Arts and Humanities Commons^™

This Was The World And I Was King: Land And Identity In Scottish Children's Literature Of The Golden Age, Rodney Fierce

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Scottish cultural identity and its erasure in nineteenth-century British children’s literature as successful Scottish authors became known as British authors, and British children’s literature was canonized as the genre’s first Golden Age. Specifically, it explores the ways that Catherine Sinclair, George MacDonald, R. M. Ballantyne, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Helen Bannerman—six popular nineteenth-century Scottish authors—maintain a sense of Scottishness in their adventure fiction. By reading the texts in the historical context of the authors’ biographies, I demonstrate that the land in their works and the benevolent colonizers allowed to control it in some …

The Body Mends Itself, Hannah Elizabeth Dow

Dissertations

The following poems were completed by the author between September 2014 and April 2017.

"Her Splendid Children Will Be Born Here”: Anglo-American Relations And Sexual Selection In Transatlantic Fiction, 1870–1914, Jennifer Lynn Robertson

Dissertations

In recent decades, scholars have sought to examine the discourse of evolutionary theory in the realist novel. This dissertation examines the ways in which the novel form embodied evolutionary theory by examining Anglo-American courtship plots. In chapter 2, I examine Charles Glascock’s courtship of Caroline Spalding in Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. During their courtship, Caroline’s dominant behaviors subvert traditional hierarchies between nations, classes, and genders. However, the open plot of evolutionary change hints at a revolutionary restructuring of social relations. I argue that Caroline and Glascock’s relationship reverts to a more traditional power structure upon their …

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Kara Marie Manning

Dissertations

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of …

In Absentia Parentis: The Orphan Figure In Latter Twentieth Century Anglo-American Children’S Fantasy, James Michael Curtis

Dissertations

Childhood development theory tells us that there are certain psychological processes that we all undergo during childhood, regardless of our national or cultural background. These developmental struggles can include some of the more ambivalent cycles—such as regression, which can be both a positive and negative phenomenon—but can also include some of the more beneficial processes like overcoming separation anxiety and creating and establishing a sense of self. One figure that is often marginalized in discussions of childhood development in children’s fantasy fiction is the orphan. In fact, book-length studies on the orphan figure in children’s literary fantasy are virtually non-existent; …

"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp

Dissertations

Most scholarship on American protest literature tends to focus on the protest literature of specific, politically marginalized groups, such as black protest, women’s protest, or working class protest. My project redefines how we read nineteenth-century American protest literature by investigating the connections between the protest texts of these three marginalized groups. In particular, I argue that mid-nineteenth-century protest authors incorporate images of physical confinement and entrapment within their texts to expose to privileged readers the physical and ideological containment and control marginalized subjects encounter in their daily lives. Drawing from rhetorical theories of argumentation and audience engagement, and incorporating historical …

Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh

Dissertations

In Anglo-American Modernist poetry, place is reduced to an analogue for the cultural degradation brought forth by the disruptive experience of modernity. This demotion stands in sharp contrast to the representation of place as a center of value in the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. In this dissertation, I shall explain this value in terms of its connection to a particular cultural substance which Frost, Larkin, and Heaney deem foundational for their non-ideological terms of belonging to place. Frost embraces New England vernacularism first as the basis for his egalitarianism and second as the core substance …

Protecting Dixie: Southern Girlhood In Children's Literature, 1852-1920, Laura Anne Hakala

Dissertations

Most scholarship about girlhood in children’s literature tends to rely on national models of girlhood. My project complicates those models by demonstrating how region shapes distinct forms of American girlhood. In particular, I examine representations of southern girlhood in children’s literature published between 1852 and 1920, drawing on the four types of literature that most featured southern girls during this time period: abolitionist literature, Confederate literature, postbellum plantation fiction, and family stories. Using a historicist methodology and spatial analysis, I place these texts in relation to information about the spatial arrangements and protocols of southern domestic sites. By viewing girlhood …

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 …

"This Masterpiece Of Nature:" An Ecocritical Study Of Joseph Conrad's Fiction, Sonja Luther

Dissertations

This dissertation employs an ecocritical approach to explore the relationship between humans and nature in the works of Joseph Conrad. In his fiction, Conrad draws an impression of nature that was unusual for its time because of its complexity. Nature is not just simple scenery or a stage set in Conrad’s fiction; it plays a major role in his characters’ regression, which develops parallel to their alienation from nature. This dissertation explores the origins of man’s alienation from nature in Conrad’s work, particularly his early fiction, and the implications for society if such alienation continues.

Chapter I serves as an …

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 …

Wit In The Early Modern Literary Marketplace, Danny Childers

Dissertations

The concept of wit undergoes a transformation in the sixteenth century from having associations with the intellect, with its cultural productions, and with classical study towards more direct associations with the writing trade and with clever wordplay. This transition, as I will demonstrate, relates specifically to tensions between humanist culture and the early modern literary marketplace. This dissertation begins by examining the early sixteenth century humanists' concept of wit and goes on to examine the presentation of the concept by four late sixteenth century writers—John Lyly (1553-1606), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Robert Greene (1560-1592), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). I argue that …

Updike, Morrison, And Roth: The Politics Of American Identity, Christopher Steven Love

Dissertations

My dissertation analyzes American identity in the works of John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Specifically, I examine American identity in Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (1960-1990); Morrison’s trilogy of novels Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998); and Roth’s trilogy comprising the novels American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). The studied texts of these three novelists, I argue, attack national myths and undermine exclusive narratives that are incongruent with the nation’s ideal identity as a pluralistic and democratic nation.

Travel For Agoraphobics, John Allen Berry

Dissertations

Travel for Agoraphobics is a collection of fifty poems accompanied by an introduction. Using both traditional and experimental forms, the poems are in conversation with each other about loneliness and isolation in an age of technologies designed to bring us closer together. The introduction addresses the influence of other writers and the process of writing and revising.

"When The Eternal Can Be Met": Bergsonian Time In The Theologies Of C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, And W.H. Auden, James Corey Latta

Dissertations

C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden all converted to the Christian faith and, upon conversion, turned to the theme of time in their post-conversion works. Interestingly, these Christian authors employed the secular philosophical framework of Henri Bergson’s theory of duration to construct their theologies of time. As texts fostered by Bergson’s ideas of intuition, the dualistic self, and durative force, Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Eliot’sFour Quartets, and Auden’s “Kairos and Logos” are theological works that depict time as an agent.

What’S In A Test? Constructions Of Literacy And Its Implications For English Proficiency Test Design, Josye Marie Brookter

Dissertations

Although college-level composition pedagogy is becoming more open to language diversity, some crucial current-traditional vestiges remain, particularly in proficiency exams. Too often these exams only identify students who are slipping through the cracks of literacy instruction, while the definition of English represented by this test limits alternate notions of writing and literacy. The test represents local, institutional values about written English, although those values must also be consistent with national standards. Typically, administrators, teachers, and students feel compelled to choose traditional forms of writing over postmodern ones, a choice that is seldom discussed in the literature. Conflicting perspectives of English …

"Robert Frost Blues”, Gregory Arthur Weiss

Dissertations

Robert Frost Blues collectively argues, stylistically and thematically, that apprehending the world is difficult. If one is able to know the world to some degree, the efficacy of that knowledge will be significantly affected by whether other people agree that that apprehension of the world is correct. But beyond that, Robert Frost Blues, with its casual sestinas and villanelles, colloquial language, found language, prose poems, dialogues, and iambic narratives, implicitly argues that the most important aspect of knowing the world is not the form that knowledge fits into or the literary devices it employs. Instead apprehending the world requires both …

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …

Legal Discourse, Conceptual Metaphors, And Basic Writing Programming: A Study Of Ayers V. Fordice, Joyce Olewski Inman

Dissertations

In what ways does legal discourse influence our perceptions of students labeled as basic writers and these students’ perceptions of themselves? How does standards-based discourse affect student writers’ abilities to define themselves in academe? This dissertation involves an examination of legal and public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to answer these questions. Its intent is to explore how conceptual metaphors prevalent in these discourses affect our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi but also in the field of composition more globally.

My …

The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson

Dissertations

This study evaluates Africanisms (representations of racialized or ethnicized blackness) within three contemporary non-black authors’ texts: Jewish American Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, white southerner Melinda Haynes’ novel Mother of Pearl, and Nyurican poet Victor Hernández Cruz’s works “Mesa Blanca” and “White Table.” Though not entirely unproblematic, each selection somehow redefines black identity and agency to challenge denigrated representations of Africanist people and culture. In the process, each author subverts faulty components of American myths of racial purity, particularly stratifying black-white dualisms that promote whiteness, racial supremacy, and resulting undue privilege. This study also traces how Bellow, Haynes …

Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee

Dissertations

Discussions of the pastoral mode in American literary history frequently omit the complicated relationship between African Americans and the natural world, particularly as it relates to the South. The pastoral, as a sensibility, has long been an important part of the southern identity, for the mythos of the South long depended upon its association with a new “Garden of the World” image, a paradise dependent upon slave labor and a racial hierarchy to sustain it. For African Americans, the rural South has been both a home and a place of violence and oppression, particularly during the period of slavery through …

Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates Tennessee Williams’s earliest full-length plays, also known as the apprentice plays—Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, and Stairs to the Roof—by comparing, contrasting and contextualizing them in relation to Daniel Chandler’s generic criteria of drama; namely, narrative, characterization, setting, topics, iconography, and staging techniques. The present study also draws upon an extensive body of scholarship pertaining to genre theory, Williams’s cultural contemporaries, and the historical and psychological backdrop of Depression-era America. In these early plays, Williams diverged sharply from the dramatic generic conventions of his day, manipulating them in new …

"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee

Dissertations

The goal of this project is to posit a theory of how Byron’s texts, specifically through the development of his hero, construct gender and sexuality as styles of seduction that resist easy classification by binary systems. I propose that Byron’s works characterize gender through ironic performances of seduction that, because they reveal that binary structures lack a stable core, dissolve systemic differentiation and thus fatally complicate any attempt to force the individual into rigid categories of gender or sexual identity. Byron’s works deploy seduction as a tactic of ironic representation of both gender and sexual practice that is necessarily multiplicitous …

Scopophilia And Spectacle: Fashion And Femininity In The Novels Of Frances Burney, Cheryl Denise Clark

Dissertations

My dissertation investigates how the relationship between looking and being seen, or the interaction between scopophilia and spectacle, intersects with the rise of consumer culture and the ascendance of eighteenth-century fashion and fashionable places. By using Frances Burney’s novels as a lens through which to examine the eighteenth century’s fascination with looking, I consider the ways in which attracting “the look” or gaining attention through the visibility of stylish apparel and goods becomes a pathway to social agency in Burney’s novels. Fashion for Burney, I argue, emerges as a multifaceted system that manifests as a means of as social power …

"The Mirror Turn Lamp": Natural-Supernatural In Yeats, Cleston Lee Armstrong Iii

Dissertations

The supernatural portrayed in Yeats represents a carefully constructed convergence of all major themes in his canon. Yeats's first exposure to myth, the supernatural, and magic occurs in the 1890s when he worked as an editor of William Blake and Irish fairy lore. This experience at once inspired Yeats to explore mysticism and to shroud his own collected works in mystery. With the onset of modernity and the age of criticism this period ushered in, however, he was unable to capitalize on the spiritual as first imagined. As mere aesthetic, peculiar illuminations of the immaterial world Yeats so intensely sought …

Metoikos: Modernism's Resident Aliens, Justin Glen Williamson

Dissertations

This dissertation examines why D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce all conceived of themselves as cultural outsiders and how they used this ostensibly marginal social status to conceal a set of conservative core values they sensed were eroding. This otherwise disparate group shared a sense of cultural alienation, recognized the potentially powerful position of the exile, and demonstrated a keen willingness to exploit its possibilities. Although these writers have long been acknowledged and heralded for their experimentation, their technical and formal innovation, much of their work springs from essentially conservative impulses, beliefs, and values, aimed …

Composition Programs And Practices In Sweden: Possibilities For Cross-Fertilization With The United States, Birgitta Linnea Sjoberg Ramsey

Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to several of the discussions that are taking place within the field of rhetoric and composition at this particular time: about the nature and definition of academic literacy; about the impact of a heterogeneous and multicultural student population on literacy practices in the academy; about the issue of academic socialization; and about the advantages and disadvantages of traditional first-year composition courses. Most importantly, this work is a contribution to cross-national research and an attempt to open up the field of composition to recognize and include voices other than the ones from North America. Even though the differences …