English Language and Literature Commons^™

Vapr, Henry Knollenberg

Theses and Dissertations--English

vapr is a collection of short stories loosely interconnected via an anthropoid of smoke self-titled the Antimmanuel. vapr is an acronym for VOID & AUGURY & PRESENCE & RESIDUE; there is nothing else, and it is all ephemeral. The Antimmanuel is the guide; it is there with us even when god is not – within capitalism, within religion, within mental health crises, etc. Although very much not a work of Realism, this collection of eight stories grasps for, at the very least, its own author’s understanding of the real – what it feels like to live in middle America in …

Stick With Me: Essays, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

A small-town Appalachian deviant confronts the frequent, recurrent grief of the opioid crisis and its mortal, psychological, and communal consequences. This collection endeavors to explore substance use, addiction, geopolitical exploitation of Kentucky, central Appalachia, and surrounding areas, while also celebrating the lives of individual loved ones lost to deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. Here, the common narrative of depravity surrounding addiction is challenged through the rendering of full characters capable of love, trust, friendship, humor, mental health management, and personal growth. Time and place factor fundamentally into the stories told here—whether based in central Kentucky or central Appalachia, …

How To Live Life All The Way Up Learning Life Skills From Literary Characters, Sue N. Mize

Theses and Dissertations--English

In this essay, using the theories of psychiatrist, Eric Berne and his script theory; psychoanalyst, Carl Jung and his archetypes and mandalas; as well as the Native American Medicine Wheel; and the Hindu notion of the kundalini, I analyze the psychological development of Adele Quested of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Anna Wulf of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). Adela Quested goes to India seeking the real India and while engaging the archetype of the Lover discovers her real Self. While in India she metaphorically walks the Medicine Wheel and discovers that to be …

Perilous Times: Reading The Apocalypse In Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Religious Writing, Brittany Sulzener

Theses and Dissertations--English

During the time of war, rebellion, and political upheaval in the early American nation, apocalyptic imagery featured prominently in the rhetoric of preachers, abolitionists, writers, and orators. As nineteenth-century, white, American men like George Lippard proleptically envisioned the ruins of America as a source of future longing for those looking back on a great nation, many Black religious women writing in the antebellum era imagined an apocalyptic event so cataclysmic that it would destroy and remake the nation. Apocalyptic discourse in the nineteenth century allowed Black women to eschew social constraints and deliver scathing critiques of the American sociopolitical landscape, …

The Reflective Age: Nostalgia At The End Of History, Zachary Griffith

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in …

(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation advances studies of Black childhood, particularly Black girlhood, by examining how African American women writers depict the troubled journey to adulthood in stories of segregation, immigration, and incarceration. I argue that authors of four representative literary works emphasize architectural structures as well as ancestral hauntings among which Black children grow up. Without examining the material structures, we cannot understand the strategies these haunted Black youth deploy to reach adulthood. Examining the architectural structures that the protagonists of Maud Martha (1953), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Zami (1982), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) grow up in and around, I demonstrate …

Gorgeous Gorgeous Girls, Chioma Ezeano

Theses and Dissertations--English

Gorgeous Gorgeous Girls is a feminist collection. These are short stories that circumnavigate the peculiarities of Nigerian women. Each story takes a specific lens into the lives of the average Nigerian women, their daily survivals, their daily struggles—how these women examine life and existence. Through these variegated means, the stories ponder how societal ideologies, societal demands affect these women, especially the average Nigerian woman living beyond the poverty threshold. Each character wrestles, questions what it means, what it takes to survive struggles. They interrogate sexuality, mental health, immigration, capitalism, what it means to be a full human, people capable of …

Short Story Collection, Kevin Bond

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis consists of four pieces of short fiction workshopped as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Kentucky. Themes and topics explored include familial dynamics, depictions of childhood and coming of age, solitude, adverse psychological effects of toxic masculinity, natural sphere as sanctuary and source of spiritual renewal, and sense of place.

Fantasies Of Race And Place: White Nationalist And Alt-Right Undercurrents In Fantasy Roleplaying Games, Mark Hines

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of fantasy settings in roleplaying games often draw upon understandings of the medieval and early Renaissance world. This dynamic often extends to racial politics in such worlds. For the contemporary roleplaying game, this often means that game mechanics are built around race, species, or gender. Often, players interpret such mechanics as a means of bioessentializing race or practicing stereotypes rooted in Eurocentric morality and values.

This thesis examines the underlying rhetoric and implicit stakes by which race in fantasy worlds overlaps with the rhetoric and proposed stakes of White Nationalist and Alt-right actors. As fantasy roleplaying games, and especially …

"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even …

Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain

Theses and Dissertations--English

Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature examines the resurgence of didactic political literature in the United States during the 21st century, specifically adaptations of early 20th century American leftist protest works by authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Richard Wright. While the most political aspects of these writers’ fiction are often either criticized as too politically overt – such as Sinclair’s The Jungle and Wright’s Native Son – or forgotten in favor of an author’s perceived literary merit – London’s The Iron Heel in comparison to his other works like Call of the Wild …

Fleshcrawl, Shanita Jackson

Theses and Dissertations--English

I am fascinated with the spiritual, physical, and psychological experiences that occur when one’s flesh crawls. The experiences, akin to inverted goosebumps, result from provocations of the senses or of the mind. James Blake’s latest album, for example, triggers my flesh to crawl. The art on the album cover depicts a decaying body turned into a canyon-like labyrinth. In undergrad, attempts to conceptualize slave-deck diagrams disturbed my flesh to crawl. I am intrigued by how anxiety, epigenetics, and superstition all factor into the subjective intensities of this collective experience. As it seems, circumstance heightens the severity and frequency of the …

Death, Discipline, And The Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric In Early Modern English Texts, Leslie Raybuck Malland

Theses and Dissertations--English

Death, Discipline, and the Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric in Early Modern English Texts locates allusions to the biopolitical culture of Early Modern England within popular English texts. Through my examination of the period’s fascination with death—public executions, newly-authorized anatomies—and the ways in which death, as well as the treatment of the dead, was authorized by and supported the ideological aims of the state, my research identifies how those themes carry over into the most popular works of the day, reviewing instances of both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric across genres to find allusions to biopower — or, state control of the biological. …

Almost Heaven: Religious Arguments In Appalachian Extractive Fiction, Darby Lane Campbell

Theses and Dissertations--English

Appalachia is a national sacrifice zone that hosts extractive industries directly responsible for many social problems in the region, however, many attribute these issues to the moral failings of Appalachians themselves. Activism in the area is heavily focused on opposing both extraction and the negative perceptions which contribute to its domination. One way this activism is conducted is through extractive fiction—novels which expose the destruction caused by extractive industries. Appalachian extractive fiction utilizes religion and spirituality to argue against extraction. This research examines how fiction can be an effective mode of activism and how the use of Christian arguments in …

Southern Alterity In The Global Modernist Novel, 1899-1966, Benjamin J. Wilson

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation examines the portrayal of southern alterity in the global modernist novel. The trope of southern spaces as sites of decay, degeneration, and dissolution proves to be remarkably durable in both fictions set within the domestic U.S. south, as well as those colonial and postcolonial texts associated with the global modernist canon. Novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! suggest that the alterity of places like the Congo and Haiti are inextricably bound up with racial hierarchies. On the other hand, texts such as Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Zora Neale …

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …

Wisdom From The Collard Field: Exploring Agrarian Community In Twenty And Twenty-First Century American Literature, Robert M. Gorum

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation surveys agrarian literature written by American writers since World War II. It compares the Southern Agrarians of Vanderbilt University and New Agrarians such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon to examine their understanding of place and home. I begin my inquiry with a personal frame story of time I have spent in and around the sustainable agriculture movement. Drawing on various forms of literature, including memoirs, cookbooks, novels, reportage, and other scholarship, I explore American ideals since World War II relating to the production and consumption of food.

I begin my opening chapter with a reassessment …

Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …

“Innocent Bystanders”: White Guilt And The Destruction Of Native Americans In Us Literature, 1824-1830, Noor Al-Attar

Theses and Dissertations--English

Stereotypes describing the Native Peoples as lacking in many attributes such as religion, civilization, self-control, and even family bonds originated in the early years of contact, popularized through captivity narratives, and used in nineteenth century writings to justify the “vanishing” of the Native people. My dissertation adds to the discussion of myth of the Vanishing American by focusing on overlooked representations of Native illness. Illness, a shared human experience, was preserved for white characters in white authors’ writings. Ailing Native peoples were either denied any stories narrating this experience of human vulnerability or were depicted as resorting to superstitious and …

Waking Sleep: The Uncanny In Modernist Literary Aesthetics, Delmar R. Reffett Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--English

With the dawning of the twentieth century, writers and critics found themselves facing a social world undergoing massive change, the forces of capitalist modernity leaving the individual increasingly disaffected and disconnected from her surroundings. This social world, rent as it was by alienation, offered a hostile environment for the sort of coherence that had traditionally been prized by Western aesthetics since the Enlightenment. How could a literary work attain a degree of coherence while reflecting a deeply dissonant modernity? Navigating this contradiction between literature’s inherited values and literature’s possibilities in alienated society can be seen as central to the project …

Wholeness And Belonging In Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split: An Eco-Politics Of Resilience And Resistance, Mary Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split illuminates an urgent and radical eco-political project: the creation of whole, resilient, co-species communities capable of surviving interlocking political, social, and ecological crises. Finney foregrounds the strategic practice of belonging as a method of survival within contexts of systemic oppression and climate chaos. “Belonging,” in these terms, is not a “natural” ontological state, but a mode of co-being that is continually (re)created and (re)enacted through daily world-making practices: foodways, spatial habitation, migration and movement. Belonging is a collection of reciprocal, adaptive, situated praxes that make and sustain beings and worlds. They rely on and …

Transformative Subjects: American Children’S Periodicals, 1855-1905, Emily R. Dehaven

Theses and Dissertations--English

Through this dissertation, I explore the ways that authors and editors use the form of children’s periodicals to discuss questions of childhood independence, the structure of the family, and the balance of power between children and adults with regards to literary texts. I examine the ways in which adults and children negotiate control over the periodicals and over the images of transformation present within those texts. Periodicals offer a unique opportunity for interaction between readers and editors. Magazines and newspapers encouraged readers to write into the magazine to offer their own insights and opinions. Readers of children’s magazines even had …

Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …

Values In The Air: Community And Capital Conversion In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Deirdre Mikolajcik

Theses and Dissertations--English

Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility …

Nineteenth-Century Pets And The Politics Of Touch, Valerie L. Stevens

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nineteenth-Century Pets and the Politics of Touch examines texts of the era in which both humans and animals find empowerment at the point of physical encounter. I challenge contemporary perceptions of human-pet relationships as sweetly affectionate by focusing on touch. I uncover an earlier interest in the close reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that these nineteenth-century thinkers presented what I call a “politics of touch,” in which intimate and often jarring physical encounters allow for mutuality and autonomy. I first turn to Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and protective violence, a condoned ferocity that frequently unites and guards …

Madness Narratives: Victorian Textual Responses To The Insanity Diagnosis, Jonathan Glenn Tinnin

Theses and Dissertations--English

In Madness Narratives, I examine four understudied texts at the intersection of Victorian asylums, patients’ lack of voice, and resistance narratives. I argue that these texts all reject the silencing power of the insanity diagnosis as they represent patients, former patients, and asylum reformers creating counternarratives that call for recognition of the patients’ humanity and right to be heard. In my first chapter, “Narrating Insanity: Constructing the Madness Narrative in Charles Reade’s Hard Cash,” I assert that Reade’s 1863 novel proposes a nuanced understanding of the insanity diagnosis as a collaboratively-composed story that justifies the confinement of the …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …

But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr

Theses and Dissertations--English

“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …

Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20^th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19^th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the …

A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations--English

Leading into the American Revolution, Puritan captivity narratives gained a resurgent popularity as nationalized sentiment burned towards political upheaval. Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative (1682) was reprinted six times between 1770-1776, signifying an incredible interest in Puritan stories that seemed to antithetically inspire a progressive and radical revolution against England. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson enhanced an already fervent revolutionary sentiment, transforming a seemingly straightforward captivity narrative into a totem meant to represent the oppressive struggle between England and her most coveted colony.

Such a literary revival taps …