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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Eruptive Baroque Hysteria In English Neoclassical Literature, Royce Lee Best Aug 2014

Eruptive Baroque Hysteria In English Neoclassical Literature, Royce Lee Best

Masters Theses

"Eruptive Baroque Hysteria in English Neoclassical Literature" explores the persistence and intrusion of early-seventeenth-century baroque aesthetics in otherwise bourgeois, neoclassical works of the English Restoration. These "baroque eruptive" moments, I argue, can be read as particular instances that articulate historically-specific anxieties felt by aristocrats, including the restructuring of the family unit and the dual appeal and abhorrence of continental Catholicism. The introduction discusses the poetry of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester; chapter 1 discusses William Wycherley's The Country Wife; chapter 2 discusses Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd; and the conclusion chapter probes into several early eighteenth-century works.


The Liminal Mirror: The Impact Of Mirror Images And Reflections On Identity In The Bloody Chamber And Coraline, Staci Poston Conner May 2014

The Liminal Mirror: The Impact Of Mirror Images And Reflections On Identity In The Bloody Chamber And Coraline, Staci Poston Conner

Masters Theses

In Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002), mirrors play a large role in the development of the female protagonist’s identity. Tracing the motif of physical mirrors and mirrored realities in these texts offers a deeper understanding of each protagonist’s coming of age and coming to terms with her own identity. Though Angela Carter’s short stories are for an adult audience, they are remakes of fairy tales, which are often viewed as children’s literature, or at least literature about the child. Though the appropriate reading age for Coraline is debatable, it can tentatively be categorized as …


Scientism, Satire, And Sacrificial Ceremony In Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" And C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", Jonathan Smalt May 2014

Scientism, Satire, And Sacrificial Ceremony In Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" And C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", Jonathan Smalt

Masters Theses

Though the nineteenth-century Victorian belief that science alone could provide utopia for man weakened in the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern era, this belief still continues today. In order to understand our current scientific milieu--and the dangers of propagating scientism--we must first trace the rise of scientism in the nineteenth-century. Though removed, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes From Underground (1864), and C.S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength (1965), are united in their critiques of scientism as a conceptual framework for human residency. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace of London's Great Exhibition (1862) embodied the nineteenth-century goal to found utopia through the …


A Professorial Nation: The Pedagogical Gardens Of William Crimsworth, Jane Eyre, And Lucy Snowe, Elise Green Apr 2014

A Professorial Nation: The Pedagogical Gardens Of William Crimsworth, Jane Eyre, And Lucy Snowe, Elise Green

Masters Theses

Charlotte Brontë was not an intentional pedagogue, but nevertheless, her works reflect the dynamics of an educational ideology that depends on the natural environment. In Brontë's works, including The Professor, Jane Eyre, and Villette, safe learning environments are most commonly found in gardens, providing spaces--literally and metaphorically--dedicated to individual growth. These spaces are not isolated, however, as they are located in bustling towns such as Villette and schoolyards like those of Jane Eyre. Likewise, the individual does not grow in isolation; rather, development is a process that is fostered by an individual's interaction with his or her environment. In essence, …


Victorian Domesticity And The Perpetuation Of Childhood: An Examination Of Gender Roles And The Family Unit In J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Abigail Nusbaum Apr 2014

Victorian Domesticity And The Perpetuation Of Childhood: An Examination Of Gender Roles And The Family Unit In J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Abigail Nusbaum

Masters Theses

This work examines JM Barrie's Peter Pan in light of its cultural context. It works to show how the Victorian ideology of the separate spheres narrowed the scope of roles for men and women within the home, which ultimately led to an obsession with childhood that manifested itself strongly in the works of the children of the Victorians, the Edwardians. A study of the Victorian society in which Barrie grew up and first imagined Peter Pan, accompanied by a close reading of the text, reveals Barrie using the various characters' interactions with the title character as cultural artifacts that illuminate …


Towards An Integrated Personhood Through Suffering: The Disparate Ideologies Of Freud, Maritain, And Aquinas And The Power Of Analogy In Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory, Dana Sarchet Apr 2014

Towards An Integrated Personhood Through Suffering: The Disparate Ideologies Of Freud, Maritain, And Aquinas And The Power Of Analogy In Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory, Dana Sarchet

Masters Theses

Freud, Maritain, and Aquinas have greatly influenced the literature of Graham Greene, and Greene's The Power and the Glory is no exception. As both Freud and Greene attest to the irrevocable influence of childhood on adulthood, we must read Luis, the primary child character in The Power and the Glory, in light of the characters who impact his transition into his adult life. But these characters reflect yet another thread in Greene's perspective of personhood; studying Catholicism at least four years before writing Catholic fiction, Greene was also greatly influenced by the theological thought of Aquinas and Maritain, and this …


"Every Child In Our World Will Know His Name!": Malcolm Gladwell's Theories As An Explanation For The Cultural Phenomenon Of Harry Potter, Alicia Morgan Jan 2014

"Every Child In Our World Will Know His Name!": Malcolm Gladwell's Theories As An Explanation For The Cultural Phenomenon Of Harry Potter, Alicia Morgan

Masters Theses

When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hit stores in the United States in 1998, children and adults alike went wild. Not only had Rowling's first book made huge waves in the UK, but Americans were talking about the struggling, single-parent who had penned a children's classic before the book even reached American stores. American audiences accepted Rowling's first novel with open arms, making it one of the first children's books to reach and occupy The New York Times best-seller list for so long. While certain marketing techniques and the rise of the Internet did contribute to Harry Potter's initial …


Dish And Pot: Scatology And Liminal Space In Samuel Beckett, Keegan Bradford Jan 2014

Dish And Pot: Scatology And Liminal Space In Samuel Beckett, Keegan Bradford

Masters Theses

In the final novel of Samuel Beckett's trilogy, The Unnamable, the eponymous main character whose monologues, musings, and diatribes comprise the entirety of the work bemoans his inability to harness the communicable properties of language: "...it's like shit, there we have it at last, there it is at last, the right word, one has only to seek, seek in vain, to be sure of finding in the end, it's a question of elimination" (Three Novels 368). Beckett's work is consumed with this question of elimination. In this sense, language is parallel to scat in Beckett's work. Beckett's absurd language, circular …


Detective Fiction Reinvention And Didacticism In G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Clifford Stumme Jan 2014

Detective Fiction Reinvention And Didacticism In G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Clifford Stumme

Masters Theses

In the Father Brown stories, G. K. Chesterton reengineers the classic detective story so that it can be a vehicle for didactic messages. Through a rethinking of mysteries, a repurposing of secondary characters, and a subversion of Holmsean-type detectives, Chesterton is able to insert philosophic ideas into his stories while still entertaining readers. Differing from earlier detective stories, the Father Brown mysteries showcase an acceptance of the spiritual and a natural empathy for all characters whether criminal or no. In my research, I show how, through these stories, Chesterton posits messages that are new to the mystery genre and how …