Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Be-Holde The First Acte Of This Tragedy" : Generic Symbiosis And Cross-Pollination In Jacobean Drama And The Early Modern Prose Novella, Karen Ann Zyck Galbraith

Dissertations (1934 -)

The role of the early modern novella in the formation of Jacobean drama has been consistently understated in literary criticism. Source study and independent criticism of Elizabethan prose fiction, the two most common areas in which these novellas are discussed, are as quick to reference these works as they are to dismiss them. Using a primarily intertextual lens, it is the purpose of this dissertation to expose the rich relationship between early modern English, Italian, and Spanish novellas and their Jacobean dramatic counterparts. Specifically, my dissertation seeks to examine the deep thematic influences of the early modern novella on Jacobean …

Spirit Of The Psyche: Carl Jung's And Victor White's Influence On Flannery O'Connor's Fiction, Paul Wakeman

Dissertations (1934 -)

Flannery O'Connor's interest in depth psychology, especially as it was presented by Carl Jung and Victor White, a Dominican priest and a "founding member of the C. G. Jung Institute," plays a greater role in her fiction than has been previously noted. O'Connor found parallels with Jung's theory of the unconscious and Catholic dogma, but ultimately found White's Catholicized presentation of the unconscious, which equated the unconscious psyche with the soul, more amenable to her faith.

This research first highlights the attention O'Connor gave to Jung's and White's theories of the unconscious as found in her public lectures, her personal …

Violence And Masculinity In American Fiction, 1950-1975, Magdalen Mckinley

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in fiction published by Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth between 1950 and 1975. Through close literary analysis coupled with a study of race and gender in 20th century American culture, I examine the manner in which gendered existential dilemmas are portrayed in this fiction as arising from a number of external factors, including racism, ethnic stereotyping, and the triumph of white heteronormativity as a model of masculinity. In doing so, I offer a reconsideration of …

Gender Politics In The Novels Of Eliza Haywood, Susan Muse

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study investigates how Eliza Haywood addressed ideological conflicts about gender produced by modernization in early eighteenth-century England. Expanding Michael McKeon's theory of the novel to include "questions of gender," I address a wide sample of novels in order to show how Haywood's writing developed during her long career. Her first preoccupation was the sexual double standard that defined "fallen women" as society's exiles. Influenced by the "she-tragedy" of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Haywood wrote novels that elicited pity for fallen women and searched for reasons to explain their condition. Haywood's writing became overtly political with her …

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, And Postnational Identity In Four Novels By Irish Women, 1960-2000, Sarah Nestor

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines four novels that represent Irish women and girls confronting the typical narrative of Irish national identity in the twentieth century. The post-independence construction of Irish national identity depended upon prescriptive roles that aligned with its founders’ beliefs about the nation’s ethnic homogeneity and moral superiority. Irish women’s identity and roles as wives and mothers were imperative to upholding this idea of the nation, particularly its morality. Irish women were therefore charged with maintaining well-defined gender roles and the nuclear family in an effort to define a distinctive Irish identity. Thus, when women’s roles are challenged or changed …

A Victorian Christmas In Hell: Yuletide Ghosts And Necessary Pleasures In The Age Of Capital, Brandon Chitwood

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation explores how the cultural and literary development – one might argue, creation – of a specifically Victorian Christmas arose in response to social anxieties related to the expansion of industrial capitalism, Darwinian theories of evolution, and the increasingly problematic definition of the family during the nineteenth century in Britain. Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens, the dissertation explores how the liminal figure of the ghost pervades the literary narrativization of the Christmas holiday, and how such ghosts provided uncanny comforts to a reading public increasingly horrified by social, economic, and natural forces seemingly beyond their control. The dissertation argues …

Pamela: Or, Virtue Reworded: The Texts, Paratexts, And Revisions That Redefine Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Jarrod Hurlbert

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation is a study of the revisions Samuel Richardson made to his first novel, Pamela, and its sequel, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, published within his lifetime. Richardson, who was his own printer, revised Pamela eight times over twenty years, the sequel three times, and the majority of the variants have hitherto suffered from critical neglect. Because it is well known that Richardson responded to friendly and antagonistic "collaborators" by making emendations, I also examine the extant documents that played a role in Pamela's development, including Richardson's correspondence and contemporary criticisms of the novel. Pamela Reworded, then, is an …