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Theses/Dissertations

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Full-Text Articles in American Literature

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan Jan 2023

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the repercussions of slavery-induced dehumanization and trauma depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and explores Kambili’s stifling home life characterized by her father’s rigid Catholicism in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Morrison’s Beloved emphasizes the importance of personal engagement with the history of slavery so as to fully comprehend its horrors and overcome them. In Purple Hibiscus, the paper investigates the role religion plays in causing trauma, as Eugene’s strict adherence to Catholicism and dismissal of traditional rituals inflict both physical and psychological pain on his family. The complex and multifaceted depiction of religion in these novels …

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Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov Jan 2023

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

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Extranormal Sorcery In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Harleyquinn Wahl Jan 2023

Extranormal Sorcery In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Harleyquinn Wahl

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

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Orphan Hermeneutics: Refashioning Archetypes In 19th-Century Epic Prose Fiction, John David Sieker Jan 2023

Orphan Hermeneutics: Refashioning Archetypes In 19th-Century Epic Prose Fiction, John David Sieker

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Celebrated authors of the 19th century, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens are frequently critiqued within specifically national parameters, regarded as authors whose literary concerns reflect their respective countries and cultures. From that premise, there seems little if any connective thread to link Bleak House, the quintessential "stay-at-home" novel, and Moby-Dick, the epic, sea-faring adventure spanning nearly the entire globe. However, certain parallels between these novels in both form and content prove quite striking and reveal a transatlantic connection worthy of sustained critical attention. Both Melville and Dickens gesture to biblical and Classical antiquity in order to weave their respective narratives. …

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Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis Jan 2023

Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore writing during the start of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. States. This time period encompasses the early 1980s to mid-1990s before Protease Inhibitors were FDA approved which was the medical breakthrough drug that helped turn an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a chronic condition. This thesis will be an examination of three themes: “Gay White Cis Male Experience of HIV/AIDS”,” Marginalized Identity Experience of HIV/AIDS” and an exploration of two plays written during the height of the AIDS epidemic that were later turned into HBO productions: The Normal Heart …

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“I Don’T Want To Cook”: Reconfiguring The Domestic Space In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Rida Leonard Jan 2023

“I Don’T Want To Cook”: Reconfiguring The Domestic Space In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Rida Leonard

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In the scholarship that considers ways in which the concept of domesticity features in the lives of black and white women in history, there is less discussion of how these women’s unique challenges led them to alter the traditional domestic space. This dissertation first assesses a range of nineteenth-century American newspapers to understand the prevalent social milieu and then closely analyzes select literary texts of the time, to argue that the distinct racial circumstances that framed black and white women’s struggles enabled them to reform the domestic space as needed. Analysis of the nineteenth century press reveals that while white …

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The End Of Everything: The Physical And Figurative Impacts Of Landscape On American Ideology, Wyatt Alger Jan 2023

The End Of Everything: The Physical And Figurative Impacts Of Landscape On American Ideology, Wyatt Alger

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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"Dream Police": Political Imagination In William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ethan Jg Haapala Jan 2023

"Dream Police": Political Imagination In William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ethan Jg Haapala

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall Jan 2023

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

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In Whitman's Wake, Kacie Megan Fodness Jan 2023

In Whitman's Wake, Kacie Megan Fodness

Dissertations and Theses

In Whitman’s Wake argues that nineteenth-century American writing includes a living invitation for its future readers. The kind of invitational writing prioritized in this work has not yet been fully accounted for in literary criticism. What’s more, even when we as readers have experienced such an invitation (one we feel is for us) we have not followed the feeling far enough. As a result, scholarship has largely neglected, and perhaps has consciously rejected, the intentional action of a writer that creates an encounter with their future reader. My project contributes to the ongoing critical conversation around the relationship of readers …

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Indigenous Storytelling As Decolonial Praxis, Ceremony And At Colby, Georgia Goodman Jan 2023

Indigenous Storytelling As Decolonial Praxis, Ceremony And At Colby, Georgia Goodman

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to amplify Indigenous lifeways, diplomacies, sciences, diplomatic relations, and the power of storytelling. This is not a piece analyzing Indigenous culture. Rather, this thesis returns the gaze to the settler colonial state, specifically its storytelling ideologies, to show that systemic practices of inequity in storytelling can be disrupted and decolonized through a recentering of Indigenous ideologies. For example, reciprocity with lands and animals, reflection on positionality and decentering colonial understandings of time and place.

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"Emerson Remained My Master": The Influence Of Ralph Waldo Emerson On Louisa May Alcott's Thought And Writing In Little Women, Emma Wilburn Jan 2023

"Emerson Remained My Master": The Influence Of Ralph Waldo Emerson On Louisa May Alcott's Thought And Writing In Little Women, Emma Wilburn

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I will argue that Little Women was heavily influenced by Alcott’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s influence impacted Alcott’s life and writing in two main ways. First, growing up in Concord, surrounded by the influence of well-known Transcendentalist writers and under the mentorship of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alcott was heavily influenced by his work and the ideals of the transcendentalist movement. The ideas of Transcendentalism that Emerson made popular and wrote about in his pieces such as “Nature” and speeches like “Women” and “The American Scholar” appear in Little Women. Second, Alcott was also heavily influenced …

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Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon Jan 2023

Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon

MSU Graduate Theses

The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …

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Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen Jan 2023

Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen

MSU Graduate Theses

By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …

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Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon Jan 2023

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

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A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii Jan 2023

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

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Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec Jan 2023

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

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N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick Jan 2023

N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate how the illustrated images and text of the medieval myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood were translated from an English national epic to an American classic and used, I argue, to construct a new American identity. My analysis looks at both the written word and illustrated images in Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur written by Sidney Lanier and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and Robin Hood written by Paul Creswick and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. …

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Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis Jan 2023

Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer …

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The Portrayal Of Disability In 19th And 20th Century American Novels, Taylor Whittington Jan 2023

The Portrayal Of Disability In 19th And 20th Century American Novels, Taylor Whittington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the treatment of disabled characters by their family and communities in 19th and 20th - century American literature. The three works being evaluated are, The Monster (1898) by Stephen Crane, The Sound and The Fury (1928) by William Faulkner, and Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck. Although The Sound and The Fury and Of Mice and Men contain a white disabled character, The Monster details the disfiguration of an African American man. In The Monster, race exacerbates the community’s response to the disfigured Henry Johnson, compared to Lennie in Of Mice and Men, …

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Nice Girls, Wild Women: The Call Of The American Wilderness And Feminine Rejection Of The American Dream, Alice Paige Dillard Jan 2023

Nice Girls, Wild Women: The Call Of The American Wilderness And Feminine Rejection Of The American Dream, Alice Paige Dillard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reflecting the inherently patriarchal nature of the colonization that birthed America as a nation, the American landscape English settlers sought to subjugate became connotated with the female gender through English colonial writing. American westward expansion gained greater allure than the overt appeal of conquest and agrarian industry when her untamed western landscape was likened to images of an unspent virginal bride or the breast of a nurturing mother. Thomas Morton likens the colonies of Maryland and Virginia to the Biblical figures of Leah and Rachel in his poem “New English Canaan” to demonstrate their equal worth as English colonies, though …

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Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese Dec 2022

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …

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Printed And Bound: The Publishers' Case Binding And 19th-Century Women's Critique Of Marriage, Carolyn Suneja Dec 2022

Printed And Bound: The Publishers' Case Binding And 19th-Century Women's Critique Of Marriage, Carolyn Suneja

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the coevolution of industrial book formats in the 19th century and women’s critique of marriage in fiction, arguing that the highly decorated case binding both reflected and shaped broader cultural anxieties engendered by the accessibility of new literary forms to mass audiences and the impact of that literature on the cultural logics by which women understood their roles and options. Given the reciprocal relationship between the mechanisms of industrial print and women’s writing, the material conditions of book production are important considerations for the literary scholar. The four novels examined in this dissertation—Fanny Fern’s Rose Clark, Harriet …

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Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima Dec 2022

Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation uses the concept of the Great American Novel as a strategic framework for understanding the cultural ascendance of realism. Much more than a naïve expression of literary chauvinism, the rise of the idea of the Great American Novel marks a transformative moment in the decades before realism becomes institutionalized as a “new school” in the 1880s. Examining how Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, and Henry James anticipate or respond to the call for the national novel which mediates among regions, Before Realism demonstrates that American literary realism emerged out of its engagement and negotiation with the Great …

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Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Veiled Criticism Through Extreme Entertainment, Thoby Jeanty Dec 2022

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Veiled Criticism Through Extreme Entertainment, Thoby Jeanty

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the writings of Meiji novelists living during a time of transition. Their writings became known as part of a genre called Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. The genre became defined as engaging in extremes to entertain an audience captivated by the eroticism, grotesque, or even the nonsensical nature of the stories being told. The thesis discovers there is a pressing social commentary on the tumultuous transition to modernity hidden within these works. The traditions established during the Tokugawa era starting from 1603 and lasting until 1867 came under pressure with the start of the Meiji era in 1868. Each …

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Re-Visioning The Modern/Ist Body: Literature, Women, And Modern Dance, Marisa Higgins Aug 2022

Re-Visioning The Modern/Ist Body: Literature, Women, And Modern Dance, Marisa Higgins

Doctoral Dissertations

This project explores the connections between modern dance and modernism Though initially, these connections might seem inchoate, modern dance provides a way to consider how expressive movement in modernism and gender restrictions prompts a physical response. Dance is inherently stylistic movement, and it is vital to explore how movement offers women a way to engage or respond to modernity. By investigating the role of movement in modernist literature and the particular tension between constraint and freedom that characterized female movement during this period, I argue that expressive movement and embodied performance offers a means of self-exploration and self-actualization. Specifically, it …

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Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips Jul 2022

Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis frames Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961) as a novel that pits the fading tradition of the Bildungsroman, aligned with what its protagonist calls the "vertical" throughout the text, against the supposed alternative of "the search", aligned with horizontal wandering. As the vast changes of modernity, namely technology and industrialization, transformed Western society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, many novelists began to see the Bildungsideal as incompatible with their new world. Walker Percy's novel begins with a similar conclusion, and I track how The Moviegoer engages with the Bildungsideal and its supposed failure to sustain itself into the …

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Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany Jun 2022

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

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Combating Narratives: Soldiering In Twentieth-Century African American And Latinx Literature, Stacy Reardon Jun 2022

Combating Narratives: Soldiering In Twentieth-Century African American And Latinx Literature, Stacy Reardon

Doctoral Dissertations

The neglect of the stories of African American and Latinx soldiers of color, combined with the relative absence of direct testimony by such soldiers, is very much on the minds of writers who achieve what Toni Morrison calls a “literary archeology” that fills in the gaps of the historical record. By closely examining John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder, Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging, and John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities: A Love Story, in this study I argue that twentieth-century African American and Latinx war fiction penned between the start of the Civil Rights …

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The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard Jun 2022

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …

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