English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Complete Poems Of Anne Bannerman, Matthew Heilman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anne Bannerman (c.1780-1829) spent most of her life in Edinburgh, Scotland and published three volumes of poetry in the early nineteenth century. For my dissertation, I have prepared the first fully-annotated critical edition of Bannerman’s complete works, including Poems (1800), Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), and Poems, A New Edition (1807). A comprehensive introduction provides information on Bannerman’s life and background, and examines her work in the context of British Romanticism, the Gothic, Scottish nationalism, and the ballad tradition. Close-readings of the poems examine the ways in which Bannerman’s female narrators challenge early nineteenth-century conceptualizations of gender, particularly in …

The Temptation Of Sherlock Holmes: Aesthetics, Expectations, And The Gothic, Sarah M. Davin

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This thesis will be concerned with challenging the preconceptions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, and how different readings of the text are revealed when those preconceptions are challenged. While the character of Sherlock Holmes is often considered as very scientific in nature, this thesis will attempt to challenge this, suggesting alternative readings of Holmes that might situate the character within a literary tradition rather than pretending that the Holmes character can somehow be psychoanalyzed or that his work as a detective in a text somehow directly interacted with the real world. By focusing on the …

Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates The Human Corpse In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Charles Hoge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores representations of the human corpse in nineteenth-century British literature and ephemeral culture as a dynamic, multidirectional vehicle used by writers and readers to help articulate emerging anxieties that were complicating the very idea of death. Using cultural criticism as its primary critical heuristic filter, this project analyzes how the lingering influence of folklore animates the human corpses that populate canonical and extra-canonical nineteenth-century British literature.

The first chapter examines the treatment of the human corpse through burial and mourning rituals, as specific developments within these procedures provide interpretive windows into how the idea of death was quickly …

Responsibility And Responsiveness In The Novels Of Ann Radcliffe And Mary Shelley, Katherine Marie Mcgee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the ways in which humans interact with and respond to other humans and nonhumans in Ann Radcliffe's and Mary Shelley's novels. I argue that in light of the social and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, Radcliffe and Shelley call not so much for Revolution or drastic reform but for a change in the ways in which individuals respond to the needs of others, both human and nonhuman, and take responsibility for each other. The ways in which humans interact with the nonhuman inform the positive and negative practices that they should use to interact with …