English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Collection Of Short Stories, Tryphena Lizzert Yeboah

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The short stories in this collection offer diverse and expansive realities of the human condition, particularly around the lives of women—their identities, bodies, emotions, and how they live and navigate a social order that is often constructed to dominate and undermine them. How can we complicate marginalized portrayals of women shaped by the male gaze and interrogate the patriarchal presumption of the African woman? What different approaches should be employed in capturing different aspects of her domestic and social life, how she defines and expresses autonomy, how she subverts gender norms, and her experiences of emotional and physical violence? These …

Estranged Temporality: How Time Tells Stories In Science Fiction, Phillip H. Howells

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

According to Darko Suvin in his influential critical treatise, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, estrangement in Science Fiction (SF) gives authors the ability to build worlds related to but distant from our own using specific metaphors. This dissertation takes up this term and applies it to the fulcrum of time in SF as a method of creating possible futures and imaginative pasts in order to illuminate the realities of the present. The realities of the present are congruent with the material circumstances of the past, and this can be seen in the kinds of SF worlds built by members of …

Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis serves as a rationale for the creative writing pedagogy I use and how it serves my high school creative writing class. As my school district made the decision to overhaul our English curriculum, the English department decided to add Creative Writing as an English class elective.

The work for planning these new classes was spread around the English Department, and I was assigned to design the curriculum for the new Creative Writing class. Designing an entire class from scratch leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation. However, as excited for this new course as I was, …

Sacrificial Lambs: The Perils Of Childhood In Shakespeare, Benjamin Sidney Reed

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

“Sacrificial Lambs: The Perils of Childhood in Shakespeare” utilizes childhood studies to read five Shakespearean plays and how they portray child characters in perilous situations such as kidnapping, banishment, and murder. It argues these dangers emulate real circumstances young people faced in the early modern period, including the boy actors playing these roles. The dissertation’s key research questions include how children in these plays exhibit agency in the face of danger, how they resist adult systems of power, and how audiences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have responded to these portrayals of imperiled and rebellious youths. The Introduction …

Lincoln's Carnegie Library: A History Of Community And Philanthropy, Emily Blomstedt

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Nebraska received 69 Carnegie libraries from the Carnegie foundation between 1899 and 1922. The first and most expensive Nebraska Carnegie library was granted to Lincoln in December 1899, after a fire destroyed Lincoln’s previous library. Lincoln’s main Carnegie library served the community between 1902 and 1960 before it was torn down in 1961 to build the present-day Bennett Martin library. This thesis explores the 60-year history of Lincoln’s Carnegie library, how it connects to national trends surrounding Carnegie libraries, and the role community and philanthropy played in the development of Lincoln’s public library system. These themes are examined through a …

Between Pages And Politics: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Of Book Bans, Hannah Morrison

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Across the United States, school boards are being inundated with requests to ban books. While these conversations are often localized, what the rise in censorship across the country suggests is that there is a fierce movement behind censoring young adult literature. What is frequently erased in these campaigns are stories of people of color and queer communities, alongside topics such as sexuality, drugs, or violence. The presiding conclusion within childhood studies on how we have reached a point where censorship is abundantly common in American schools is that public discourse views children as less than or not fully formed, thus …

Beyond The Looking Glass: Dreams And Somnial States And Spaces In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Poised between a waning magico-theological tradition of symbolic dream interpretation and the rising influence of scientific dream theories, which equated dreaming with disorder, the dream occupied a unique space in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Dreams were coming untethered from signification, as natural philosophers deemed their content indecipherable and chaotic. Yet vestiges of early modern beliefs could still lend supernatural power and polyphony to dreams.

This was not simply a matter of making a binary choice between two ways of thinking about dreams but instead a site of collisions and coalescences. I contend that the ways in which dreams were conceptualized in …

Booktok's Potentials And Possibilities In Composition Studies: An Interactive Digital Collection, Hanna Varilek

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis, “BookTok’s Potentials and Possibilities in Composition Studies: An Interactive Digital Collection,” explores the phenomenon of BookTok, a vibrant out-of-school literacy program on the social media platform TikTok centered around books, reading, and literary discussions. As digital platforms continue to shape contemporary cultural landscapes, BookTok emerges as a unique space where users engage with literature and participate in discussions that influence their reading habits and preferences. This thesis explores the possibilities of BookTok in reimagining the current landscape of first-year writing and composition classrooms by introducing an interactive digital collection of BookTok content and educational resources titled, The …

The American West, 1899–1936: Prose, Poetry & Drama, Harriet Monroe, Michael R. Hill, Lindsay Atnip

Zea E-Books Collection

This comprehensive volume presents Harriet Monroe’s (1860–1936) previously unexplored love affair with the American West, an infatuation that blossomed in three interrelated genres: prose, poetry, and drama. Known internationally as the founder and influential editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, here Monroe is revealed as a prolific author with a passion for the people, scenery, and environments she encountered during western escapes from her constricted urban life in Chicago. Monroe’s western travels were transformative. Originally schooled in the literary and artistic traditions of Europe, Monroe became increasingly convinced of the fundamental importance of the American West as the …

“The Direful Spectacle Of The Wrack”: Teaching Against Colonialism Through Shipwrecks And Shakespeare, Sara A. Rich

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

It has become increasingly apparent that anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogies are necessary in higher education classrooms, and honors education as an experimental zone is an ideal place to test ideas that can be taken into the wider university community. Honors professors epitomize the teacher-scholar model, and this paper presents a six-year trajectory of anti-colonial pedagogy coupled with original interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Bringing canonical Shakespeare into conversation with historical shipwrecks and their aftermath, students learn how The Tempest was written at a pivotal point in history, coincidentally situated in the same year as the earliest …

Harriet Monroe: An American Poet In Vevey. Her Diary Entries, May 16 – July 26, 1898, Harriet Monroe, Michael R. Hill, Deborah Anna Logan

Zea E-Books Collection

Since its inception in 1912, Poetry magazine has been widely regarded as a premier resource for modern poetry and poets. Published in Chicago as Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, its legacy continues today through the Poetry Foundation, a superlative online resource for seekers of poets, poems, and random lines needing identification. A less immediately recognizable legacy is that of its founder, Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), one of those fin de siècle “intellectual women” typically dismissed as a contradiction in terms. But Monroe was a force to be reckoned with, and this beautifully crafted volume participates in the recuperation of a life …

English 890: Advanced Research Methods, A First Benchmark Portfolio, Janel Simons

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

In this benchmark portfolio, I reflect on course design and student learning in a course I teach for incoming Master's students in the English department, ENGL 890: Advanced Research Methods. ENGL 890 is a mini-session course intended to introduce students to various aspects of managing graduate-level research within the discipline of English studies. In this portfolio, I discuss the learning outcomes and goals for the course, highlight some of the assessments I use, reflect on student learning throughout the course, and articulate changes that might improve student learning in future iterations of the course. Given the overarching goals of this …

Transcorporeal Habitus: Adapting Sociological Embodiment To The Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Trevor Bleick

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The knowledge that humans have become a geological force necessitates a reimagining of what it means to be human. This thesis explores the ways in which bodies (both human and nonhuman) are represented within the self-conscious Anthropocene. This tripartite analysis, synthesized in the term ‘transcorporeal habitus,’ presents a framework through which we can better understand the ways bodies are entangled within a greater ecosystem. By drawing on the works of scholars in the fields of sociology, ecocriticism, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) this thesis provides the groundwork for reimaging humanness in a period of immense change. Pierre Bourdieu and Stacy …

Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is thought that African literature tends to be dominated by the masculine-oriented politics that also characterizes African public political life. In some cases, this is true, but there is a feminist movement in Africa, and many African women writers are using global feminist principles and global anti-colonial principles to write a different kind of literature. As a consequence, recent novels such as Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), set in Zimbabwe, and Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019), revise past, often male, African writers’ approaches to depicting the genders, even as they also criticize, implicitly or explicitly, still-widespread colonialist …

Pedagogical Alliances Among Writing Instructors And Teaching Librarians Through A Writing Information Literacy Community Of Practice, Zoe Mcdonald, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In this praxis piece, a WPA and a writing instructor describe a writing information literacy community of practice among writing instructors and teaching librarians. Through paying attention to one resulting assignment, a full class annotated bibliography, the co-authors argue this professional development program extended collaborations among the writing program and the library to center contextual notions of authority and metacognition that connect to composition’s democratic political commitments.

Wakara's Waterscapes: Storytelling, Cartography, And Rhetorical Sovereignty On The Shores Of The Green River, Abbey O'Brien

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In the mid nineteenth-century, Wakara, a prominent Ute leader, witnessed the invasion of his homeland by Mormon settlers and mountain-men. He met the scouts and explorers who were sent out to examine the land and waterscapes, and who drew maps along their way. It was those same maps which were eventually used as tools to justify colonial expansion all across the Utah territories, Wakara’s home. But Wakara resisted. Employing his understandings of the roles that cartography and the written word played in Mormon and settler discourse, Wakara created his own maps in order to assert his Indigenous authority over the …

Interpretation And Ovidian Myth In Alexander’S Bridge And O Pioneers!, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay describes interpretive strategies widely applied to Ovidian mythic materials during the period of Cather’s early career, especially those operative in Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! The article assumes that widely held conventional interpretations of myths, in this case Ovidian myths, in a specific time and area are part of their semantic content, or iconology, and are tools Cather used in communicating with her audience. The essay then looks at a passage in the 1912 Alexander’s Bridge and two disputed passages in the 1913 O Pioneers! along with extended Bacchic themes in the latter novel that employ conventional Ovidian …

Reflections On The Victorian(Ist) Impulse To Totalize Africa, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality …

The Politics Of Tools, Stephen Ramsay

Department of English: Faculty Publications

A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,” [Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor

Zea E-Books Collection

Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This …

Memoirs Of The Foreign Legion, Maurice Magnus, D.H. Lawrence

Zea E-Books Collection

Maurice Magnus was 39 years old when he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to join the fight against Germany in World War I. Magnus was an American expatriot living in Rome—a theatrical agent, tutor, newspaper correspondent, writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. He soon discovered his error—the Legion he found consisted largely of German exiles, prison-avoiding felons, and contemptuous French officers. Magnus spent about six weeks training in North Africa before a transfer to southern France provided the opportunity to desert and flee back to Italy. The Memoirs recounts his brief disenchanted tenure as a Legionnaire. After his military service …

William Shakespeare’S All Is True, Lord Chamberlain’S “Truth,” And Civil Religion, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first title for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII—All Is True—may reflect standard early modern usage signifying that all is an aspect of ‘troth’ or loyalty, all is common understanding, or all is received from a divine source. In the play, the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s only character so named, serves the Henrician monarchy’s “truth” by serving Henry’s religious and monarchic goals as the Jacobean Lord Chamberlain similarly served James I’s goals, assuring audiences of the integrity, truth, and legitimacy of the monarchy and its faith. The play shows the Lord Chamberlain working to strengthen the loyalty of Henry’s realm …

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pretrial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 …

Dewey In The Digital Age: Experiential Composition And Reflection As Transformation, Danielle Shumaker Page

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the act of composing as a transformational, ongoing event and offers digital reflection as a tool for first-year writing students to evaluate their own writing practices. I analyze student vlogs produced in response to an assignment that asked students to produce digital reflections on their work as writers across the process of completing a final course project. My findings suggest that adapting experiential learning principles, digital and non-digital, into composition classroom design creates and facilitates writing experiences that are immersive and transformational. Crucial to designing learning occasions is the process of active reflection upon what the writer …

The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …

Migration And Trauma: Memory And The Myths Of El Otro Lado, Elva Moreno Del Rio

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of two parts that scrutinize the myth of the United States

and el cuento of El Otro Lado. The first part titled, “The Illness Rooted in the American Myth” connects the U.S. myth to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s piece Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. In analyzing the writings of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Eden E. Torres, I indentify the impact that Crevecoeur’s myth had on Black, Indigenous and other people of color. This research illustrates the physical and psychological effects that these ideologies have on the mind and body of …

Dancing And Poetry: A Study Of The Whirling Dervish Dance Through Rumi’S Poetry, Tasneem Huq

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This exploration investigates the influence of Rumi’s book of poetry, Mathnawi, upon the Sufi practice of the Whirling Dervish dances. It argues that Rumi’s Mathnawi underlies the choreography of the Whirling Dervish dances. Each step of the dance expresses, manifests or embodies themes found in Rumi’s poetry: separation from Unity, ascension, annihilation, and a return to Unity. The thesis introduces this argument, and then discusses historical, theological, and linguistic themes related to Rumi, Sufism, and the Whirling Dervish dances. Following this, the thesis provides a framework that begins with the Neoplatonic theory of emanation grounding Rumi’s poetic thought, followed by …

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …

The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …