English Language and Literature Commons^™

Empire Of Horror: Race, Animality, And Monstrosity In The Victorian Gothic, Grace Monaghan

Honors Projects

This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As …

Cultural Subtexts And Social Functions Of Domestic Music-Making In Jane Austen’S England, Lidia A. Chang

Masters Theses

Barring a few notable exceptions, English music between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries earns scant notice in music history textbooks, despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture, especially during the Georgian era. However, I will argue that the English of this period were, in many respects, even more committed to music than their continental counterparts. The problem, for England, was not that it made no music during this period, but that it made the wrong kind of music, and enjoyed it in the wrong ways. At a time when Germanic critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx …

A Queer Poet In A Queer Time: John Milton And Homosexuality, Adam J. Wagner

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

Scholar David Hawkes refers to John Milton as a “Hero of Our Time.” Milton’s written works, including his poetry and political treatises, contain cultural and theological insight applicable not only to his 17th Century English culture, but 21st Century American culture as well. As homosexuality continues to enter the public sphere in Western society, many scholars are uncovering past insights about how sexuality has evolved. Milton’s literary texts provide insight into his own sexual orientation and how people viewed human sexuality post-English Renaissance. Homosexuality is a broad topic, but Milton’s works give insight into three main areas—homosexual sex, sexual orientation, …

Victorian Women And Their Working Roles, Kara L. Barrett

English Theses

Women during the Victorian Era did not have many rights. They were viewed as only supposed to be housewives and mothers to their children. The women during this era were only viewed as people that should only concern themselves with keeping a successful household. However, during this time women were forced into working positions outside of the household.

Women that were forced into working situations outside of their households were viewed negatively by society. Many women needed to have an income to support their families because the men in the household were not making enough money to survive. When the …

"'Ic Paet Secgan Maeg, Hwaet Ic Yrmpa Gebad'": Christian Scribes' Condemnation Of Blood Feud And Its Effect On Women In Anglo-Saxon Society, Tara Seate-Beck

Theses & Honors Papers

In preserving The Wife 's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Beowulf's battle scene with Grendel's mother, Christian poets and scribes preserved much more than just the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. They recorded the feminine voice, a rare perspective emerging from a society founded principally on the fundamentals of warfare and male dominance. The women's songs stand as testaments to the strife and discord women suffered as a consequence of their husbands' participation in blood feud. Their stories are not merely recounted as third person narratives, as much of the other extant texts from the period are; in the elegies, these …

Life After Death: Widows And The English Novel, Defoe To Austen, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

This monograph argues that images of the widow in the early novel served to express, explore, and construct concepts of appropriate female activity in emerging capitalism during the eighteenth century in England. Drawing on novels published between 1719 and 1818, this study investigates how different classes of widows (affluent, working class, impoverished, and criminal) functioned to challenge and affirm emerging economic values. A concluding chapter on widows in Jane Austen's work shows how changing notions of appropriate female economic activity had settled by the establishment of both the capitalist economy and the novel in the early nineteenth century.

Bodies Of Type: The Work Of Textual Production In English Printers' Manuals, Lisa M. Maruca

English Faculty Research Publications

This essay examines the shifting, ideologically situated and contested representations of print texts and technologies in two representative printers' manuals: Joseph Moxon's 1683 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing and John Smith's 1755 The Printer's Grammar. The construction of orderly print is supported in each by changing discourses of sexuality and gender. Moxon's manual celebrates the heterosexual working bodies of print, the laborers whose physical production of print is as important as the text supplied by writers. In Smith, however, the naturalized gendering of a now invisible print privileges only the Author, whose disembodied intellect transcends the …

Institutions Of The English Novel's Canon: Review Of Institutions Of The English Novel By Homer Obed Brown, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Institutions Of The English Novel's Canon: Review Of Institutions Of The English Novel By Homer Obed Brown, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

No abstract provided.

Men In (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, And Psychoanalysis In Rebecca West's The Return Of The Soldier , Misha Kavka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along …

Overview Of Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

No abstract provided.