English Language and Literature Commons^™

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

The Montagnards, Jarred J. Marlatt

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Founding Farce, Or, The Lost Debates Of The Constitutional Convention: Being An Account Of The Discovery Of An Overlooked Document, And The Loss Again, And Rediscovery Of Said Document, Wherein Is Written Unheard Proceedings In The Crafting Of The Glorious Constitution Of These 13 Colonies (Which Has Lately Been Misplaced), Alexander W. Pickens

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The Constitutional Convention was shrouded in mystery, yet America has been confidently given a narrative of what went on behind closed doors in Philadelphia. Though most of our authentic records of what went on were written by men assumed to be reliable, the deeper one reads into history the more unreliable they become, recent evidence even suggesting that James Madison altered his notes on the Convention years after it was concluded. What if our perception of history is flawed and the Convention was not the glorious meeting of intellectual giants but instead a town hall full of immature behemoths who …

“That Dark Parade”: Emily Dickinson And The Victorian "Cult Of Death”, Carol M. Degrasse

English Department Theses

The elegiac poems of Emily Dickinson provide what is perhaps the clearest depiction of the conflicting emotions inherent to the death-conscious nineteenth century. In one such poem, Dickinson’s oxymoronic phrase, “Dark Parade,” encapsulates the spirit of a social movement that was born of a desire to comfort the grief-stricken and to beautify the horrific. Throughout Dickinson’s corpus of elegiac poetry, the speaker echoes these sentiments and crafts an insightful portrait, juxtaposing the stark horror of death with the ethereal beauty of ceremony. As Dickinson’s elegies are traced over time, the poems develop as microcosmic representations of a grieving nation, as …

Posthumous Preaching: James Melville's Ghostly Advice In Ane Dialogue (1619), With An Edition From The Manuscript, Jamie Reid Baxter

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the use of the dialogue in Renaissance Scotland, and explores the background, themes, and dramatic art of Ane Dialogue (1619), concerning the Five Articles of Perth (1618), and resistance to the church policies of King James VI & I; gives character-sketches of the four speakers, James Melville, William Balcanquhall, Archibald Johnstone, and John Smyth, and of their satiric target, the Edinburgh minister William Struthers; concludes by providing an annotated edition of the dialogue transcribed from the sole manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Wodrow Quarto LXXXIV, ff. 19-25.

'A Thin And Tattered Veil': Lewis Grassic Gibbon And The Church Of Scotland, Ian Campbell

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the changes in Scottish religious practice and adherence from just before the First World War, through to the early 1930s, through the representation of the Church of Scotland in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair trilogy: Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934), with briefer comment on other writings by the same author writing as J. L. Mitchell. and a final comparison between Gibbon's portrayal of religious change and that in an earlier Scottish novel, John Galt's Annals of the Parish(1821).

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …

American Prometheus: Carnegie's Captain, Bill Jones, Tom Gage

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

American Prometheus: Carnegie’s Captain, Bill Jones presents a compelling historical memoir of the illustrious life of rebellious steel genius and inventor, Captain Bill Jones.

Hero of the Civil War and Johnstown Flood, Captain Bill Jones built and supervised the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which in its first five years advanced to the rank of the world’s most productive and profitable steel mill. His “hands-on, all over” style solved Carnegie’s production problems on the spot, enlisted baseball teams from the Works’ departments to defuse ethnic strife, promoted the eight-hour work day, and patented inventions, including the Jones Hot Metal mixer, which …

True Crime As A Literature Of Advocacy, Leslie Rowen

Undergraduate Theses

True crime is often dismissed as a genre of cheap paperbacks with little literary merit and highly sensational, pornographic content. By contrast, my paper proposes an alternative literary history of true crime which merits further investigation because of its focus on advocating for justice where the justice system failed. I begin with Catharine Williams’ 1833 piece Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, an early example from true crime literature. The text disputes the acquittal of a Methodist preacher for the murder of a female mill worker, arguing that the trial was unfairly slanted in the defendant’s favor. More than a century …

Discursive Mapping: Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca And Thomas Jefferson’S Construction Of Selfhood And Otherness, Monica Doebel

Undergraduate Research Awards

The binary of savage versus civilized was deeply embedded in the structure of early American society and the consciousness of early generations of colonizers, codified through multiple methods of inscribing meaning upon native land. Thomas Jefferson, in his pseudo-scientific Notes on the State of Virginia, taxonomizes life in native America using maps, charts, and textual descriptions for the purpose of consolidating an American identity premised on superiority over native people and black slaves. In contrast, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca maps native America purely through language, constructing the illusory infallibility of European colonizers while crafting an overall narrative of native …

Subjective Retelling: The Influence Of External And Individual Factors On The Folktales Of The Brothers Grimm, Katherine R. Woodhouse

Young Historians Conference

Since a first edition of Children’s and Household Tales was published in 1812, the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm has been read, told, watched, and referenced all over the world. When the Grimms initially set out to construct the famous anthology, they intended to objectively uncover a breadth of traditional German folktales, preserving them in their purest possible forms. These stories, the brothers believed, held the essence of the nation’s declining culture and collective identity. However, the assumption that the stories of Children’s and Household Tales holistically represent the genuine German history and dialogue of oral storytelling is inaccurate. …

Transatlantic Grammars: Lindley Murray And William Cobbett, Peter J. Manning

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Authentic Tidings": What Wordsworth Gave To William James, David E. Leary

Psychology Faculty Publications

It is widely recognized that William James had a profound and pervasive impact upon literary writers, works, styles, and genres, not to mention upon the encompassing frameworks of modernism and post-modernism, throughout the 20th century. Much less recognized is the impact of literature upon James’s life and work, whether in psychology or philosophy. This article looks at the influence of one particular author, William Wordsworth, primarily through his long 1814 poem The Excursion, from which James drew “authentic tidings” that helped him weather some early storms and create his distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and its …

Laurent Binet's Hhhh: Historiographic Metafiction In Contemporary French Literature About World War Ii, Cailee S. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

In the last two decades, a considerable number of contemporary French authors have employed metafiction—a narrative mode in which texts themselves purposefully call attention to the fact that they are fiction—when writing novels which attempt to grapple with traumatic events, namely World War II and the Holocaust. In attempting to understand this popular, but controversial literary phenomenon—called historiographic metafiction—, this thesis contextually analyzes Laurent Binet's Himmler's Him heisst Heydrich (2010), a contemporary French novel about the assassination of real-life Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. This thesis also compares Binet's text to two other contemporary French historiographic metafictional novels about World War …

British Women Writers And The Reception Of Ancient Egypt, 1840-1910: Imperialist Representations Of Egyptian Women, Molly Youngkin

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

Remembering The Great War: Writing And Publishing The Experiences Of Wwi, Ian A. Isherwood

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues …

Berth Of The Abergavenny, Richard Matlak

Texts relating to the Earl of Abergavenny (ship)

This essay serves as a brief introduction to the digital collection, Berth of the Abergavenny, by providing context for the historical and literary significance of the model East Indiaman, The Earl of Abergavenny, on display in Dinand Library at the College of the Holy Cross.

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …

Arnold Whitridge: Scholar And Veteran Of Two Armies And Two Wars, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This is an invited blog post written for Roads to the Great War, a site dedicated to the study of the First World War edited by historian Mike Hanlon. The article discusses the life and career of Arnold Whitridge, a soldier, scholar and grandson of British poet Matthew Arnold.

This is the url:

http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2017/01/arnold-whitridge-scholar-and-veteran-of.html

Impact Of Tuberculosis On Victorian England, Cara Caputo

Maria Dittman Library Research Competition: Student Award Winners

No abstract provided.

It Matters What You Call A Thing: How Illustration During The Indian Mutiny Shaped The Visual Culture Of Victorian England, Josh Corson

Honors Library Research Award

2016/2017 second place award winner. The paper elucidates the origins of image, text, and ideology as a visual culture of fear and racism in white, middle-class England. 12 pages.

The Sinking Of The Abergavenny, Richard Matlak

Texts relating to the Earl of Abergavenny (ship)

This section of the screenplay Immortal Sea is a fictional representation of the sinking of the Earl of Abergevenny off the coast of England in 1805.

Music Of The “Cult Of Whitman”: Charles Villiers Stanford's Elegiac Ode, Jacob Bird

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Between 1884 and 1914, English musical taste was completing a profound shift from the sentimentality of light drawing room ballads and popular songs toward more serious-minded works. Professionalized composers sought to express high moral and humanistic ideals— undoubtedly English—as opposed to continental values. One source for their works was the poetry of the American, Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Whitman had been one figure in the English-American cultural war which was waged since the early 19th century. Whitman was thought by most English as not a ‘proper poet’ because his works fall so far outside their tradition, thus making his poetry an …

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth

Departmental Honors Projects

First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …

Whitman And The Elegy: Mythologizing Lincoln And The Poetic Reconstruction Of Mourning, Brytani Raymond

Online Theses and Dissertations

In Walt Whitman's mind, Abraham Lincoln represented the very essence of America and, because of this, Lincoln and his assassination were the ideal subject through which Whitman could explore the art of mourning on both individual and collective scales. The regimented order of lament, adoration, and consolation of the traditional elegy were not enough to accommodate the complex, organic mourning that Whitman sought to capture in his poems. Whitman's series of elegies following the death of Abraham Lincoln mythologized the president in ways that still permeate our historical view of Lincoln today. This essay seeks to give an in-depth explication …

A Declaration Of The State Of The Colony: Type Facsimile Edition, Edward Waterhouse, Dylan Ruediger

British Virginia

Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony is the Virginia Company's official response to the Powhatan attack on the plantation in the spring of 1622. The attack, often called the “Jamestown Massacre,” cost the lives of 25% of the population of the colony (individually listed by Waterhouse in a harrowing catalog of the dead). It led to massive retaliation by the English. It also significantly changed the ideological basis of the colonial project in Virginia from one based on naïve hopes that Indians would voluntarily subordinate themselves to the English towards an aggressive colonialism of dispossession. Waterhouse’s text …

A Declaration Of The State Of The Colony: Photographic Facsimile Edition, Edward Waterhouse, Dylan Ruediger

British Virginia

Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony is the Virginia Company's official response to the Powhatan attack on the plantation in the spring of 1622. The attack, often called the “Jamestown Massacre,” cost the lives of 25% of the population of the colony (individually listed by Waterhouse in a harrowing catalog of the dead). It led to massive retaliation by the English. It also significantly changed the ideological basis of the colonial project in Virginia from one based on naïve hopes that Indians would voluntarily subordinate themselves to the English towards an aggressive colonialism of dispossession. Waterhouse’s text …

Snoop-Women With Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, And The Gender Of Domestic Intelligence, Megan Faragher

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation's qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO's methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women's experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison's novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents …