English Language and Literature Commons^™

Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space In Victorian Fiction, Mary C. Jones

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider …

The Joys Of Earth: Evolutionary Kinship In Victorian Atheist And Agnostic Authors, Keri R. Stevenson

Theses and Dissertations--English

Darwin’s evolutionary theory provided, for some atheist and agnostic authors in Victorian England, a theory of kinship and community, of investment in the world, that had been missing before. Without a “creation” story that could match the Biblical version, those who stood outside the dominant Christian paradigm rarely had the words or concepts to construct their own visions of how humans fit into the existence of other species, into landscapes, and into a world that, if unfallen, seemed resistant to other explanations. Those who did construct alternate mythologies usually reared them on a Christian base.

Into the Victorian loss of …

The Effects Of A New Method Of Instruction On The Perceptions Of Appalachian English, Michelle L. Compton

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This paper evaluates whether students’ perceptions of Appalachian English improve through a method of instruction that uses dialect literature in the classroom. Most existing methods of instruction tend to portray dialects as wrong, incorrect, or in some way less rule-governed than Standardized English, despite the numerous studies that have demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Labov 1969, Wolfram 1986). The data from this study derives from two groups of students enrolled in introductory composition and communication at the University of Kentucky. Each group is given a pre-test to determine attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standardized English. An experimental group is then exposed to …

More Than Death: Fear Of Illness In American Literature 1775-1876, Sarah Schuetze

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives about personal and collective experiences with disease train American readers to fear illness while warning them against the dangers of being afraid. Such narratives depict the way illness ravages the physical body, disrupts interpersonal relationships, and threatens to dismantle social or municipal organization. In other words, the story of sickness is a story of terror-inducing dis-order. I study disease with a lens informed by cultural and disability studies to show that what makes disease historically and culturally significant is its power—through the body—to dis-order relationships, society, and knowledge. Anxieties about this dis-order …

Recontextualizing Pudd'nhead: Minstrelsy, Race, And The Performance Of Progress, Collin A. Skeen

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis examines how Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson does much more than simply bridge the recurring racial and cultural behaviors of the antebellum South with the reality of late-19^th century America; instead, I argue that Twain’s novella acts as a performative text, participating in a dialogue with a number of cultural forces—literature, theatre, politics, and commercialism—as a way of commenting on popular conceptualizations of late-nineteenth century social progress. Using the critical perspective of Performance Studies, it is clear that Twain’s novel is demonstrating how nineteenth century America used certain sets of symbols and signs to perform race, ultimately critiquing the …

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rebecca Beach

Theses and Dissertations--English

Turning Their Talk investigates the pressures placed upon female characters’ communication styles as they enter the heterosexual market in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The title of this dissertation derives from a phrase found in each the six novels I examine--“she turned the conversation”—to suggest the subtle control female characters exercise through speech that allows them to achieve tangible forms of social agency. My dissertation argues that novelistic representations of speech mirror the paradoxical roles women historically faced as they balanced societal …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

The American Dime Museum: Bodily Spectacle And Social Midways In Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature And Culture, James C. Fairfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture.

Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many …

A Posture Of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’S Location, Position, And Displacement, Aaron Cloyd

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Drawing on work from autobiographical studies that distinguishes between but correlates position and location, this paper examines Mary Rowlandson’s situatedness in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and argues that she is a figure of removal and displacement. Although Rowlandson seeks to position herself through voice, actions, and text, such expressions of agency occur within the locating structures of culture, expectation, and memory. The resultant tension between self- positioning and other-locating leaves Rowlandson perpetually removed as she is unable to fully reposition herself within any significant site.

Six Poems On Sixteenth-Century Maps, Jeremy Dae Paden

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Enclosed are seven poems that explore the topic of mapping. Six of these form part of a series of ekphrastic poems on sixteenth-century "mappa mundi." They use the trope of the "cosmographic heart" or the "cordiform map" to tell the story of early European and American contact. Four of them use actual sixteenth-century mappa mundi (Fineaus's cordiform map, Bunting's clover-leaf map, Hand an anonymous Flemish map that uses Ortellius's cordiform map as the face of a jester) as points of departure. These maps by iconographically distorting the world make visible through representation the Early Modern Europe had with understanding the …

Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery In The Antebellum Imaginaton, Holly F. Osborn

Theses and Dissertations--English

Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them.

I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the …

Image/Text And Text/Image: Reimagining Multimodal Relationships Through Dissociation, Amy K. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations--English

W.J.T. Mitchell has famously noted that we are in the midst of a “pictorial turn,” and images are playing an increasingly important role in digital and multimodal communication. My dissertation addresses the question of how meaning is made when texts and images are united in multimodal arguments. Visual rhetoricians have often attempted to understand text-image arguments by privileging one medium over the other, either using text-based rhetorical principles or developing new image-based theories. I argue that the relationship between the two media is more dynamic, and can be better understood by applying The New Rhetoric’s concept of dissociation, which …

Is Shakespeare Still In The Holler? The Death Of A Language Myth, Jennifer Cramer

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly Olson Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Nuestros Sonidos: A Case Study Of Bilingual Music And Play Among Primary-School Age Heritage Language Learners, Sara P. Alvarez

Theses and Dissertations--English

The demographics in the United States continue to show a dramatic increase of immigrant students who speak a language other than English at home (Smitherman; U.S. Census); however, schooling ideologies and practices continue to treat developing bilingualism as a detriment to students entering school rather than a resource (Canagarajah; Heath; Matsuda; Valdés et al; Richardson; Santa Ana; Street). In this case study, conducted in the “Nuevo New South” (Mohl; Rich and Miranda), I observed how bilingual music and play in school-like settings can promote bilingual literacy practices and bridge gaps between traditional schooling practices and communities ways of languaging. Engaging …

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

Considering The Human And Nonhuman In Literary Studies: Notes For A Biographic Network Approach For The Study Of Literary Objects, Edward L. Bullock

Theses and Dissertations--English

In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of …

Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris

Theses and Dissertations--English

When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must …

Settling Mud, Running Streams, And “The Whole Thing About Men And Women”: Subverting Classical Discourse And The Role Of Character In Gertrude Stein’S “Melanctha”, Elizabeth D. S. Wise

Theses and Dissertations--English

The thesis begins by exploring Stein’s autobiographical connections to the Jamesian concepts of bottom nature and habit, in an attempt to demonstrate that both, in the pen of Gertrude Stein, are as connected to classical virtue theory and the development of character as a moral state and characters as created persons within her creative oeuvre, as they are connected to psychological experiments in William James’ laboratory. In wading through what may seem to be muddy waters of Stein’s slippery definitions and circular sentences, the thesis shows that Stein uses the discourse of classical virtue theory to achieve her goal—breaking down …

Creating Domestic Dependents: Indian Removal, Cherokee Sovereignty And Women’S Rights, Jesslyn R. Collins-Frohlich

Theses and Dissertations--English

What, this project asks, are the impacts of the alliance between women and Native Americans in the nineteenth century debate over Indian Removal? How might groups similarly excluded from patriarchal systems of government by race and gender turn exclusion into arguments for inclusion? In what ways might this alliance change interpretations of the women’s right and Native American rights movements? While arguments made by women and Native Americans during Indian Removal receive considerable scholarly attention, most studies-especially those concerned with women’s involvement- subordinate Indian Removal to abolition or create significant omissions in the narratives of both movements by adopting a …

Strong Angels Of Comfort: Middle Class Managing Daughters In Victorian Literature, Emily A. Dotson

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the social sciences about the challenging nature of care labor as well as feminist discussions about the role of the daughter in Victorian culture.

It explores the literary presence of the middle class managing daughter in the Victorian home.

Collectively, the novels in this study articulate social anxieties about the unclear and unstable role of daughters in the family, the physically and emotionally challenging work they, and all women, do, and the struggle for daughters to find a place in a family hierarchy, which is often structured not by effort or affection, but …

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Katherine Mansfield Among The Moderns: Her Impact On Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, And Aldous Huxley, Nicola Anne Tarrant-Hoskins

Theses and Dissertations--English

Katherine Mansfield among the Moderns examines Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with three fellow writers: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, and appraises her impact on their writing. Drawing on the literary and the personal relationships between the aforementioned, and on letters, diaries, and journals, this project traces Mansfield’s interactions with her contemporaries, providing a richer and more dynamic portrait of Mansfield’s place within modernism than usually recognized.

Hitherto, critical work has not scrutinized Mansfield in the manner I suggest: attending to representations of her as a character in other’s work, while analyzing the degree to which her influence on …

Learning To Retell Stories Through Comparative Teaching: Writing And Drawing, Rachel L. Lindle

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

Students who are emergent readers and writers are often difficult to assess, as they are unable to communicate understanding in writing. From my observations, these students communicate ideas best through concrete forms of expression, rather than the abstract formation of letters and writing that is unfamiliar to them. Drawing provides an alternate form of expression from writing. Based on information found in literature review and personal experiences from working with students who are emergent readers and writers, pictures and drawings are a bridge to communicate ideas with these students. This form of expression and communication may be a useful assessment …

Whithersoever Thou Goest: The Discourses Of Exile In Early Modern Literature, Joshua Seth Lee

Theses and Dissertations--English

Exile is, as Edward Said so eloquently put it, “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” Exiled peoples operate on the margins of their native culture: part of it, but excluded from it permanently or temporarily. Broadly speaking, my project explores the impact of exile on English literature of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. English exiles appear frequently in literary studies of the period, but little attention has thus far been focused on the effect of exile itself on late medieval and early modern authors. Historical studies on exile have been more prevalent and engaging. My project builds on this …

The Abandonment Of Modernity: Bare Life And The Camp In Homo Sacer And Hotel Rwanda, Carolyn Ownbey

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Checked Bags: A Litany Of Potentially Explosive Things, Sherrin Frances

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

For This Earth Too Long Hauled / Later Valorization, Bob Mulligan

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.