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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
'By Winding Paths And Varied Slopes': John Ruskin's Non-Fiction Prose And The Transformation Of The Nineteenth Century Elegy, Bethann R. Bowman
'By Winding Paths And Varied Slopes': John Ruskin's Non-Fiction Prose And The Transformation Of The Nineteenth Century Elegy, Bethann R. Bowman
Doctoral Dissertations
In this work I explore how the non-fiction prose of John Ruskin contributes to the transformation of the poetic genre of elegy in mid-late Victorian England. I argue that in this period, the elegy undergoes a shift so dramatic that its generic elements are no longer confined to poetry. I place and question the changes occurring in the Victorian elegy in part by my study of Peter Sacks' seminal text The English Elegy (1985). In contextualizing my argument, I also consider more recent genre studies of the elegy by Stuart Curran, Erik Gray, Elizabeth Helsinger, Jahan Ramanzani, and Karen Weisman. …
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Doctoral Dissertations
In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …
Benevolent Intentions: Hospitality, Ethics And The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Teresa R Saxton
Benevolent Intentions: Hospitality, Ethics And The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Teresa R Saxton
Doctoral Dissertations
“Benevolent Intentions: Hospitality, Ethics and the Eighteenth-Century Novel” describes how representations of hospitality in British novels of the last half of the eighteenth century engage new ethical questions raised by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. The novels explore a philosophical turn towards intention from the vulnerable position of the guest. As opposed to traditional conceptions of hospitality that combined ideals of hospitality with culturally specific actions, the new hospitality portrayed in the eighteenth century novel exhibits suspicions about hospitable actions and seeks instead to establish benevolent intentions in both host and guest. I argue that the host position is particularly mistrusted: …
Knowing The Holy: Sanctification And Identity In Sixteenth- And Seventeenth-Century Literature, Elizabeth Anne Acker
Knowing The Holy: Sanctification And Identity In Sixteenth- And Seventeenth-Century Literature, Elizabeth Anne Acker
Doctoral Dissertations
Literary critics have long recognized the importance of religious dogmas to the formation and awareness of personal identity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stanley Fish’s seminal work, Self-Consuming Artifacts, argues that the goal of seventeenth-century writers, influenced by the theology of Augustine, was not so much a construction of the self, but a deconstruction of the self as a sacred act. Borrowing from more recent work by Brian Cummings and Gary Kuchar, this dissertation explores the Protestant conception of holiness, or good works, within a salvation paradigm that centered on faith rather than works. In Edmund Spenser’s Faerie …
Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman
Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman
Doctoral Dissertations
Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …