Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Deconstructing Hikikomori: From Literature To Reality, Lydia Perry

Senior Projects Fall 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

This work explores the growing trend of socially withdrawn individuals in Japanese society known as "hikikomori." Through the lenses of philosophy, literature, anthropology, economics, and more, I deconstruct the common perceptions of hikikomori and expand upon the cultural critiques inherent in choosing a life of solitude.

The Charles Harpur Critical Archive: A History And Technical Report, Paul Eggert, Desmond A. Schmidt

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a history of and a technical report on the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales from the 1830s to the 1860s. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and manuscript form have been recovered. In order to manage the complexity of his often heavily revised manuscripts traditional encoding in XML–TEI, with its known difficulties in handling overlapping structures and complex revisions, was rejected. Instead, the transcriptions were split into simplified versions and layers of revision. Markup describing textual formats was stored externally …

The Road That Got Us Here, Kayla M. Rotz

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article attempts to explain the romanticism of Native American culture existing in The United States and how it came to be. Through a chain of events this romanticism began. Forced Migration caused a social divide creating a separate social space for Native American people. Because of this negative social space we may see hegemony begin to take place. The American Government took Native children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into the general American population, thus creating a domino effect. In many cases children carry on a culture for other generations. However if these children are forced …

The Road That Got Us Here, Kayla M. Rotz

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article attempts to explain the romanticism of Native American culture existing in The United States and how it came to be. Through a chain of events this romanticism began. Forced Migration caused a social divide creating a separate social space for Native American people. Because of this negative social space we may see hegemony begin to take place. The American Government took Native children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into the general American population, thus creating a domino effect. In many cases children carry on a culture for other generations. However if these children are forced …

Romantic Poetry, Technical Breakthrough And The Changing Editorial Role, Paul Eggert, Desmond A. Schmidt

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This report provides (1) a short history of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), which has been in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales. Writing from the 1830s to the 1860s, he was unable to publish in book form because of the undeveloped state of the local literary publishing scene. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and in manuscript form have been recovered. (2) A summary of the technical approach, a new one for special-purpose digital archives, is provided. The principal innovation is the use of a Multi-Version Document …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

Nights In The City Beautiful, Veronica Suarez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley.

The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. …

Ann Yearsley, "Earl Goodwin", And The Politics Of Romantic Discontent, Chris Foss

English, Linguistics, and Communication (Legacy)

There is a dearth of more substantial critical studies on Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin in general, and while the few out there have helpfully illuminated the play’s representation of the historical plight of women and the poor during Anglo-Saxon times, as well as its application to their current predicaments in Romantic-era England and France, they have tended to leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first …

On The Fringes: The Monsters, The Voiceless, The Abominations, And The Exiled, Virginia Davis Wyeth

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Peripheral characters/characteristics frequently serve to highlight the problematic societal situation of marginalized groups, even though these characters on the fringes of the text or main characters with unusual attributes are seemingly irrelevant to the primary plot. This portfolio examines, through a teaching unit, the monster archetype and its representation as a means to suppress Other or other within ourselves. The literary analysis pieces also examine the repression of historically marginalized groups, such as women, homosexuals, and children. And the last piece even takes a look at what happens when powerful groups are usurped by socio-economic and cultural shifts.

Review Of The Ladies Of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, And The Legacies Of Criticism, Dawn M. Goode

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

Review of The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism. Bucknell UP, 2017. xxxvi + 331pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-6114-8761-9.

Discourses On Fantasy: A Narrative Allegory, Reuben Dendinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project, though officially designated by the English Department as a creative thesis, is really a hybrid work that combines creative writing with literary criticism. The work is structured as a "dream vision," a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages in which a narrator receives some form of instruction or wisdom through an allegorical dream. Examples include The Pearl, The Romance of the Rose, and Chaucer's House of Fame. In this thesis, the allegorical space of the dream vision provides a platform for a series of essays structured as dialogues. These dialogues explore the aesthetics and …

Owen Barfield: Philosophy, Poetry, And Theology. Michael Vincent Di Fuccia, Tiffany Brooke Martin

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

No abstract provided.

Buddhism In Progress: Ecstasy, Eternity, And Zen Sickness In The English Romantics, Logan M. Rohde

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation addresses the philosophical similarity between English Romanticism and Buddhism from a Zen Buddhist perspective. In contrast to scholars such as Mark Lussier and John G. Rudy, who have focused on the similarity between Romantic and Buddhist philosophy, I explore their differences. I argue that Romanticism represents a “Buddhism in progress”: both philosophies seek to overcome “the self,” but do so through different means. Lacking direct access to Buddhist teachings, the authors considered in this study (Beckford, Coleridge, De Quincey, Shelley, and Keats) developed their own practice of self-transcendence through writing, often prompted by experiences of ecstatic intoxication that …

Immortality In Literature: The Goddesses Of Ancient Greece, Rebecca Lozier

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The following text explores the connections between the mythology of ancient Greece and the society from which it arose. Women are often at the heart of classical myth despite being oppressed members of society. Understanding the role of women in mythology provides insight into women's treatment in ancient Greece. It follows the lasting influence of ancient Greece and its mythology through to the Romantic Period. Understanding how poets used myth, provides understanding into the culture's beliefs about women.

Irish Harps, Scottish Fiddles, English Pens: Romantic Satire And British Nationalism, Shannon Raelene Heath

Doctoral Dissertations

"Irish Harps, Scottish Fiddles, English Pens: Romantic Satire and British Nationalism" discusses the intersection between satire and nationalism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British Romantic poetry. Using case studies of three prominent satirists, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and George Gordon, Lord Byron to represent marginalized nationalities within the British state, I examine the ways in which each poet expresses a sense of dis-ease or uncomfortableness with their own national identity, an anxiety caused either by the ways in which their nationality was perceived within the British public, or by their own ability or inability to express that nationality. Thus, …

Romantic Metasubjectivity: Rethinking The Romantic Subject Through Schelling And Jung, Gord Barentsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis takes up Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology to develop Romantic metasubjectivity, a model of the subject absorbing more of the vast compass of Romantic thinking on subjectivity than what prevails in Romantic criticism. Romantic criticism tends to be dominated by psychoanalysis as well as deconstruction and poststructuralist theory, which see the subject as either a linguistic phenomenon or simply a locus of difference without a unified “I.” In response to this critical tradition, Romantic metasubjectivity discerns a notion of Self which is neither a linguistic fantasy nor a transcendental essence which is or becomes fully …

Public Records, Private Texts: Richard Carlile's Publication Of The Age Of Reason And The Birth Of Public Domain, Andrew S. Doub

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1818 and 1824, radical printer and publisher Richard Carlile made a determined effort to disseminate copies of Thomas Paine's banned text The Age of Reason in England. Despite strict censorship laws and harsh legal penalties used to curtail previous publishers of this title, Carlile employed a number of creative techniques that kept Paine's deistic writings in print and in circulation during the Regency period. These included republishing public domain court documents when he was charged with seditious libel and reading The Age of Reason in its entirety into testimony during his trial, making it part of the public record. …

Racial Roots Of Romanticism: American And European Africanism Are The Creation Of Bio-Politics, James Flynn

Honors College Theses

The British Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Edgar Allan Poe shared a number of similarities in their writing styles. Both men came onto the scene early in their respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the first generation of British literary Romantics, while Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In the work of both men there is an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. This focus on race has been covered at length by authors such as Toni Morrison in her book …

"A Magic Deeper Still": Sacramental Poetics In William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, And C.S. Lewis, Eric Michael Bontempo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A sacramental poetics requires a particular mode of being-in-the-world. Religiously-minded poets, from Dante and Milton to Donne and Herbert, have long considered how the individual becomes attuned with creation and God’s will. But what happens when modernity and secularization challenge long-held assumptions about the universe and how humankind fits into it? A reevaluation is then needed. My thesis begins with an examination of how William Wordsworth, who sort of falls into modernity, seeks to reoccupy the functions of religion in an increasingly secularized landscape. One consequence of the European Enlightenment is the disentangling and distancing that occurs in regards to …

Romanticism And Christianity, Erin R. Toal

The Kabod

The fervency of Romantic notions sometimes caused the Romantics to stray from Christianity; nonetheless, Romanticism offers many insights that can enhance Christian life and inspire worship of God.

The Complete Poems Of Anne Bannerman, Matthew Heilman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anne Bannerman (c.1780-1829) spent most of her life in Edinburgh, Scotland and published three volumes of poetry in the early nineteenth century. For my dissertation, I have prepared the first fully-annotated critical edition of Bannerman’s complete works, including Poems (1800), Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), and Poems, A New Edition (1807). A comprehensive introduction provides information on Bannerman’s life and background, and examines her work in the context of British Romanticism, the Gothic, Scottish nationalism, and the ballad tradition. Close-readings of the poems examine the ways in which Bannerman’s female narrators challenge early nineteenth-century conceptualizations of gender, particularly in …

Romantic Ends: Death And Dying, 1776-1835, Andrew J. Welch

Dissertations

Romantic Ends reinterprets of the origins and legacies of romantic death, the cultural spectacle exemplified by the dramatic deaths of young poets like John Keats. Against the widespread belief that romanticism ushered in a uniquely theatrical vision of death, Romantic Ends traces a long history of death as rhetorical performance, from the early modern ars moriendi ("art of dying") to the neoclassical obsession with the good death. The poetic deaths of the romantic period established a new repertoire of tropes and figures out of these longstanding and disparate deathbed traditions, set within the emerging discursive arena of "poetry." Yet while …

Poe's Gothic Soul In "Metzengerstein": An Invitation To Look Inside, Elizabeth Peek

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The following paper examines Poe’s affair with German tradition, particularly Gothic and Romantic writing, through an analysis of his short story “Metzengerstein.” This short story is not only rich with the conventions of Gothic fiction, but also rings with an autobiographical tone. The added piece of Poe himself in this text implies his own Gothic origins. I imply that Poe was a natural Romantic, with the purpose of bringing his own terror to a larger audience. The German gloom in “Metzengerstein” was authentic, not an imitation. I come to the conclusion that Poe’s production of literary horror – in the …

Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Can Poetry Save The Earth: A Study In Romantic Ecology, Carlisle Huntington

Summer Research

This is a study in Romantic Poetry through an ecocritical lenses. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their joint collection Lyrical Ballads, a foundational text of the Romantic period. The impending environmental crisis has motivated many Romantic scholars to reconsider the Romantic’s love of nature. Though it has often been mischaracterized as escapist, many writers argue that Romantic nature poetry is actually the first instance of western proto-ecological literature. This paper seeks to define the Romantic ontology of nature and how it may contribute to contemporary discourse regarding environmental ethics, …

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …

From Longinus To Tolkien: A Theory Of The Fantastic Sublime, Seth Wilson

English Department Theses

As concepts, the fantastic and the sublime share much in common. Both have the power to take a reader outside the scope of his or her own worldview and experience, and both share the paradoxical power to both elevate and humble the human spirit. So it is surprising that few scholars have explored the intersection between these two constructs, and none has attempted to systematically explore how this intersection operates in the context of literary theory. This thesis endeavors to build a theoretical framework for the fantastic sublime by exploring its constituent parts. First, I examine the contribution of the …

Religion In Sense And Sensibility, Erin R. Toal

The Kabod

Jane Austen’s first major novel that was published, Sense and Sensibility, exemplifies the shifting perspectives in religion during the Georgian period by exploring the virtues of its title through the lenses of the Anglicanism of Georgian England. This paper argues that Sense and Sensibility reflects Jane Austen’s worldview and identifies how it stems from the Neoclassical and Romantic fusion present in her religious belief.

Finding Inspiration In Darkness: The Exploration Of Obscurity In Romanticism Through The Works Of Lord Byron And Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Sarah E. Seal

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through the works of Lord Byron and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, I explored the function of the themes of darkness and obscurity in Romanticism. There was a clear connection between the inclusion of these themes and the rejection of the Enlightenment period, which is what I focused on in this thesis. I discovered that the Romantics found inspiration and beauty in the darker, stranger aspects of the natural world, while rejecting the logical and rational beliefs of the Enlightenment.

Organizations Of Knowledge About The Orient In German And British Romanticism 1780-1820, Naqaa Abbas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the various literary modes in which German and British Romantic literature and culture organize knowledge about Islam and the Middle East. I explore how the Orient exceeds and troubles the “place” it is given in a historical and geographical classification systems. I argue that many Romantic writers challenge the constructedness of the Oriental narrative during their time, thus questioning what really constitutes knowledge and the limits of knowledge. In this context, I re-evaluate Edward W. Said’s socio-historical generalizations regarding Orientalism as a form of Western control over the East. While studies on Romantic Orientalism have focused on …