Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …

“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth

Doctoral Dissertations

It is well established that Anglo-Saxon writers were concerned with a specific set of principles (chastity, wisdom and piety) articulated in monastic life. However, the representation of women’s religious lives and the exemplification of their values influencing male saint’s Lives and their authors have to date been largely overlooked. To rectify this omission, I focus on Wulfstan’s tenth-century Vita St. Æthelwoldi, in which Æthelthryth’s character plays a far more significant role than we have heretofore noticed. Apart from the traditional figurae the author uses to depict her virtuous devotion, Wulfstan’s account of Æthelthryth is a testimony of a particular …

Waiting For Now: Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time, Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement.
In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. …

Patristic Precedent And Vernacular Innovation: The Practice And Theory Of Anglo-Saxon Translation, Andrew Timothy Eichel

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation investigates Anglo-Saxon translation and interpretation during the reign of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century, and the Benedictine Reform of the tenth and eleventh centuries. These two periods represent a time of renaissance in Anglo-Saxon England, when circumstance and ambition allowed for a number of impressive reformation enterprises, including increased dedication to education of both clerical orders and the laity, which therefore augmented the output of writing motivated by scholarly curiosity, ecclesiastical inquiry, and political strategizing. At these formative stages, translation emerged as perhaps the most critical task for the vernacular writers. The Latinate prestige culture …

Military Virtue In Roman Rhetorical Education, Anthony Edward Zupancic

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the connection between rhetoric and military culture in the early Roman Empire. Despite obvious references to the military and martial virtues, little scholarly attention has been directed to exploring the possibilities located within this connection. This dissertation is an alternative cultural history of rhetorical theory and pedagogy that draws on close reading and philology, as well as performance and metaphor theory. In building on the cultural history of Rome, I introduce a concept of “military virtue” that expands on understandings of the Roman notion of virtus (virtue) found in recent scholarship. Since virtue in the ancient world …

Crafting Memory And My Collector, Katherine Ann Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a partial novel entitled My Collector as well as a critical introduction that explores both the usefulness of a craft essay, and how memory is rendered in fiction through the intersection of time management and point of view. In the critical introduction, I conduct close readings of two of John Banville’s novels—The Sea and The Untouchable—and apply ideas about time and memory from essays by Maud Casey, Joan Silber, and Adam Braver. My explorations demonstrate that the role of memory in fiction is more than setting up a cause-and-effect or a simple explanation for …

"A More Natural Mother": Concepts Of Maternity And Queenship In Early Modern England, Anne-Marie Kathleen Strohman

Doctoral Dissertations

Early in her reign, in response to Parliament’s formal requests that she marry and secure the succession, Elizabeth calls herself the “mother of England.” Her metaphorical maternity signals a rhetorical transaction between Elizabeth and her people that stretches across time, space, and genre; writers respond to Elizabeth by modifying the metaphor in order to shape her behavior. Conceptual blending theory, developed by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, provides language to articulate the complexities of Elizabeth’s metaphor—to understand how language, culture, and cognition interact to create and modify meaning. Furthering the work of critics who analyze Elizabeth’s self-presentation and …

Archaism, Or Textual Literalism In The Historical Novel, Linell B Wisner

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the technique of archaism as it has been practiced in the historical novel since that genre’s origins. By “archaism,” I refer to a variation of the strategy that Jerome McGann calls textual “literalism,” whereby literary texts use “thickly materialized” language and bibliographic forms to foreground their own “textuality as such” (Black Riders 74). Archaism is distinguished from Blake’s, Pound’s, or Robert Carlton Brown’s literalism by its imitation of older literary idioms, yet the specifically historical quality of its intertextuality also seems different from primarily formal imitations such as pastiche and parody.

Although archaism appears to have originated …

Welcome To Boomland, Cebrun Abe Gaustad

Doctoral Dissertations

Abe Gaustad's first collection of stories, Welcome to Boomland, explores the lives of disparate characters longing for some escape. Whether a paraplegic blues aficionado or a boy who finds a strange object in the woods, they are each searching for a way out of their stagnation. Yet each character is trapped by their own unique circumstance: some of them by their mistakes, some by ruthless dictators, some by the very notion of death. As they search for their freedom, they find out new things about themselves and manage to wage quiet rebellions against those that would control them. In the …

Into The Attic: A Novel, Laura E. Koons

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a novel titled Into the Attic. The novel tells the story of Sullivan Young, a junior at a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s, and James Shelley, a young literature professor at the college, with whom Sullivan initiates an affair. The narrative switches between the points of view of these two men, neither of whom is happy with the person he is becoming, and develops around the fears each has about the relationship.

The novel is concerned with character, sexuality, and power; in order to explore these issues fully within Sullivan and …

Boffin's Books And Darwin's Finches: Victorian Cultures Of Collecting, Michael W. Hancock '89

Doctoral Dissertations

Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for acquisition and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning that was often represented in the literature of the age as a source of prestige and social legitimation. Through interdisciplinary readings of Victorian fiction, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, my study examines how textual representations …