Digital Commons Network^™

The Endangered Representation Of Sexual Violence In Sarah Kane's Blasted, Dina Zhurba

Master's Theses

In Blasted, Kane represents how incidents of rape highlight, exacerbate and solidify the unevenness of power distribution between men and women in the modern world and provides a new perspective at what we might call “rape in general” – a transhistorical phenomenon of rape as a practice of violence towards the female victim. Through a detailed analysis of the unique representational circumstances of the multiple scenes of rape, such as Cate’s meaningful absence in Ian’s scene of rape, the author of the essay comes to a conclusion that rape is and remains an engendered practice. However, along with reaffirming …

Male Adolescents Of Divorce: The Relationship With Their Noncustodial Father, Christine L. Kerr

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the divorce rate in the United States began to rise dramatically in the 1970s, researchers have studied the impact of divorce on those involved. The research indicates that children whose parents divorce are more likely than children whose parents remain married to suffer from a lower level of well-being and are at greater risk for a myriad of ills including poorer school performance and increased behavior problems. While few researchers have focused on the impact of divorce on male adolescents specifically, studies of adolescent males in general indicate they are at risk for a variety of problems including poor …

Lessons In Humanity: A Memoir, Chelsi Joy Sutton-Linderman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the opening pages of his work, Dog Years; A Memoir, Mark Doty explains: Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. This is why I shouldn't be writing anything about the two dogs that have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter? (1)

In this thesis I argue that Doty, among other respected contemporary writers, is saying something that matters when he writes of …

Resurrecting Speranza: Lady Jane Wilde As The Celtic Sovereignty, Heather Lorene Tolen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Lady Jane Wilde, writing under the pen name of Speranza, established ethos among a poor, uneducated, Catholic populace from whom she was socially and religiously disconnected. Additionally, it raises questions as to Lady Wilde's exclusion from the roster of Irish literary voices who are commonly associated with the Irish Literary Revival, inasmuch as Lady Wilde played a critical, inceptive role in that movement. Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, was an ardent nationalist who lived in Victorian Ireland. She contributed thirty-nine poems and several essays to the Nation newspaper—a nationalist publication—under the …

Rereading And Rewriting Women's History, Jacqueline Harris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Atwood discusses the importance of the female writer’s responsibility, that to write as a woman or about women means that you take upon yourself the responsibility of writing as a form of negotiation with our female dead and with what these dead took with them—the truth about who they were. By rereading and rewriting our communal past, women writers pay tribute to our female ancestors by voicing their silent stories while also changing gender stereotypes, complicating who these women were, and acknowledging their accomplishments.

In her …

A Transnational Study: Young Adult Literature Exchanged Between The Us And Germany, Kristana Miskin

Theses and Dissertations

Both young adult literature and transnational literature occupy transitional spaces and defy simple classifications. Their commonalities naturally suit the two sets of literature for concurrent study. However, the field is underdeveloped, particularly in the United States. With a concentration on the exchanges taking place between the U.S. and Germany, this thesis addresses the need to assemble primary materials and pertinent critical commentary into a single place available to educators, scholars, and researchers to acquire background on transnational YAL themes. The thesis delineates methods used in conducting and compiling research on U.S.-German YAL exchange and highlights the translation and publication concerns …

Blank Power: The Social And Political Criticism Of Blank Fiction And Cinema, Ashley Minix Donnelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores a style of literature known as "blank" fiction that became popular in the United States in the mid-1980s, focusing on its stark, limited form, its minimal plots, its focus on commodification, and its scenes of graphic violence. The author presents the argument that filmmakers were producing pieces of cinema during the same time period that are similar in both form and content to the works of blank fiction. These films are a part of a style she labels "blank" cinema.

Blank fiction and cinema are politically charged and highly critical of the social and political situation in …

Poem No. 100, November 2008, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

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

No abstract provided.

So Far From The Shire: Psychological Distance And Isolation In The Lord Of The Rings, Ginna Wilkerson

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

Considers Frodo’s psychological isolation in The Lord of the Rings and offers a perspective on Frodo and post-traumatic stress syndrome, looking closely at what was happening to him during his quest rather than after and using current understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse to provide a framework for understanding his experiences and reactions.

Dystopian Matriarchies: Deconstructing The Womb In Angela Carter's Heroes And Villains And The Passion Of New Eve, Hope Jennings

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

Much of contemporary women’s writing attempts to offer significant tactics for the reclamation of women’s bodies with the aim of mapping out new territories of female autonomy. The British author Angela Carter (1940-1992) demonstrates in the majority of her writings an intensive concern with how embodied sites of power are often created or reinforced through various mythological narratives or frameworks. More specifically, Carter interrogates the extent to which the privileging or reappropriation of the maternal body as a source of feminine power poses itself as a problematic terrain in various feminist discourses. In contrast to the majority of Carter’s earlier …

The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy Of His Last Days [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

Sigmund Freud has been on Mark Edmundson’s mind at least since his 1990 book, Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud. In that book, Edmundson uncovers a tension between two sides of Freud: the normative Freud committed to a rigid understanding of human behavior, and the romantic Freud whose restlessness with all given conventions inspired endless self-reinvention in his own writing. This side of Freud shows his kinship to Wordsworth, Emerson, and other writers and provides grounds of resistance to what is most stultifying in his own work. In Edmundson’s view, we need the imaginative …

Mentors’ Views About Developing Effective English Teaching Practices, Peter Hudson, Jan Millwater

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Effective mentoring in English is considered paramount to a preservice teacher’s development. What are mentors’ views about developing effective English teaching practices in their mentees? This study used quantitative data (survey) and qualitative data (questionnaire) on 24 mentors’ perceptions of mentoring second-year preservice teachers for teaching English and, in particular, the teaching of writing. Quantitative data measured mentors’ perceptions of their attributes and practices across five factors for mentoring (i.e., Personal Attributes, System Requirements, Pedagogical Knowledge, Modelling, and Feedback) with 67% or more of these mentors (n=24) agreeing or strongly agreeing they provided all of the advocated attributes and practices …

A Western Man Of Color: Richard Wright And The World, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations

Richard Wright had become by the mid 50s an analyst of what it means to be ‘of’ the West. He was by now a firmly-established émigré, and had become a French citizen in 1947. His journeys, in a way, had only just become: Europe was a stage or an inauguration into further mappings of the self and society. Those mappings took the extraordinary geo-political shifts of the mid-century as their subject. In the wake of the Second World War, severely damaged economically and in terms of sheer power, European nations were finally forced to give ground to the nationalist movements …

Playing For His Side: Kipling’S ‘Regulus,’ Corporal Punishment, And Classical Education, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Regulus,” revolves around the flogging of a student who has let loose a mouse in the drawing classroom of a turn-of-the-century British public school. The first part of the story is devoted to a fifth-form Latin class’s line-by-line explication of Horace’s fifth Roman ode, in which the story’s title character is presented as a paradigm of manly virtue; the remainder is given over to narration of the mouse-miscreant’s progress toward punishment, in thematic counterpoint to the Regulus exemplum. Within that idiosyncratic framework, the story tackles as ambitious a topic as the purposes of education, with particular …

Eng 3808-001, Ruth Hoberman

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

Eng 3606-001: Modern Drama, David Radavich

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

Eng 1091g-098: Composition And Language: Honors, John Kilgore

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

Eng 3405-004: Children's Literature, John Moore

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

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

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-016-032-038: Composition And Language, Ned Huston

Fall 2008

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Feminine Loyalty Trends In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Appalachian Literature., Candace Jean Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Loyalty to the self, family, and husband create interesting tensions for feminine characters in Appalachian literature. Traditional views of loyalty dictate that the Appalachian woman chooses to be loyal to her husband and family while abandoning her self loyalty. Appalachian women writers define the terms of loyalty and the conflicts these three levels create. Furthermore, studying a progression of novels from 1926 to the present shows that feminine loyalty trends have changed. This argument focuses on examining loyalty trends of feminine Appalachian characters, studying the contentions among those loyalties, specifically showing how loyalty patterns have changed in literature, and offering …

Paradise Lost And The Medieval Tradition, Justin Lee Mathews

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis is a comparative study of the Medieval influence on the creation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the purpose of this thesis is to establish Paradise Lost as a poem designed to correct what Milton saw as the errors of the Medieval theological worldview. A range of topics are discussed, from the loyal angels to the Garden of Eden to Hell and Satan, and particular attention is given to Dantean parallels in these areas of Milton’s poem. The thesis shows how Milton responded to such Medieval concepts as courtly love and salvation theory and demonstrates how Milton …

Conquering The Sublime: Terror And Control In Moby-Dick, Matthew William Burkett

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick represents an experiment in Romantic literature. In addition to relying on the works of British Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Melville also applies Edmund Burke's ideas of the sublime to depict the inherent terror of hunting whales on the open ocean. According to Burke, the sublime is anything that inspires fear in the human mind, and Melville describes whaling in sublime terms. Melville also employs the sublime to critique 19th-century American society. The novel attacks humanity's drive to conquer both the natural world and other human beings. I will examine …

The Narrative “I” And Eye : Hawthorne’S Artist As Social Observer, Orah Dan Massarsky

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis considers the position of the artist in a polarized society experiencing radical extremist political tensions and which demands public allegiance and identification with the dominant ideology. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose personal origins were grounded in the American past that formed his creative domain, was an astute social critic whose writings in the turbulent period of mid nineteenth-century America reflected an acute awareness of the fundamental crises in his time, such as slavery and the efforts towards its abolition, the perils of regional conflict that threatened national unity, the effects of increasing commercialization and urbanization of American culture and the …

'The Fire And The Rose Are One': The Coherence Of The Prophetic Voice In The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot, Matthew Fairman

All Theses

Contrary to much scholarship on T. S Eliot's poetry, I argue that Eliot's work cannot be divided into the two separate categories of before and after The Waste Land. While most of the imagery of Eliot's earlier poems admittedly tends to be much darker than that of his later poems, it is irresponsible to disregard the general bent of the entirety of Eliot's poetry in order to claim that this difference in imagery reflects a total transformation of Eliot's message from one of strict pessimism to one of faith in the Anglican religion. Rather, much biographical and textual evidence shows …

Contributors, Gwenyth E. Hood

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Boot Camp For The Psyche: Inoculative Nonfiction And Pre-Memory Structures As Preemptive Trauma Mediation In Fiction And Film, Jacob Michael Hodgen

Theses and Dissertations

While some theorists have hinted at various social functions served by the gothic genre—such as providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms—recent research within the last few decades into sociology, military science, and trauma studies supplies compelling new ways of rereading the horror genre. In addition to providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms, horror media can now be read as a preemptive measure in an effort to mediate the immediate and long-term effects of the trauma and horror faced by humanity. I argue that in much the same way …

Death In The Royal Family: Victorian Funeral Sermon Techniques In Tennyson's National Poetry, Daniel W. Newton

Theses and Dissertations

Mourning rituals and memorial aesthetics played an integral role in Victorian England. Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, confronted death on a literary level. His national elegiac poetry — addressed to Victoria — is illuminated when read as a funeral sermon. By drawing out the funeral sermon techniques Tennyson incorporates, we see that he assumes a role as religious mediator to counsel and comfort Victoria in her grief. Tennyson's funeral sermon message alters quite distinctively from Albert's death in 1861, to the death of the Duke of Clarence in 1892, where he makes a final effort to restore the …

Towards A New Currency Of Economic Criticism, Jason G. Douglas

Theses and Dissertations

“The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe's third and final tale featuring the detective Dupin, has evoked a long history of critical response. Criticism has tended to read the text for its role in the development of detective fiction and as illustrative of various theoretical positions. However, the implications of the “The Purloined Letter,” as a tale of ratiocination, has largely been left unexplored. “The Purloined Letter” explores logical processes of value and exchange, particularly economic exchange, in a manner very similar to what Charles Sanders Peirce will call pragmatism several decades later. Dupin's deductive methods and Peirce's abductive logic express …