Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Veiled Victorian Vampires: What Literary Antagonists Reveal About Societal Fears Of 19th Century England, Jenna Harford

Honors Theses

In my thesis paper I look at three primary texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to analyze their main antagonists through a vampiric lens. I explain how the characters of Bertha Mason, Miss Havisham, and Dorian Gray are all written with veiled vampiric traits that revolve around themes of sexuality, secrecy and seclusion, and unbridled physical and emotional violence. Although none of these texts is obviously a “vampire novel”, the authors lean into vampire tropes including eerie physical description, doubled relationships, and other vampire lore that can be best …

The Enigmatic Self: An Ongoing Exploration Of Literary Selfhood From The American Renaissance To Contemporary Young Adult Literature, Helene Leichter

Honors Theses

Assuming the near impossible task of sorting through and delineating various conceptions of the self in and throughout literary and civil history, literary critic Irving Howe adopts a highly perceptive and profoundly analytical approach to the enigmatic individual. In the article quoted above, "The Self in Literature," Howe consolidates what he believes to be the most promising attempts at coding and decoding abstractions of the self across numerous literary, philosophical, and sociological texts. The success of Howe’s analysis lies in his ability to simultaneously embrace and scrutinize seemingly incompatible notions of bodily and spiritual discourse. With the knowledge that such …

Noble Pagans And Satanic Saracens: Literary Portrayals Of Islam In Medieval Italy And Iberia., John Spencer Jones

Honors Theses

The medieval Christian world is generally associated with a kind of religious zealotry that would seem to preclude the development of nuanced understandings of the religious Other. The heightened interreligious contact in regions such as Iberia and the Italian Peninsula, however, made room for relationships with members of other faiths that resulted in more developed ideas about these other creeds. This honors thesis examines the portrayal of Islam in the Christian literature of medieval Italy and Iberia, dating from the late 11th century to the middle of the 14th century. It categorizes a few types of the literary “use” of …

Exquisite Paradise: Taste And Consumption In Hebe Uhart’S ‘El Budín Esponjoso’ (1977), Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Food Studies in Latin American Literature presents a timely collection of essays analyzing a wide array of Latin American narratives through the lens of food studies. Topics explored include potato and maize in colonial and contemporary global narratives; the role of cooking in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetics; the centrality of desire in twentieth-century cooking writing by women; the relationship among food, recipes, and national identity; the role of food in travel narratives; and the impact of advertisements on domestic roles.

The contributors included here—experts in Latin American history, literature, and cultural studies—bring a novel, interdisciplinary approach to …

[Introduction To] In The Flesh: Embodied Identities In Roman Elegy, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Bookshelf

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change.

Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at …

Behind The Immediacy, The Nodal Points In The Congolese Story: Two Generations Of Writers, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

La première génération des écrivains congolais de l' ére postcoloniale a traité du déséquilibre éprouvé par toute la société au lendemain de l'indépendance. Aussitôt que le glas de la liber­té a retenti, les troubles sociaux, en partie causés á l'instigation de l'ancienne autorité coloniale, mirent á feu et á sang plusieurs zones de la nation. L'indépendance cha cha chantée dans l'euphorie géné-­rale par Joseph Kabasele et l'African Jazz, chanson devenue méto­-nymie auditive de cette période de liberation, ne donna suite qu'á des célébrations éphèméres suivies de crises sociales déchirantes.

Fernando Rosenberg. After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, And Film In Latin America, 1990-2010 (Book Review), Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Review of the book After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990-2010 by Fernando Rosenberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

[Introduction To] The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost, Louis Schwartz

Bookshelf

This Companion presents fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its grand design. Essays in Part I introduce the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics …

Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, And Actualized Metaphors In Mrs. Dalloway And Raymond, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

This article takes up Rita Felski’s recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour’s latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge’s best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments …

The King's Toilet: Cruising Literary History In Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

In this article I will read Before Night Falls as Arenas' queer version of Cuban literary history and his relation to it. Against the commonplace assertions that demand that Before Night Falls be primarily understood, if not exclusively, as an invective against Fidel Castro or, in the other extreme, as an ars moriendi and AIDS testimonial from a sexual dissident, I wish to revisit this text on the twentieth anniversary of its publication to underscore a missed reading that can help situate how Arenas, one of the most transgressive writers theorized in this collection as the Generation of '72, might …

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

Trauma And Temporal Hybridity In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, presents an often bewildering mix of different times: images, stories, and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences. Critics have noted this temporal blending and have cited this feature as reflecting the novel’s magical realism, or postcolonialism, or postmodernism, which are all associated with various forms of time play.¹ Indeed, as writers from Joyce to Woolf to Rushdie remind us, time is always to some extent a mixture, as the present must be understood as a complex amalgamation and negotiation of past moments. Roy’s …

Repugnant Aboriginality: Leanne Howe’S Shell Shaker And Indigenous Representation In The Age Of Multiculturalism, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe’s 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts, at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. And yet, these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by pre-emptying identification through difference, an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we …

[Introduction To] Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing, LáZaro Lima, Felice Picano

Bookshelf

As the U.S. Latino population grows rapidly, and as the LGBTQ Latino community becomes more visible and a more crucial part of our literary and artistic heritage, there is an increasing demand for literature that successfully highlights these diverse lives. Edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano, Ambientes is a revolutionary collection of fiction featuring stories by established authors as well as emerging voices that present a collective portrait of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience in America today. With a preface by Picano and an introduction by Lima that sets the stage for understanding Latino literary and cultural history, …

Claude De France, Mere/Mer De Verueuse Memoire, Lidia Radi

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

En 1517, Pierre Gringore met en scène Ies spectacles de rue pour l'Entree de la royne [Claude] de France a Paris faicte le mardy XII. jour du mays de May. L'an de grace mil cinq cens et XVII.² Un an plus tard Guillaume Michel, dit de Tours,³ reprend Ia plupart des personnages représentés dans Ies spectacles de Gringore et Ies fait défiler dans son Soulas de Noblesse sus le coronnement de la Rayne de France Claude (1518), qui est Ia dernière pièce de son Penser de Royal Memoire, ouvrage à visée politique et religieuse, dédié …

True Crime, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Whether or not Capote invented something called the “nonfiction novel,” he ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder. In the years since In Cold Blood appeared, the genre of true crime regularly appears on the bestseller list. It is related to crime fiction, certainly – but it might equally well be grouped with documentary or read alongside romance fiction. And while its readers have a deep engagement with the genre that is very different from the engagement of readers of crime fiction, its writers are often forced to occupy a position – in relation to victims, criminals and …

Cosmological Vision(S) : History, Modernism, And American Renewal In Hart Crane's The Bridge, Lauren Grewe

Honors Theses

With the help of recent Crane studies, along with my own ear, I intend to prove the worth of Crane's myth of bridging as a way of responding to and eventually reforming the Elitonian vision of the modem world. The Bridge counters Eliot as a way to offer hope to the modem world in place of despair, as a way to offer a system of belief that is neither dogmatic nor futile, that incorporates a vision of the future just as much as a vision of the past.

Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell was only five when Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. But in Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) she seeks to answer the question that black teenagers in Mississippi, and indeed many people from all over the United States, asked after seeing the photograph of Till's mutilated and bloated body: "How could they do that to him? He's only a boy" (Dittmer 58). Campbell embraces the view that Lillian Smith expressed in Killers of the Dream (1949): "The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white …

The French Faulkner: Vision, Instrumentality, And Sanctuary's 'Lake Of Ink', Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Like Edgar Allan Poe and the American film noir, William Faulkner enjoyed a critical reception in France that anticipated his American audience by several years. While not the first critics to admire Faulkner’s writing, readers like Maurice Coindreau, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the earliest readers to recognize a particular quality to his fiction, one that, especially in the case of certain novels, evaded Faulkner’s contemporary American readers. As certain examples of this cross-cultural acceptance demonstrate, such as Baudelair’s translation of Poe in the nineteenth century and his exalting of Poe as a poetic genius, or Raymond …

Who Is A Southern Writer?, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Richard Ford’s response to a questioner at the University of Mississippi symposium—that he is a “southerner” but not a “southern writer”—makes him only the latest in a long line of distinguished writers who grew up in the South, but have refused to be corralled into a regional stall. Other contemporary writers from the South, feeling “left out” of a potentially profitable niche market, have sought to broaden the definition of “southern literature.” Instead of worrying about who qualifies as a “southern writer” or rigidly delimiting “southern literature,” we might more fruitfully ask questions about who is writing about the U.S. …

Spanish Speakers And Early 'Latino' Expression, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Spanish speakers have been present and writing in what is today the United States since the late sixteenth century, when Spanish explorers and colonizers described their experiences in chronicles, prose, poems, and epistolary exchanges. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Spanish speakers from various Latin American countries and Spain began to develop a cultural identity within the United States that was linguistically, racially, and culturally distinct from the Anglo-American majority culture. In the nineteenth century Spanish speakers comprised three principal groups: American citizens of Spanish ancestry, Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Americans, and exiled political figures in the …

The "Beyondness Of Things" In The Buccaneers: Vernon Lee's Influence On Edith Wharton's Sense Of Places, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since its publication in 1938, readers have been at odds in their assessment of The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton's only novel set in England. While her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, and many early reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw great promise in the unfinished novel, a few critics like Edmund Wilson wrote the work off as 'an old-fashioned story for girls' and judged Wharton's skill 'dulled' in this her last book. In the 1980's, however, feminist critics found much to value in the novel: from protagonist Annabel St. George's self-actualization to the comradeship of the American girls and the …

Buying Time: Howards End And Commodified Nostalgia, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Midway through E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the newly married Margaret Schlegel Wilcox returns to the titular country house to find it the recipient of an unexpected makeover. Closed since the death of the first Mrs. Wilcox and for months used as a warehouse for the Schlegels’ possessions, the house has been unpacked and reconstituted by the housekeeper, Miss Avery, who creates a new interior built from moments of Margaret’s own history. As Margaret moves through the house in surprise, she takes a virtual tour of her past: her umbrella-stand greets her in the entrance way, the infamous sword …

[Introduction To] Growing Up In The South: An Anthology Of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a …

Dreams Of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis And The Literature Of Vienna, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The first edition of Die Traumdeutung (translated as The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) bears a publication date of 1900, although it actually appeared in Vienna in November 1899. This is consistent with the pivotal temporality of a work that looks retrospectively into the nineteenth century and prospectively into the twentieth. In 1931, Freud said of his first and arguably most important book, "It contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. " In terms of the influence not only on his later publications, but also …

Wrestling With Religion: Pullman, Pratchett, And The Uses Of Story, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

While children's and young adult fantasy literature is often concerned with "first things," with the struggle between good and evil, or with the fate of the cosmos, still it is rarely overtly religious in the sense of direct engagement with "faith, religion and church(es)" (Ghesquiere 307). Perhaps it is children's literature's vexed relationship with didacticism that keeps fantasy writers for children from engaging directly with religious language and concepts, or perhaps it is the setting in an alternate world that enables allegorizing impulse rather than direct engagement. In either case, despite a tradition of fables, parables, and allegorical treatments of …

Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

As the recently published epistolary collection reveals, Ralph Ellison was an unabashed Americanist, for better and for worse. Ellison's faith in American identity and the democratic process, which is evident at the end of Invisible Man in the protagonist's determination to "affirm the principle on which the country was built [and not the men who did the violence]" (574), is again manifest in the posthumous novel, Juneteenth. According to John F. Callahan, Ellison's litearary executor, the novel celebrates "the indivisibility of the American experience" (Juneteeth xvi). James Alan McPherson (the African-American writer to whom Ellison showed a portion …

Natives And Academics: Researching And Writing About American Indians (Book Review), David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Review of the book, Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians by Devon Mihesuah. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, And Sara: Roles And Role Models In A Little Princess, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Role-model criticism, the easiest and often most logical form of criticism for children’s literature, has fallen out of favor in our more theoretically sophisticated times. Toril Moi, surveying the state of feminist criticism in 1985, devoted a chapter to “Images of Women” criticism, finding it overly prescriptive and frequently self-contradictory in its calls for a “realistic” or accurate depiction of women’s lives simultaneously with the desire for “strong, impressive female characters” (47). Since many real women (and men!) are neither strong nor impressive, the effort is doomed from the start. And the specific call for “role models” is problematic in …