English Language and Literature Commons^™

Teasing Tales And Tit(Bit)S, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Collection of African-American folklore from Shuckin' and Jivin' by Daryl Dance.

James Branch Cabell's Jurgen : Fulfillment And Paradox, Elizabeth Witham Loving

Master's Theses

James Branch Cabell's controversial, Jurgen, is the novel that propelled him into fame. Suppressed as pornography only months after its publication, Jurgen drew attention from many areas. While Cabell's peers protested the suppression and praised the novel as a masterpiece, other readers were only interested in the forbidden "racy" language. Unfortunately, it was for the second reason that Jurgen became the most widely read of Cabell's works. The general public was not interested in his talent as a writer, but it was interested in a scandalous book. The novel's suppression received so much publicity, that everyone wanted to read …

"This Enterprise Non Shall Partake With Me." : Milton's Conquering Of His Precursors Through Orphean Allusions, Kathryn Nyreen Cooke

Master's Theses

Within his poetry and prose, John Milton shows a respect for the authors of antquity while simultaneously seeking his own voice, a style that makes him different from and better than his predecessors. Milton's works contain expressions of these Renaissance characteristics: the appreciation of the Classics, the search for a more personal relationship with God, and the attempt to achieve some individuality; however, even in the smallest of literary figures such as the Orphean allusions, the need to combine a respect for the past with the ambition for a uniquely personal voice as a poet exists. The isolation of the …

The Voice Unbound : Mary Shelley's Vision Of Romanticism, Courtenay Noelle Smith

Master's Theses

Mary Shelley was propelled into fame while still a teenager because of her powerful and "gothic" novel Frankenstein. This novel and several facts about the author's personal life have kept her in the public eye since her death. Though Frankenstein has long been a subject of scholarship, Mary Shelley has been little studied directly in relation to the great literary movement, Romanticism, in which she participated Romantic literature is pervaded by numerous political and aesthetic tensions, in particular the paradox of the ideals of genius and fellowship. In many of the Romantic works readers and scholars will find that the …

Go Eena Kumbla: A Comparison Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home And Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

When I returned to Jamaica in July 1982, I took as gifts for friends some recent novels by black American writers, including Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. Upon my arrival, Erna Brodber gave me a copy of her new book, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. As I read it, I was struck by another instance of how similar experiences (in this case, being black and female in the Americas of the civil rights, black awareness, Rastafarian, and feminist movements) had inspired such strikingly similar expressions in books published the same year (1980) by an American …

Ernest Miller Hemingway : Dimensions Of Death, Bruce R. Mcdonald

Honors Theses

The life and works of Ernest Miller Hemingway resemble the views of the people of Castile, Spain in many ways. From an early age, Hemingway took an "intelligent interest" in the concept of death. It was an interest that was to grow to encompass almost every aspect of his sixty year life and his literary career. For Hemingway, death was an essential component in his existence as well as a necessary consequence of living in our world. Hemingway's exploration of the notion of death gave meaning and security to his being. For Hemingway, death eventually became an all consuming obsession …

Shakespeare And Astrology, William Bruce Smith

Master's Theses

The popular ity of astrology in Elizabethan England is ref lected by the large number of references to it in the works of William Shakespeare. The majority of astrological references in the Shakespearean canon are "commonplaces" and do not add signif icantly to our understanding of his work, although they are of interest in studying exactly how much astrological knowledge he possessed. There are astrological references in the plays, however, that are of significance in the study of character in Shakespeare. In certain plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Winter' s Tale) a judgement concerning various individuals ' inner nobility may …

[Introduction To] Folklore From Contemporary Jamaicans, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

There is not now available, nor has there ever been, a general and comprehensive introductory collection of the rich folklore of Jamaica. Yet, despite this widespread enthrallment with the better-known aspects of Jamaican folk life and culture, the fact remains that no extensive general collection of the vast range of Jamaican folklore has been assembled.

Dr. Dance spent six months in Jamaica from June through November 1978 researching and compiling stories and folklore for this book.

A Study Of The Self In The Red And The Black And The Confessions Of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Roberta Mowery

Honors Theses

Although there are many reasons for reading and writing literature, perhaps the most compelling one is to gain knowledge of and access to the self. One of the most interesting aspects in the literary study of the self involves the individual's perception of his public and private self. This differentiation between the public an dprivate persona is developed in dept in Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. The protagonists of these two works lead lives of duplicity and hypocrisy, each submerging his private personality in order to get ahead in …

"Learn It To The Younguns": Passing On Folk Wisdom, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This is the book I had been planning to write for the past fifteen years, it was inevitable that if I kept procrastinating, someone would more expeditiously respond to the obvious void. Finally H. Nigel Thomas has provided the kind of exploration and explication of the use, influence, and impact of Black folklore on literature that I perceived was so much needed. Despite the numerous published commentaries on the influence of Afro-American folklore on individual works and specific authors, and the occasional consideration of its influence on a particular genre or a limited period (such as Keith Byerman's focus on …

You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin, like innumerable other Black artists, has found that in his efforts to express the plight of the Black man in America, he has been forced to deal over and over again with that inescapable dilemma of the Black American - the lack of sense of a positive self-identity. Time after time in his writings he has shown an awareness of the fact that identity contains, as Erik Erikson so accurately indicates, "a complementarity of past and future both in the individual and in society." Baldwin wrote in "Many Thousands Gone," "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we …

Zora Neale Hurston And The Emergence Of Self, Cheryl Y. Williams

Honors Theses

Abraham Maslow in his work From The Farther Reaches of Human Nature made the statement:

Every human being has (two) sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging to the past, afraid to grow... afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self (45-6).

What makes …

Lewis Carroll's Dissection And Restructure Of The Social Self, Pamela F. Pecora

Honors Theses

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, should not be categorized as literature primarily for children. These stories are works of art whose complex nature demans intellectual interpretation. Such a study is not meant to take joy away from the innocent and pleasurable surface of Alice's adventures. Instead, the usefulness of probing deeply into this literature is to reveal a fundamental lesson that Carroll imparts to his readers. After studying the feelings prevalent in English Victorian society, Carroll's personal feelings as illustrated through his themes, and his devices and techniqu eof writing, I have …

[Introduction To] Long Gone: The Mecklenburg Six And The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

Magnitude of the Death Row escape on May 31, 1984 of six condemned men (Linwood Briley, James Briley, Earl Clanton, Jr., Willie Leroy Jones, Derick Lynn Peterson, and Lem Tuggle) incarcerated in the Mecklenburg Correction Center in Boydton, Virginia is chronicled.

The terror it inspired in Virginia and up and down the East Coast, and even into Canada, evoked memories of the numerous exploits of fugitives and out-laws on the run in Black folktales, Black toasts, Black music, and Black literature.

Richard Brautigan : A Man In Search Of America, Elizabeth A. Howell

Honors Theses

Avant-garde writing tends to be an "iffy" thing these days, more a matter of cocktail chatter than execution. The resources for experiments seem used up, or ash John Barth put it, "exhausted" (Pinkser 75). Things and words increase in quantity but diminish in value and meaning, making the contemporary writer more and more unwilling to follow the old ways of arranging them. Though this is not a new predicament for an aspiring writer, it is one that seems threatening in an age of self-conscious art. Writers must look for new grammars and new semantics. Some writers turn this quest for …

Kate Chopin : A Different Look, Kimberly Ann Francis

Honors Theses

Kate Chopin? Who is she? This is a common resonse of many people who are not familiar with this outstanding woman writer of the late 1800's and early 1900's. In fact, this same question would more likely have gone unanswered then than today. For the most part, many of her contemporaries are prominently discussed and read today because they enjoyed popularity while they were alive. They not only established literary voges; in many cases they gave the public what it wanted to read. Such writers include Mark Twain and Stephen Crane as well as Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow. Kate …

Alice Walker: An Interpretation Of Her Works, Niamh Walsh

Honors Theses

In summary, I feel as if Alice Walker has used her literature for far more than mere literary entertainment. I believe that she wrote with a very strong message for both blacks and women. To both minorities, of which she herself is proud to belong, she calls for acknowledgmetn of their attirubutes, their worth and their limitations: she calls for reclamation of the many positive attributes that have, for too long, been derided as insignificant: and she calls for a loud, joyous celebration of all the many defining aspects of womanhood and blackness. I see this evident in most, in …

Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Struggle For Poetic Vision, Kathryn M. Fessler

Honors Theses

In this study, I will trace the developmetn and history of Hopkins' struggle to realize and live by a vision of an immanent God, using as the gauge of his progress the poems, which are the celarest expressions of Hopkins' heart. I will illustrate the chronological progression of this vision in the poetry, and discuss specific poems in terms of their places in the history of Hopkins' life as a poet and a priest. I will also pay some degree of attention to linguistic innovations in the poetry, since these are manifestations of Hopkins' liberation from certain formal constraints made …

Toni Morrison's Approach To Understanding, Joyce Dorris

Honors Theses

Toni Morrison tackles the problems for which she does not have resolutions. In order to make an impact on readers and achieve a meaningful understanding, Morrison manipulates readers' emotions. She says, "My writing expects, demands participatory reading. The reader supplies the emotions. Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience" (Tate, 125). Morrison carefully positions her readers to see what her characters see and react as they would. Morrison feels if the readers can see the person experiencing the thing, they do not need an explanation. The illustration will …

[Introduction To] Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical And Critical Sourcebook, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The beginnings of Caribbean literature lie hidden In the folklore of the plantation era and in the prim, condescending travelogues, the exotic novels, and the apparently naive slave narratives - often authored by Whites - that began to appear as early as the eighteenth century. Francis Williams, the classically educated Black poet of 18th century Jamaica, used conventional Augustan poetics to protest racism and assert the common humanity of mankind. The vision draws from Caribbean life. By the 19th century some black poets began to write of their own concerns and experiences, some writing in the local vernacular.

The essays …

The Pastoral Tradition In Film, Andrew J. Ford

Honors Theses

The pastoral, whether in painting, music, literature, or film, has always attempted to capture that fleeting moment in history, real or unreal, where man is autonomous. The pastoral life occurs only after man has gained a considerable amount of control over nature and before he has found himself controlled by his fellow man or by those common evils made real and specific by civilization. In other words, the pastoral tries to capture or create that period in history where man has conquered the wilderness in some major way, usually by farming or animal herding, but has not yet become involved …

James Joyce's Use Of Topography In Ulysses, Mary Beth Delea

Honors Theses

James Joyce's Ulysses stands out as the most conscientiously topographical novel ever written, according to the authors of Literary Landscapes of the British Isles. The Dublin which Joyce recreates is the Dublin of physical reality, painstakingly transposed so as to elicit exact details of the city. This detailed locale plays an important role in the novel, revealing many of Joyce's ingenious artistic purposes. The topography of Dublin appears the beginning of Ulysses and is significant until the end of the novel, influencing three major aspects of the work. The aspects referred to include the personality of Dublin as well as …

An Experiment In Southern Letters : The Reviewer, 1921-1925, Elizabeth Spindler Scott

Master's Theses

The Reviewer (1921-1925) was a "little magazine" created by four iconoclastic young editors, Emily Clark, Hunter Stagg, Margaret Freeman, and Mary Street to counter Mencken's claim that the South was a "Sahara of the Bozart." Aided by R. L. Mencken, James Branch Cabell and Carl Van Vechten the editors secured contributions from the most famous writers of the time to publish with their "discoveries." This thesis contains the magazine's history, an extensive bibliography, and an anthology drawn from the most representative sections in each genre. Copies of The Reviewer are extremely rare, and the anthology is intended to show that …

Bosom Buddies And Lonely Hearts, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorius, Ol' Cap'n nostalgically reminisces about the good old days when he enjoyed what he recollects as close loving relationships with Blacks. He recalls to Gitlow "how you and me growed up together. Had the same mammy - my mammy was your mother." And Gitlow responds, "Yessir! Bosom buddies." Despite the satire and irony with which Ossie Davis consciously invests this scene, it suggest to me another irony - one which Davis certainly did not intend - and that is that one of the images of the Black woman which has frequently been shared by …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

An American Myth : James Dickey's "The Zodiac", Arthur Gordon Van Ness

Master's Theses

In the brief explanatory preface of "The Zodiac" Dickey says: "Its twelve sections are the story of a drunken and perhaps dying Dutch poet who returns to his home in Amsterdam after years of travel and tries desperately to relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe." The question immediately arises as to how a Dutch poet, and particularly one living in the Old World city of Amsterdam, relates to an American myth. What, in other words, does a Dutchman returning to his home in Holland nave to do with the New World?

Meredith's Women In Time : Diana Merion And Clara Middleton, Dana Sims Brewer

Master's Theses

In The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways, George Meredith joins the ranks of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill in a slowly evolving cultural crusade to gain self respect, dignity, and independence for Victorian women.

The Post-Postmodern Aesthetics Of John Fowles, Claiborne Johnson Cordle

Master's Theses

Because a thesis is by definition a proposi­ tion to be argued, I feel some obigation to make strong assertion--either John Fowles is a post­ modernist writer, or John Fowles is not a postmodernist writer. What is immediately "problematic" about such an either/or proposition is that each side can be argued convincingly by a careful process of selection of examples to support the prospective cases (and omission of those which refute them). I cannot easily dismiss the wisdom of Northrop Frye's statement that, "They think of ideas as weapons; they seek the irrefutable argument, which keeps eluding them because all …

Jamaica Novel Has Ring Of Truth. The Harder They Come By Michael Thelwell (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In a recent interview, Michael Thelwell told of being present at a Caribbean Day celebration in New York attended by countless people with "a nostalgia for their country" and of his resultant resolve to give Jamaicans and their children something to read about themselves. In "The Harder They Come," Thelwell has more than achieved his goal, for the novel does not merely offer a bit of nostalgia for homesick Jamaicans; it is also a thrilling introduction to a culture and a people for the outsider.

A Kierkegaardian Reading Of Three Novels By Faulkner, Francine Marilyn Hall

Master's Theses

William Faulkner and S¢ren Kierkegaard, although separated in time by almost a century, possess a common concern: both are deeply interested in the numerous ways in which individuals live out their lives in either hope or despair. Exploring the avenues which might alleviate this despair and providing a basis for hope are tasks both authors have accepted as theirs.

This paper relates three novels by Faulkner to the stages of existence set forth by Kierkegaard in much of his philosophical writing. I intend to show that Faulk­ ner's characters serve as illustrations of different ways in which an individual may …