality was pathological, and that malefactors were naturally brutish and incorrigible. Predominant conceptions of …

Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Steampunk is a progressive literary genre that evokes, imitates, and re-imagines the nineteenth century and favors the Industrial Revolution ideals of science and technology. In a historical framework, it mixes nineteenth-century conventions and retrofuturistic machinery with science fiction and fantasy elements. Steampunk authors are able to radically redefine socio-cultural implications that affect both past and contemporary societies. The following study explores the multitude of characteristics that define Steampunk literature as an interdisciplinary study. Chapter 1 explores the definitions and literary genres that construct Steampunk and includes a brief literary history of Steampunk works. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherie Priest’s novel …

Review: Childress, Alice. Selected Plays., Julie M. Burrell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Speed And Stasis: Femininity And Symbolism In John Dos Passos's 1919, Natalie Tara Cope

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

My thesis connects the ideas of speed, movement, symbolism and feminism in Dos Passos’s work 1919, the second book of the U.S.A. trilogy. For the women in the novel―Janey Williams, Eveline Hutchins, Eleanor Stoddard, and Daughter― there is an ever-present tension in their existence as they struggle between the static roles available for women as symbolic figures outside of time and the personal mobility that allows them to participate in history. By using speed as a measure of extreme behavior, I examine the degrees to which women could move outside of their domestic sphere of inequality and the speed at …

New Directions In The Rhizome Of Children's Literature And Children's Culture: A Case Study In Transmedia Storytelling, Katosha O'Daniel

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines the changing idea of what constitutes a “text” in twenty-first century children’s literature and children’s culture. Beginning with John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), through the Golden Age of Children’s Literature—that of the 1860s to 1900—and as a result of the shift to a children’s culture in the 1950s onward, my project interrogates the historical rhizome of children’s literature and children’s culture. The historical rhizome, which serves as the framework for this thesis, indicates the emergence of a fourth branch in the rhizome in our current epistemic mutation to the digitized text. Using J.K. Rowling’s Harry …

Beneath The Frock And Beyond The Original Plumbing : A Visual Rhetorical Analysis Of Transgender Magazines, Dayna Arcurio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis studies the rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and visual semiotic potential of the transgender and transsexual community by engaging with its signature rhetorical texts: its print and digital magazines. Designating the transgender/transsexual magazines, Original Plumbing and Frock Magazine as my primary texts for study, I provide three critical lenses through which to view the written and visual expression of the transgender community. The heart of this research seeks to understand how the transgender/transsexual community creates meaning by examining three aspects of its magazines: 1) the trans-rhetorical expression through articles and interviews; 2) each magazine’s aesthetic design through the lens of …

Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies In Graphic Novels, Julie Ann Bingham

English

In “Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in the Graphic Novel,” I examine how graphic narratives have historically been used to express political concerns; I then rate the impact of two contemporary works which imagine planetary crisis in relation to this context. Working with Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead and Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, I aim to illustrate that the violent worlds depicted in each fiction attest relevant social critique. As a frame for this analysis, I turn to the work of philosopher David Kellogg Lewis. Using his model of modal realism, I argue that engaging …

From Pulp To Webpage: Homestuck And Postmodern Digital Narrative, Austin Gunner Litwhiler

English

Homestuck by Andrew Hussie is a work developed entirely as an experiment in using the internet as a storytelling medium. In order to analyze this drastically new form of story, born and grown on the internet, I must initially analyze the two genres it best fuses; Homestuck is published serially and episodic, and largely contains media elements of the Graphic Novel. However, Homestuck also mixes into the story areas where reader choice and interactivity, animated cut scenes, and music in a fashion that imitates a video game. I’ll be examining Homestuck as a primary text, first inspecting its form and …

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 …

Magical Process, Patrice Loar

Senior Honors Theses

The use of supernatural beings in four of Shakespeare’s plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and The Tempest – is examined in order to show the change in Shakespeare’s thinking about magic, and how the mortal and supernatural can co-exist. The shift from properly controlled benevolent female power, to out-of-control malevolent female power, to the eradication of female power and triumph of the male magus is examined; the ideal co-existence of the human and supernatural worlds is assessed.

Beauty And The Beast: Across Cultures And Time., Bridgette Johnson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis traces the fairy tale of Beauty and Beast across different cultures in classic versions of the tale to examine social and cultural factors and gender norms and compares those findings to modern retellings while examining the same themes as the classic tales.

Shaming The Love Plot: Inconvenient Women Navigating Conventional Romance, Brittan Wilkey

HIM 1990-2015

The love plot is one of the most widely consumed genres of fiction for women. Romance often dictates a woman's identity and her "story" or narrative, leaving little room for other avenues of self-development. However, when romance fails, even in the realm of fiction, women are left with shame. Shame might suggest a catastrophic aftereffect of the failure of women's initial investment of the love plot; however, I argue that shame functions in place of the love plot and helps to provide a critique of the oppressive and patriarchal nature of conventional romance. Using affect theory, I look at both …

Weight Loss Methods And Eating Disorder Risk Factors In Collegiate Wrestlers, Jessica Rea

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate the weight loss of collegiate wrestlers and assess their risk for eating disorders (ED). Methods: Wrestlers were recruited by contacting the athletic trainer (AT) at the institution they wrestled. ATs who agreed to participate were sent an electronic link containing a survey, 143 wrestlers provided usable data. The survey was created from two surveys one allows the athlete to describe his eating behaviors and the ATHLETE questionnaire which measures risk for ED. We analyzed the data using descriptive statistics and frequencies. Results: 76.6% of wrestlers indicated binge eating; eating behaviors are …

The Broadsheet- Issue 1, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• Annual English Career Night
• Honors Convocation
• Senior Reflection
• English Curriculum Reform
• Sigma Tau Delta Induction
• Upcoming Events

"The Country Of Nine-Fingered People": The Southern Mountain Tradition And The Gothic In Faulkner's Intruder In The Dust And Dickey's Deliverance, Kathleen Peterson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the role of the Southern mountain tradition and the Gothic mode in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and James Dickey’s Deliverance. Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, it argues that Faulkner and Dickey appropriated already Gothic elements of Appalachian history in order to create the Gothic characters and settings that would allow them to explore major cultural anxieties of their time. Chapter One gives a brief overview of Appalachian history from the Revolutionary War through 1970. It examines both factual material and fictional portrayals, including the miners’ union strikes of the early 1900s, Mary …

The Soul Of Man Under Capitalism, Joe L. Cantu

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This paper examines the consciousness of three literary characters, divided by space and time, from mid nineteenth century Russia, mid twentieth century Italy, to late twentieth century American society. This paper exposes literature’s rendition of modern man’s varying consciousness as shaped by the changing social conditions around him. This paper recognizes these varying social conditions as different stages in capitalism’s development. Capitalism has a history; the literature this paper examines discloses its negative impact on the consciousness of its characters. In analyzing Notes from the Underground, Contempt, and American Psycho, three novels separated by geography and spanning a timeframe of …

Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins

Masters Theses

This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.

Translingualism In Post-Secondary Writing And Language Instruction : Negotiating Language Ideologies In Policies And Pedagogical Practices., Nancy Bou Ayash

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on text-oriented data from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, this study examines how writing teachers and students constantly negotiate tensions between translingual sociolinguistic realities on one hand and monolingualist assumptions about language and language relations on another that dominate curricular and pedagogical designs in first year writing courses. The study involves a multiplicity of data sources, such as official institutional documents, individual instructional materials, classroom observations, structured interviews, and a method of "talk around texts." Writing teachers in this study sensitively grappled with tensions between the constant political pressures of generating the status quo and their ideological orientations …

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears And The English Political Novel, 1950-2010, Jackson Ayres

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010 gives a coherent account of the English political novel after World War II, a critical narrative absent from current scholarship. I contend that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a touchstone for political fiction, is underwritten by Orwell's conflicted attitude toward politics: despite embracing politics as the necessary means to genuinely improve people's lives, he also remained suspicious of politics' apparently inherent potential to diminish or even eliminate autonomy. Orwell's simultaneous attraction and vigorous resistance to politics, I argue, is tied to broader contemporaneous anxieties over political and cultural totalization. Such …

Political Twittoric : The Rhetorical Use Of Twitter By The Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign, Kainat Najmi Abidi

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

With the entrance of the digital age, the Presidential campaign has begun accommodating the growing trend of new technologies. A campaign can reach an audience in person, on the radio, through the newspaper, on television, and on the Internet. In 2008, President Barack Obama broke the limitations of campaigning by going social, which he continued in his run for reelection in 2012. Obama tapped into the popular social network of Twitter to run a portion his 2012 campaign. By utilizing this new network, Obama’s campaign accessed the multimodal quality of Twitter to benefit their goal of winning the 2012 election …

"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 Living Dead Austen : Exploring The Zombie Trope In American Culture, Film, And Literature, Katherine Godin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the origin, rise, and resonance of the zombie trope in American film and literature, focusing on three cinematic stages and culminating in an analysis of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. While many critics have casually dismissed zombies as a trend, this thesis argues that these creatures reflect a variety of Western fears that have surpassed the obvious association with death and decay. Indeed, as this thesis argues, zombies have come to reflect a myriad of anxieties concerning the gendered and racial Others, as well as consumerism, technology, and even, as will be …

Reading War : Modern Warfare In The Age Of Terror And Recent American Literature, Kyle Anthony Kovacs

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

No abstract provided.

What Are The Properties Of Editorial Cartoons That Heal?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On 23-24 April 2013, I attended a conference called “Images of Terror, Narratives of Insecurity: Literary, Artistic and Cultural Responses.” The conference was held by Project CILM–City and (In)security in Literature and the Media, and the organizers “aim to examine how literature, art and culture have dealt with notions of insecurity and to what extent they have provided significant challenges and responses to hegemonic discourses.” Visit this website for more information about the project and visit this site for more information about the conference.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how …

Do You Fit The Alloy Mold? The Homogenization Of Structure And Audience In The Television Adaptations Of 'Gossip Girl,' 'Pretty Little Liars,' And 'The Vampire Diaries', Caitlin Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which the television adaptations of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries become more homogenized during the adaptation process, thus contributing to an implied exclusivity from which Alloy, Inc.—the media and marketing company that owns these products—might benefit. This paper points out the ways in which the three products become structurally similar to one another during the adaptation process through the implementation of soap opera conventions. An exploration of consumption and class in each of the three works reveals an emphasis on class-based exclusivity in the adaptation process. Finally, a focus on …

Perspectives On Identity, Migration, And Displacement, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang, Hsiao-Yu Sun

CLCWeb Library

Perspectives on Identity, Migration, and Displacement -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang, and Hsiao-Yu Sun (Kaohsiung: National Sun Yat-sen University Press, 2010. ISBN 9789860235418 209 pages, bibliography, index) is a collection of articles about sociological and literary aspects of identity formation as a consequence of (im)migration. (Im)migration results in the problematics of assimilation and hybridity and in postcolonial scholarship, in particular, attention is paid to the concept of migration termed "Creolization" on the ground that cultural contact, cultural transmission, and cultural transformation result in the creation of new cultures. Copyright release by National Sun Yat-sen University to …

A Freudian View Of Dilsey And Fulfillment In Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Lauren Haley Adams

Student Theses and Dissertations

This work serves as a character analysis of Dilsey Gibson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Dilsey is viewed in this work from a Freudian perspective, and this work details how she fulfills her id and superego as is evidenced in the novel. She thereby becomes a representation of the ego within the novel and is shown to be a fully-developed and multi-faceted character.

Linked To His Fellow Man Of Civilized Life: Washington Irving, The Transatlantic Native American, And Romantic Historiography In A History Of New York And The Sketchbook Of Geoffrey Crayon, Kara Rebecca Kemp

Theses and Dissertations

As representatives of "an earlier stage of civilization," Native Americans in early nineteenth-century literature were integral in conversations of race relations, cultural development, and anthropological strata. They were a baseline of humanity against which more "civilized" nations of the world marked their progress, determined the value of their own cultural advancements, and proclaimed their superiority (Flint 1). They were an object of continuing fascination for Americans and Britons seeking to reinvent themselves in the aftermath of war and revolution, but their image in these nations was used as a derogatory slur (Fulford and Hutchings 1; Flint 6--7). Suggesting that a …

Symbolic Capital And The Performativity Of Authorship: The Construction And Commodification Of The Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity, Whitney Helms

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Victorian and Antebellum writers were the first literary figures to construct and perform their authorship within the sphere of celebrity. Unlike their Romantic predecessors who endured fame as an unexpected consequence of their popularity, the Victorians and their contemporaries understood celebrity as a condition of authorship. This dissertation takes as its subject the origins and development of symbolic power for authors as it was expressed in the trappings of celebrity and mass culture and argues that authorship became no longer strictly a profession of writing, but rather a performative endeavor that could be presented through diverse commercial markets. Investigating the …

Chasing The Ghost Of Melesina Trench: A Film By Qina Liu In Collaboration With Katharine Kittredge, Katherine Kittredge, Qina Liu

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

Filmmaker Qina Liu has created a short documentary about Katharine Kittredge's decade-long quest to learn about the life and work of Anglo-Irish diarist and poet Melesina Trench. The story tells of remarkable coincidences, documents lost and found, and the emergence of Trench's descendants in the project's final chapter.