English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Mountains At The End Of The World: Subcultural Appropriations Of Appalachia And The Hillbilly Image, 1990-2010, Paul L. Robertson

Theses and Dissertations

There is an aversion within the field of Appalachian Studies to addressing the cultural formulations of the Appalachian/hillbilly/mountaineer as an icon of aggressive resistance. The aversion is understandable, as for far too long images of the irrationally and savagely violent mountaineer were integral to the most gross popular culture stereotypes of Appalachia. Media consumers often take pleasure or comfort in these images, which usually occur in a reactionary context with the hillbilly as either a type of nationally necessary savage OR as an unregenerate barbarian against whom a national civilization will triumph and benefit by the struggle.

I bookend my …

Material Disease: Agency And Illness In Early American Literature, Mariah Crilley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Material Disease: Agency and Illness in Early American Literature argues that diseases shaped bodies of literature. Drawing on new materialism, disability studies, and the medical humanities, this dissertation argues that diseases were material and literary agents that transformed not only individual bodies and lives but also cultures, history, and even literature. In each chapter, I explore how one disease impacted a particular genre or paradigm: syphilis and the natural history, smallpox and the body politic, yellow fever and the novel, dysentery and sensibility, and malaria and narratives of Western expansion. By emphasizing disease’s material and literary agency, by conjoining the …

Emily Dickinson's Echology: A Listener's Reconceptualization Of Citizenship, Consciousness, And The World, Beth Ann Staley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

What I call Emily Dickinson’s “echology” combines the terms “echo” and “ecology” to understand how Dickinson’s work echoes – and is an echo – of the world and how, consequently, her work resides not just in her handwritten documents and their publication in various editions but in an ecology that’s tied to the earth that hosted her, the air that faced her, and the sea kept her listening. To assess the critical value of Dickinson’s echology, this dissertation begins by apprehending how the story of the echo is a story about sound masking, specifically about how the echo that is …

Reanimation (Afterlife Rebellion Book 1), Nicole A. White

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Reanimation (Afterlife Rebellion Book 1) is the first book in a young adult science fiction and fantasy duology about a group of ghosts and a teenage necromancer who must come to terms with a corrupted afterlife. The overarching goal was to craft an accessible fantasy, with its characters being unfamiliar with genre conventions so that readers who were as well could have an entry point into the category, and familiar readers could enjoy new interpretations of the canon. Traditional character archetypes and stereotypes that have been proven to impede representation in the genre and deter new readership are subverted or …

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

Allegories Of The Heart, Fiona Robertson

Studies in Scottish Literature

"Allegories of the Heart" uses allegory (or "telling otherwise") as a means of investigating Scott’s presence in literary works which do not specifically adapt or rework his texts, arguing that this is an underexplored area of imaginative and figurative engagement with Scott’s work. Key texts are The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Monastery, and Hawthorne’s fictions "Earth’s Holocaust" and The Scarlet Letter.

Croftangry’S Castle And The House Of Usher: Scott, Poe, And ‘Decayed And Lingering Exotics’, George S. Williams

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Poe's reading of Walter Scott, specifically through parallels of plot, setting, phrasing and imagery, between Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate, 1st series (1827) and Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), arguing that the two works share psychological preoccupations, also present more widely in the prose works of the writers.

Alienation, And Its Antidote, Anna Nissley

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This poster visually portrays and distills arguments within the paper of the same name, outlining its principal arguments and incorporating pictures of people/landscapes discussed within.

Visionaries Of The Road, Storm A. Wright

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Cultures Of American Theology, Evan Colon

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Pineapple Poetry - Studying Literature Through A Food Studies Lens, Anke Klitzing

Articles

In his essay 'A Winter Feast', literature professor Paul Schmidt unveils the layers of meaning that Pushkin wove into the description of a New Year’s feast in Eugene Onegin. But unusually, Schmidt continues his essay making the jump from literary criticism to food studies by musing on the various items on the menu without reference to Onegin, but rather to the cultural and philosophical context of food, bringing in such varied references as Brillat-Savarin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Studying food writing through the lens of literary criticism allows us to penetrate the social and symbolic meanings of food more deeply, while …

Mislabeled Muses, Deborah L. Dougherty

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Rebellion And Change On The Road Poster, Natalie Rude

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article talks about rebellion, which has always been a prominent piece of American history, but it has always been associated with world changing events. Rebellion is an action that is anything, regardless of size, that is out of the ordinary that results in personal change while on the road. Unfortunately, Rebellion on the road is gendered, meaning that while men can rebel and change wherever they wish, women can only rebel on the road, and all the personal changes women make disappear as soon as they leave the road. This is largely due to the social spaces constructed by …

The Road That Got Us Here, Kayla M. Rotz

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article attempts to explain the romanticism of Native American culture existing in The United States and how it came to be. Through a chain of events this romanticism began. Forced Migration caused a social divide creating a separate social space for Native American people. Because of this negative social space we may see hegemony begin to take place. The American Government took Native children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into the general American population, thus creating a domino effect. In many cases children carry on a culture for other generations. However if these children are forced …

The Road That Got Us Here, Kayla M. Rotz

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article attempts to explain the romanticism of Native American culture existing in The United States and how it came to be. Through a chain of events this romanticism began. Forced Migration caused a social divide creating a separate social space for Native American people. Because of this negative social space we may see hegemony begin to take place. The American Government took Native children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into the general American population, thus creating a domino effect. In many cases children carry on a culture for other generations. However if these children are forced …

A Genealogy Of Personal Development In Modern America, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Societal Rebirth: The Importance Of Spirituality, Lauren Rothstein

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The two texts Grapes of Wrath and Black Elk Speaks both include moments of anonymous forces imposing systematic modernization on society. Through the controversial subject of societal rebirths, traditionally defined through employment and steady food source availability. I propose an approach to societal rebirths that emphasizes the importance of spiritual connection to the land through a critical analysis of Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope and Leopold’s theory of land ethic.

Life On Wheels, James C. Mangum

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This analysis offers an insightful look into an aspect of travel and modernity that has gone seemingly unnoticed in the culture of American Mobility. As a social product space is created to serve the function of something integral in society. Working individuals need offices for example, students need schools, and citizens need residences. These are created spaces of society that intersect the realities of life, and an automobile is how we get to and from these spaces. Modernity has allowed us to stretch the ideas of mobility and space by combining the two. This analysis is an in depth look …

Automobility And The Future Of Transport, Lukas Koch

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Neoliberalism In Contemporary Literature: The Nuclear Family’S Decimation In Jonathan Franzen’S The Corrections, Jillianne Larson

Honors Theses

Within any text, there is often evidence of the author’s own life along with cultural reflections. A specific example of this occurrence is Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001). Since the novel was written in the early twenty-first century, it is an immediate reflection of post-millennial society, specifically the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was introduced to America as an economic venture; however, the policy’s impact can be frequently seen in relation to the nuclear family. As the idea gained popularity during the 1980s, neoliberalism began seeping into family units by way of one’s career and one’s home. This invasion has …

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Hazards Of Time Travel, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's novel Hazards of Time Travel considering the genre of Young Adult and speculative fiction as well as how the novel relates to the author's own past.

In Another Person’S Skin: Adaptations Of To Kill A Mockingbird And The Characterization Of Scout Finch, Eric A. Pitz

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines figures of women as represented in the literature of the U.S.-Mexico war in order to think through the ways in which the border conflict was preserved in nineteenth-century U.S. American collective memory. Central to my dissertation is a consideration of the intersections of history, myth, legend, and fiction in the memorialization of this war. This dissertation demonstrates that a close look at fictionalized accounts of women’s experiences of and roles in the U.S.-Mexico war highlights the ways in which historical fictions influence how we remember this moment of our collective past.

Focusing on popular accounts of the …

Patriarchal Ecocide: An Ecofeminist Reading Of Rahul Varma's Bhopal And Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy Of The People, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Ecofeminism is a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation of the natural world and the subordination of women. This concept of ecology and feminism conceptualized by Simone de Beauvoir (1952) and later refined by Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 has greened artistic values across disciplines, it is however perceived to be found only sparsely in drama. Una Chaudhuri (1994) and Theresa J. May (2005) argue that theatre is both “immediate and communal” (May 85) with a wealth of productions that “awaken ecological sensibilities” (85) and contest “industrialisation’s animus against nature” (24). Within this context, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of …

Neil Gaiman's American Gods: A Postmodern Epic For America, Susan Gorman

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

American Gods presents a postmodern view on America and its people and engages with the epic genre both in terms of form and content. This engagement with epic does not present a coherent view of the nation, as other epics do, but instead highlights multidimensionality and irony, demonstrating potential new ways in which the epic can remain important to literary work. Evaluates Gaiman’s use of formal elements of epic such as the use of the national past and national tradition as well as content components such as the presentation of the epic storyteller and the epic hero as it evaluates …

Fine Southern Gentlemen: The Three Beaux Of Edna Pontellier, Keli Masten

The Hilltop Review

Much of the literary criticism on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening has focused upon the main character, Edna Pontellier, and her journey of self-discovery, but the surrounding cast is rich with personalities as diverse and enlightening as Edna’s own. While most of the characters seem clearly defined as to their values, desires, and how they reconcile any dissonance they might face, and Edna Pontellier might seem like the only person suffering the torment of this discord, each character is actually negotiating a careful playing field replete with rules, regulations, and strict penalties if one is to run afoul. This essay explores …

Individualism And Mobility, Markus Magiera

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …

Book Review - Blood, Bone And Marrow: A Biography Of Harry Crews, Chris Sharpe

Georgia Library Quarterly

A book review of Blood, Bone and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews by Ted Geltner. This is the first biography of writer Harry Crews. It covers his life as an author of several books and articles and a teacher of creative writing.