English Language and Literature Commons^™

Children's Literature As A Catalyst For Social Change, Lyndsey Reynolds

Senior Theses

This thesis is the amalgamation of a creative writing project and an exploration of the ways that children’s literature influences and draws from social justice causes. It started after reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and realizing that children’s books are not as simple as I remember them being. This book inspired me to consider the power of children’s literature to push young readers to be aware of and thoughtfully engaged with political, social and cultural conversations. The first phase of my thesis was exploring the relationship between social justice and children’s books by reading scholarly materials. In these …

“Power In Repose”: Sleep And Agency In American Literature, 1875-1916, Hannah Leigh Huber

Theses and Dissertations

“Power in Repose” argues that American literature provided its own response to the cult of wakefulness that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Narratives by authors Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerged from a time in which conceptions of rest were reshaped by the coalescence of America’s Protestant work ethic and industrial advancement. By complicating the separation of public and private space, my chosen texts present characters exhausted by the permeation of the supposedly impervious aspects of modernity, such as artificial light, traffic commotion, and round-the-clock labor and social activity. Marginalized figures are …

A Conceptual Mapping Approach For Presenting A Practical Past: Addressing Responsibility Through Contextualization In Information System Design For The Ward One Mobile Application, Sadia Obaid Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents and documents a model for telling history through technology using the Ward One application for iOS mobile devices as a test site for the idea of conceptual mapping. The historical-information delivery system was created to mobilize the rhetoricity of representation that is a procedural necessity of technological mediation.

The paper begins by explaining the exigence of the app—to tell the history of an African-American community displaced from the land now occupied by the University of South Carolina as a result of racially discriminating housing policies in Columbia, SC and across the United States. It then addresses the …

Sand, Water, Salt: Managing The Elements In Literature Of The American West, 1880-1925, Jada Ach

Theses and Dissertations

Sand, Water, Salt focuses on Progressive Era American literature that explores the theme of land management set in the so-called wasteland spaces of the arid deserts, semi- arid high plains, and Pacific Ocean. The rhetoric of turn-of-the-century land managers, engineers, and developers insisted that humans and their environments remained separate, thus affording humans the ability to control land from a safe distance. However, the works I examine in my project demonstrate that even thoroughly regulated environments remain lively and beyond total control. My project archive, which includes Progressive Era fiction, memoirs, irrigation maps, aerial photographs, dry farming manifestos, and other …

Women’S Writing And The Poetics Of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740, Rachel Mann

Theses and Dissertations

Women’s Writing and the Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740 probes the porous boundary between science and literature, revealing that the methodologies undergirding scientific experimentation were developed communally and through a confluence of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns. Ultimately, it shows that our contemporary understanding of the natural world and the scientific method have a history that is largely one of fragments. Secondly, and more importantly, it demonstrates the value of reading imaginative writing alongside scientific developments of the day.

Focusing on women’s imaginative writing in particular reveals the power and limits that ostensibly liminal voices have. As such, Women’s Writing and …

Russian Roots In Southern Soil, James Preston Edge

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, …

Divine Absence, Divine Presence: The Theological Arguments Of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’S The History Of Joseph, Laura Macgowan

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Biblical epic The History of Joseph (1736), which dramatizes the events of Genesis 37-45, stands out in her oeuvre not only generically—it is her only long narrative poem—but because of how rarely God appears as an intervening agent or subject of narrative attention. Rather than highlight God’s splendor by imbuing Scripture with poetic embellishment, as is her wont, Rowe’s language downplays God’s hand in a famously Providential story (Genesis 50.20). While God shows up most often as an entity to beseech or a cultural token to reference, pagan deities govern the plot’s action; Rowe relishes in …

Moral Ambiguity In The Works Of Cormac Mccarthy, Christina Xan

Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy’s works have presented a question since he first published The Orchard Keeper in 1965 – what are his characters’ motivations? McCarthy’s novels are known for showing little to no interiority of his characters. This choice to depict action and not thought makes it nearly impossible to discern the reasoning behind the actions of the characters. Not being able to definitively know the motivations of the characters in his novels makes it hard to argue that his characters are simply “good” or “bad,” and morality becomes hard to discern. Although actions such as murder appear immoral without having an …

“A Solid Foundation Of Stable Possessions”: Gendered Genealogies In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Andi Waddell

Theses and Dissertations

Shirley Jackson’s odd and unsettling novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, explores the relationship between family, gender roles, and property through the murdered and murderous Blackwood family. Throughout the novel, Jackson associates objects with either male or female legacies within the family. Constance, Julian, and Merricat Blackwood engage in repetitive, formalized handling of objects, and these ritualized interactions create family history. Even as items associated with the women constitute narratives of female history and thereby subvert the family’s patriarchal structure, objects in the text reveal the way patriarchy reproduces itself in the mundane and the personal. Merricat …

The Warped One: Nationalist Adaptations Of The Cuchulain Myth, Martha J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I trace the use of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain by early Irish nationalists. From 1878 to 1939, Standish James O’Grady, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats employed this figure for specific political and cultural agendas. Cuchulain makes a fitting symbol for the “poet warrior” stereotype that was purposely and incidentally cultivated during the cultural nationalist phase of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were beginning to explore the Cuchulain myth to demonstrate cultural and linguistic ideals. Nationalists found in Cuchulain a symbol that could tie the cultural to the political and the political to the …

Building Worlds Out Of Inadequate Materials: Infrastucture And Affect In John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer And John Steinbeck’S The Grapes Of Wrath, David Scott Mathews

Theses and Dissertations

The beginning of the 20th century in America featured the rapid economic and infrastructural development of New York City, recently dubbed the “second metropolis.” The technological advancements in electric power and automobility made it possible, and economically desirable, for a larger and larger community to have access to the promise of good fortune that being connected to the metropolis signified. The result of this promise was the formation of the subway system and the highway system. Both John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath explore the space between these poles. In this essay I argue …

Encountering Robert Burns: An Oral History, G. Ross Roy, Andrea L'Hommedieu

Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy

This chapter of reminiscences has been edited chiefly from Andrea L’Hommedieu’s series of interviews, “G. Ross Roy Oral History Interview #1 [- #5]," (January 27-February 9, 2012). Some passages in the opening section are drawn from Ross Roy’s posthumously-published essay, “W. Ormiston Roy as Remembered by His Grandson,” Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, no. 174 (May 23, 2013). The next to last paragraph comes from his introduction for Robert Burns, An Exhibition (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 1971), p. 2. The final paragraph was written for the series, “What Burns means to me,” Robert Burns Lives!, …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Illegitimacy And The Power Of The Mother In The Lais Of Marie De France, Claudia Mccarron

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Reflecting Identity Through Glass Windows In Charles Dickens’S Tom Tiddler’S Ground, Ryder Seamons

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Earth And The Portrait: A Comparison Of Dostoevsky’S Alyosha Karamazov And Prince Myshkin, Callaghan Mcdonough

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

When Life Imitates Art: Aestheticism In The Importance Of Being Earnest, Drake Deornellis

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Looking Through, At, And Beyond In Thelma And Louise, Mercer Greenwald

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 21 Fall 2019, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Preface To Ssl 44.2, Tony Jarrells, Patrick Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

A brief introduction to this special issue, including reference to earlier contributions on the topic in this journal.

Claimed By The Stage: Popular Dramatization And The Legacy Of The Lady Of The Lake, Mary Nestor

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses three stage adaptations of Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake, by Thomas Dibdin for the Surrey Theatre, London, John Edmund Eyre, for the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, and Thomas Morton for Covent Garden, arguing that these popular melodramas shaped popular perception of how Scott's poem engaged the Highland landscape.

.

‘A’ That’S Past Forget – Forgie’: National Drama And The Construction Of Scottish National Identity On The Nineteenth-Century Stage, Paula Sledzinska

Studies in Scottish Literature

Focused on dramatic adaptations of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Waverley for the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, by Isaac Pocock and John W. Calcraft, this essay explores "how the conflicted Lowland and Highland traditions became incorporated into the new image of the nation," offering "a theatrical reflection of the dynamic process of identity building in the nineteenth-century Scotland."

'Poetry That Does Not Die': Andrew Lang And Walter Scott’S 'Immortal' Antiquarianism, Lucy Wood

Studies in Scottish Literature

The late 19th century essayist Andrew Lang, born in the Scottish borders, shared with Walter Scott a passionate devotion for the Borders landscape, mapped and mediated by Scott’s fictions; in his introductions to the Border Edition of Scott's novels, Lang argued that, by “immortalising” national antiquities, Scott ensured that Scotland's geographical and architectural heritage would be preserved.

‘Such Editorial Liberties’: Scott And The Textual Afterlives Of Thomas The Rhymer, David Selfe

Studies in Scottish Literature

This essay discusses from his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 etc) Walter Scott's version of the ballad "Thomas the Rhymer" (or "True Thomas") tracing the ballad's history within the social context of its reception, and then comparing Scott’s version with the orally-transmitted version "Thomas Rhymer and the Queen of Elfland",written down by Anna Gordon Brown in 1800, for differences both in wording and in punctuation choices as the “apologetic apostrophe,” to suggest how such textual traces show the changing relationship between textual form and textual function. [essay still in final proof stage]

Twilight Histories: The Waverley Novels And George Eliot’S Fictions Of The Recent Past, Camilla Cassidy

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the influence of Scott's Waverley novels on George Eliot, as novels set in recent history, drawing on Eric Hobsbawm's idea of a "twilight zone between history and memory" to examine Eliot's Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, and to argue that Eliot in reworking Scott's reimagining of this recent-historical "time-lapse" articulates a psychological experience of historical transition and modernisation.

Amédée Pichot And Walter Scott’S Parrot: A Fabulous Tale Of Parroting And Pirating, Céline Sabiron

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the background and origin of Le perroquet de Walter Scott (Paris, 1834), by the French writer and translator Amédée Pichot, who had visited Scott (and Scott's home at Abbotsford) in 1822, discussing the complex interrelationship in Pichot's work between parody, translation, and piracy, and also considering more briefly Pichot's work as anticipating the better-known parrots in Flaubert and Julian Barnes.

Allegories Of The Heart, Fiona Robertson

Studies in Scottish Literature

"Allegories of the Heart" uses allegory (or "telling otherwise") as a means of investigating Scott’s presence in literary works which do not specifically adapt or rework his texts, arguing that this is an underexplored area of imaginative and figurative engagement with Scott’s work. Key texts are The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Monastery, and Hawthorne’s fictions "Earth’s Holocaust" and The Scarlet Letter.

Croftangry’S Castle And The House Of Usher: Scott, Poe, And ‘Decayed And Lingering Exotics’, George S. Williams

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Poe's reading of Walter Scott, specifically through parallels of plot, setting, phrasing and imagery, between Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate, 1st series (1827) and Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), arguing that the two works share psychological preoccupations, also present more widely in the prose works of the writers.