English Language and Literature Commons^™

Fallen Creator And Failed Christ: An Exploration Of Religious Imagery And Metafiction In Ian Mcewan’S Atonement, Tabitha Robinson

Student Research Submissions

This paper examines the religious imagery in Atonement by Ian McEwan through a close reading of the structure and main characters Briony, Cecilia and Robbie. The novel is deeply concerned with questions of sin and redemption, which intersect with religious symbolism and metafiction to create the story. This paper reads Briony as both a creator god and a failed Christ figure and Cecilia and Robbie as Adam and Eve characters, showing the text’s self-awareness through its use of narrative to create meaning. It argues that the field of religious studies offers many theories and terms that enrich the field of …

Exploring Fragmentation In Ali Smith’S Autumn, Emily Koberlein

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This paper seeks to explore the effect of fragmentation in Ali Smith’s Autumn. Through examination of academic literature that compares traditional fragmentation utilized in modernist literature to the effects of fragmentation and its reappearance in contemporary literature, this essay seeks to examine the effects, implications, and practice of using fragmentation in contemporary work. As seen in Autumn, the fragmented nature of contemporary works functions as a method of consistency rather than to create a disconnect between the author and their text. The use of fragmentation is seen in this text’s structure, the relationship of its main characters, and the disjointed …

Diaspora And Identity In Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Riley Prater

Student Research Submissions

My paper, entitled “Identity and Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth” was written for and approved by Dr. Haffey in her 21st Century Fiction (449U) seminar class. The paper explores the complex relationship between first generation Bengali American characters and their identities in the wake of diaspora. This paper shows that Lahiri works to create a kind of liminal space in which her first generation characters exist - a space between being both Bengali and American. Lahiri does so through exploring family relationships, culture, and the pull between heritage and assimilation in order to highlight a new culture of existing …

Unraveling The Threads: Memory And Narrative In Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Emily Rooksby

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This paper, written for Dr. Haffey’s English 449U course on 21st Century Fiction, explores the intricate narrative structure and metafictional elements in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. The novel is a commentary on the power and responsibilities of storytelling, particularly how narratives shape our understanding of memory and truth. Through the lens of its protagonist, Briony Tallis, McEwan demonstrates the complexities of memory and the subjectivity of truth. Briony’s narrative, marked by guilt and a quest for forgiveness, becomes a vehicle for examining how biases and emotions influence perception. The paper delves into the novel’s use of multiple narrative perspectives and …

Dorian And The Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Alexandra Wohlford

Student Research Submissions

Written for Dr. Chris Foss’s English 478 Seminar on Oscar Wilde, “Dorian and the Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray” examines one of Wilde’s most infamous and beloved works through the lens of both psychoanalytic and queer theory. Drawing on the Romantic and Gothic traditions’ concept of the “literary double,” this research paper explores the dynamic portrait of Dorian Gray as a double for multiple characters in the text, serving as a representation of their repressed homosexual desire. Namely, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray himself emerge as the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, …

“The Battle Against Sameness”: Queer Marriages In Forster And Woolf, Lindsey Hatton

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The Bloomsbury Group was known for unconventionality, both in their lives and in their writing. This holds especially true for E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, whose novels uniquely depict queer relationships as an alternative to traditional, rigid, heterosexual marriages. This paper looks at Clarissa and Richard from Mrs. Dalloway, Margaret and Henry from Howards End, and Maurice and Alec from Maurice and how each of these couples subvert the societal conventions of the Victorian era in different ways. A close reading of these texts and characters allows for a nuanced understanding of Woolf and Forster’s revolutionary visions and demonstrates how …

Mutually Exclusive: Being Gay And Being A Man In E.M. Forster’S Maurice, Kimber Foreman

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This paper outlines the impacts of English heteronormativity on E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice by exploring applicable cultural context and its reflection within the text. Maurice was published after Forster’s death, and as his only novel with explicit queer characters, is the best suited for parsing Forster’s own understanding of the society he lived in. With a primary focus on the characters of Maurice and Clive, the paper examines the dichotomy that Forster posits heteronormative English society creates between traditional English masculinity and the identities of gay men. This examination ultimately leads to the conclusion that Forster writes the Greenwood-bound fate …

“Hysteria Abated”: Forster’S Treatment Of Women’S Mental Health In Howards End, Rosemary Pauley

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In Howards End, Forster’s female characters are written off multiple times as having ‘hysteria’ or simply being foolish, sensitive women, which was a common attitude towards mental illness in Edwardian society. This essay investigates the concept of hysteria and Forster’s use of mental health with his female characters, using these factors to enhance the understanding of the characters, particularly the struggles or judgments that the three leading ladies, Helen, Margaret, and Ruth, face. The initial inspiration was drawn from Margaret’s jumping out of the carriage, as well as the neglect of Ruth’s dying wish; both women are deemed hysterical. While …

Bildungsroman And Trauma In Harper Lee’S To Kill A Mockingbird And Dorothy Allison’S Bastard Out Of Carolina, Bernadette D'Auria

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Scholars have long viewed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as a young girl’s Bildungsroman. Through an adult Scout’s reflection on her childhood, Lee takes her readers on a journey that has traditionally been categorized as a young girl’s growth from naivete to maturity. While Scout is witness to the impacts and traumas of racism in Maycomb, scholars have often overlooked Scout’s ambivalent attitude regarding these events. Scout sentimentalizes Maycomb and rarely processes or reacts to the traumatic events that encompass her childhood, leaving Lee’s narrative a poor example of a growth towards maturity. In contrast, the coming-of-age arc in …

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

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Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

The Science Of Art “Faithfully Presented”: Entropy In British Victorian Literature, Hannah Harris

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In the chemical world, entropy, or the randomness and chaos of a system, must continually increase; it is much more favorable for things to fall apart than to be put together. This scientific concept can also be rightly applied to the study of literature. While it is true books contain information put together into some sense of order from chaos, making them counterintuitive to entropy, I am convinced these works must still obey the laws of thermodynamics. There must be an increase in chaos somewhere, and if it is not within the words themselves, it must lie within the ideas …

Representations Of Disability In Literature And Elementary Education, Rebecca Young

Student Research Submissions

By purposefully sharing diverse and inclusive literature with children during their formative years, educators can help them develop ideals which are positively inclusive of others and which support positive self-understandings. This project, an ENGL 491 independent study supervised by Dr. Chris Foss, investigates the ways that the disability community is represented within literature, as well as how positive, diverse, and inclusive literary representations of disability can benefit this community and those around it. With time, small-scale ideological shifts toward inclusivity can further spread throughout society. Thus, these literary representations can enrich all readers and have lasting positive implications for broad …

Understanding Gender Practices And Identity In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse Through The Theories Of Erving Goffman, Meaghan Mcintyre

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This paper uses sociologist Erving Goffman’s theories to examine the nature of gender and identity in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To The Lighthouse. By reading the novel through the lens of Goffman’s theory about what constitutes a performance, as well as applying his argument about the role of the front region and back region in shaping human conduct, gendered behavior is shown to be part of a “socialized [and] molded” (Goffman 35) performance instead of being a predisposed trait. In her representation of the Victorian man Mr. Ramsay, the Victorian woman Mrs. Ramsay, and the modern woman Lily Briscoe, Woolf …

Septimus Smith Had To Die: An Examination Of Virginia Woolf’S Frustration With The Mental Health System After Wwi, Mackenzie K. Mccotter

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In 1922, Virginia Woolf began writing Mrs. Dalloway as reports of shell shocked soldiers began coming out. Treatments were being created and doctors were putting those treatments into practice at the same time. Woolf was armed with her own experiences in the area of treatments for mental health and created Septimus Smith to display how wrong the contemporary treatments are for those struggling with their mental health. Septimus’ doctors, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, were examples of the way doctors ignored the trauma many patients were processing after coming back from the war. By creating these characters and having …

The Deconstruction Of Patriarchal Narratives In Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, Caleigh Pope

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The concept and criteria of what constitutes the American long poem has been debated by critics for years. Ntozake Shange redefines what is traditionally considered the long poem by experimenting with form and voice in her poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The inclusion of stage directions, dancing, and chanting contributes to reimagining the long poem. Shange distinguishes her work from traditional western poetry using these features, all part of her newly christened genre the choreopoem, an art form that does not contain traditional epic features but instead draws inspiration from theatre. …

“Plough Up Some Literary”: Signifying On “Ole Massa” And White Authority Through Oral Space In Zora Neale Hurston’S Mules And Men And Eudora Welty’S “Powerhouse”, James Vaughan

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This essay compares representative methods of black storytelling and signifying that overcome white authority in Hurston’s Mules and Men and Welty’s “Powerhouse.” Though many critics disagree with Mules and Men’s ambivalent structural frame, this essay defends Hurston’s subversive use of anthropological features and humanization of the storytellers as an act of authority over the white-dominated genre of anthropology she portrays. Likewise, the “Ole Massa” tales the workmen tell in Mules and Men signify on or subvert the legacy of slavery by depicting the slave-owner as a man easily and consistently fooled by John the slave. In using oral space, the …

Generosity Of Spirit: Faith, Democracy, And Grace In Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead, Elisabeth Dellarova

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As my honors capstone and a culminating course for the English major, I have completed an individual study on the theme of grace and how it relates to the American experience in Marilynne Robinson’s work, specifically her three books Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014). The books are about the families of John Ames and Robert Boughton, who are preachers and lifelong friends living in the fictional small town of Gilead, Iowa in the 1950s. Through the books, Robinson presents her view on modern American Christianity, placing it in the context of American religious movements such as Transcendentalism, Puritanism, …

Misogyny, Rape Culture, And The Reinforcement Of Gender Roles In Hbo’S Game Of Thrones, Emma Baumgardner

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In 2011, HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones premiered for the first time, and fans have followed ever since. While the television series is based on author George R.R. Martin’s book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, there are many artistic decisions that have been made while filming the show, many of which have been critiqued as misogynistic, perpetuating rape culture or reinforcing of stereotypical gender roles. This paper aims to bring light to these claims through the usage of the cultivation theory as well as drawing on information gathered from a survey that was distributed online which included …

Power, Performativity, And Gender In Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew, Clara Sigmon

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Literary critic Theresa Kemp proposes a conservative interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew; Kemp believes that Shakespeare reinforces gender constructs and celebrates the historic oppression of women. Amy Smith analyzes The Taming of the Shrew through the theoretical framework of performativity, focusing on identity and theatricality in the play. In this essay, I will contrast Smith’s analysis of The Taming of the Shrew with Kemp’s. I will provide evidence in favor of Smith’s reading of The Taming of the Shew, and address elements of the play which are disruptive of the hierarchal vision. Katherine (Kate) Minola …

Subverting Gendered Language Expectations: A Look At My Mother, Mary Skinner

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Features of women’s speech are typically characterized by excessive politeness and submission in the forms of hedges, fillers, indirect requests, or tag questions. Additionally, women are statistically far less likely to commit interruptions, more likely to commit retrievals, and more likely to use intensifiers, excessive adjectives, and HRT. These features combine to depict women in a negative light. Traditionally, sociolinguistics has examined the ways in which women are stigmatized and how our patriarchal society has conditioned us to view women as vapid, uncertain, unintelligent, and annoying for using these features. For this thesis, I wanted to examine the ways in …

“Poor Creature:” Class Subjugation In Samuel Richardson’S Pamela, Rhonda Fowler

Student Research Submissions

Rhonda Fowler

ENGL 447K 01

Dr. Marie McAllister

12 April 2019

“Poor Creature:” Class Subjugation in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela

In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, the

struggles of the novel’s heroine, Pamela, reveal significant marginalization due to her

class status as a servant. A linguistic and literary analysis reveals a peculiarity, the

excessive use of the word “creature,” which I believe Richardson intentionally employs

to reveal the source of Pamela’s feelings of marginalization. In Richardson’s text, the

word “creature” is used one hundred fifty-nine times. Of those one hundred fifty-nine

times, one hundred twenty- six are …

Interpretations Of Female Authority In Medieval Literature, Olivia Havlin

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Beginning with Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in 1269, Medieval authors give allegorical characteristics to women defining what a Medieval woman is, who she should be, and how she should behave. This text becomes a rule book on courtly love and male and female behavior lasting for centuries and is borrowed by authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, who used Romance of the Rose as a reference to question female authority in many of his works. Therefore, it is through an understanding of characters such as the Old Woman from The Romance of the Rose, …

Challenging Society In Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist And Bleak House, Adrienne Oliver

Student Research Submissions

The purpose of this honors project is to explore the challenging social system of Dickens’s Victorian London, specifically through the perspective of Dickens’s social philosophy characterized by the need for reformative action in the fractured society represented in both Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Divided into two documents, the first component, an annotated bibliography, focuses on the scholarly discussion of negligent and criminal institutions in Oliver Twist. The second section, an analytical paper, concentrates on Bleak House and Dickens’s representation of the city as a divided space between the gentility and isolated, vulnerable groups demonstrated by at risk …

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Ramsays: Gender Politics In To The Lighthouse, Ashley Riggleson

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In my essay, I seek to complicate typical ideas surrounding gender politics in Virginia Woolf’s Modernist novel, To the Lighthouse. To do this, I first consider the portraits of Mr. Ramsay and his son, James, to show that Woolf, contrary to popular opinion shies away from simplistic portraits of masculine power. That is, rather than creating two typically masculine gentlemen, as most critics posit that she does, Woolf instead creates two characters who fail to conform to masculine norms. This discrepancy suggests that, Woolf captures a shifting cultural landscape in language and portrays the birth of a more “Modern …

The Impact Of Morphological Awareness On The Reading Development Of Children With Developmental Dyslexia, Christina Bloom

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The effects of phonological awareness on reading development have been widely researched and are understood and recognized by both educators and linguists. The effects of morphological awareness on reading, though, have been comparatively under-researched until the past fifteen to twenty years. Recent studies have shown that morphological awareness plays a significant role in children’s reading development, and an awareness of morphology makes a significant impact on the spelling, vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension skills of typically-developing children that is independent of the contribution made by phonological awareness. Children with developmental dyslexia struggle with a morphological deficit. These children do not …

The Renaissance Woman's Guide To Divorce: Exploring Marriage In Arden Of Faversham And The Tragedy Of Mariam, Briana Tyler

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The societies in the Arden of Faversham (1592) and The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) reflect the patriarchal values of Renaissance England. Alice Arden, Arden’s female lead, and Salome, the antagonist in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam, defy the social and legal parameters placed on early modern women by killing their husbands in order to marry their lovers. While Alice and Salome succeed in carrying out the respective murders, Alice is killed for her crimes and Salome remains unpunished.

In this paper, I argue that Alice’s lack of access to legal power means that she must act outside the law; however, her reliance …

The Restricted Agency Of Women In Arden Of Faversham And The Spanish Tragedy, Amanda Howar

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The Restricted Agency of Women in Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy

Amanda Howar

ENGL 447N: Renaissance Drama Seminar Sponsoring Faculty: Dr. Maya Mathur

This project looks at the restrictions placed on two early modern female characters: Alice Arden in Arden of Faversham (1592) and Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy (1589). In the paper, it argues that the female characters combat these restrictions through rhetorical and sexual manipulation, which gives them agency for a limited period of time. Alice Arden gains agency through rhetorical manipulation that pits people against her husband, Arden, and gives them opportunities to kill …

Reclaiming Independence: Comparing The Daughters In King Lear And A Thousand Acres, Zachary Caldwell

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In William Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear, Lear’s three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, betray their father at different points in the play and die as a result. Jane Smiley reimagines the story of King Lear in her novel, A Thousand Acres, by combining new plot material with material from the original text.

Smiley’s novel is narrated by Larry’s eldest daughter, Ginny, whose voice reorients Shakespeare’s patriarchal narrative and transforms it into a feminist text. Smiley changes the overarching plot to create a more sympathetic link between the daughters and the reader by granting them a level of redemption. Ginny …

Finding Sylvia: A Journey To Uncover The Woman Within Plath's Confessional Poetry, Emily Daly

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"Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman Within Plath's Confessional Poetry" focuses on investigating the relationship between Sylvia Plath's personal life and her confessional poetry. The paper explores and comments on how Plath's confessional and personal poetry both differ from and align with the writing in her letters, novel, and journals. It seeks to comment on how confessional poetry should be viewed by the reader, and how confessional poetry can be an expression of truth while also being a form of writing that heavily depends on creativity. It discusses the many theories surrounding readings of Plath, and argues that …

Religion In The Media: A Study Of Student Perception Of Media Bias In Georgia, Alexander Clegg

Student Research Submissions

Georgia is fighting to make the step from developing to developed and the influence of the Georgian Orthodox Church has been an identified barricade for European Union leadership to accept Georgia into the supranational organization. This research investigates the relationship between religiosity and the perception of media bias among college students in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was hypothesized that the relationship between religiosity and perception of media bias will be negative, as measured by survey administered to the students. This paper proves the more religious a student is, the less likely he or she will recognize a media bias towards the …