English Language and Literature Commons^™

Supporting Women Scholars: How To Get Things Done In Hard Times, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Street Sex Workers' Discourse: Realizing Material Change Through Agential Choice., Jill Mccracken

Faculty Books

Incorporating the voices and insights of street sex workers through personal interviews, this monograph argues that the material conditions of many street workers — the physical environments they live in and their effects on the workers’ bodies, identities, and spirits — are represented, reproduced, and entrenched in the language surrounding their work. As an ethnographic case study of a local system that can be extrapolated to other subcultures and the construction of identities, this book disrupts some of the more prevalent academic and lay understandings about street prostitution by providing a thorough analysis of the material conditions surrounding street work …

"Of That Transfigured World" : Realism And Fantasy In Victorian Literature, Benjamin Jude Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these …

Butterbeer, Cauldron Cakes, And Fizzing Whizzbees: Food In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series, Leisa Anne Clark

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACTThis thesis situates the Harry Potter books into the greater body of food studies and into the extant children's literary tradition through an examination of how food can be used to understand cultural identity. Food is a biological need, but because we have created social rules and rituals around food consumption and sharing, there is more to eating than simple nutritional value. The Harry Potter series is as much about overcoming childhood adversity, and good versus evil, as it is about magic, and food in the Harry Potter series is both abundant and relevant to the narrative, context, and themes …

Tales Of Empire: Orientalism In Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature, Brittany Renee Griffin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children's literature often does not hold the same weight in the studies of a culture as its big brother, the novel. However, as children's literature is written by adults, to convey information which is important for a child to learn in order to be a functioning member of that society, it can be analyzed in the same way novels are, to provide insight into the broad sweeping issues that concerned the adults of that era. Nineteenth-century British children's literature in particular reveals the deep-seated preoccupation the British Empire had with its eastern colonies, and shows how England's relationship to those …

“The Play’S The Thing”: Theatre As A Scholarly Meeting Ground In Age Studies, Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

English Sarasota Manatee Campus Faculty Publications

Addressing three current critical turns in gerontology, this article proposes the theatre as a fertile ground for various theoretical angles in age studies - including the performative on and off stage, the narrative in the script and the critical questioning of age and ageism in the multiple realities of performance. Beginning from a shared site in the theatre, researchers may be able to establish greater common ground, resulting not only in multi-disciplinary efforts but also in truly interdisciplinary work. With a foundation in performance studies, this article suggests promising directions for age studies and theatre scholarship by examining three aspects …

Lower Sacraments: Theological Eating In The Fiction Of C. S. Lewis, Gregory Philip Hartley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For years, critics and fans of C. S. Lewis have noted his curious attentiveness to descriptions of food and scenes of eating. Some attempts have been made to interpret Lewis's use of food, but never in a manner comprehensively unifying Lewis's culinary expressions with his own thought and beliefs. My study seeks to fill this void. The introduction demonstrates how Lewis's culinary language aggregates through elements of his life, his literary background, and his Judeo-Christian worldview. Using the grammar of his own culinary language, I examine Lewis's fiction for patterns found within his meals and analyze these patterns for theological …

"Show Me The Money!": A Pecuniary Explication Of William Makepeace Thackeray's Critical Journalism, Gary Simons

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established.

Thackeray's contributions to leading London …

The Time Machine And Heart Of Darkness: H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, And The Fin De Siecle, Haili Ann Vinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much work has been done on the relationship between fin de siècle authors H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. As Nicholas Delbanco explains, these writers lived closely to one another in Kent during the transition into the Twentieth Century. While scholars have stressed the collaboration between Conrad and Ford and the disagreements between Wells and James, fewer have treated the relationship of Wells and Conrad. Their most widely read works, The Time Machine and Heart of Darkness, share remarkable similarities that reveal common topical influences on both writers. Furthermore, I argue that Wells …

William Bartram, The Search For Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, And Unpublished Writings., Thomas Hallock, Nancy Hoffmann

Faculty Books

An important figure in early American science and letters, William Bartram (1739–1823) has been known almost exclusively for his classic book, Travels. William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design presents new material in the form of art, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. These documents expand our knowledge of Bartram as an explorer, naturalist, artist, writer, and citizen of the early Republic. Part One, the correspondence, includes letters to and from Bartram’s family, friends, and peers, establishing his developing consciousness about the natural world as well as his passion for rendering it in drawing. The difficult business of undertaking scientific study and …

Establishing Creative Writing Studies As An Academic Discipline, Dianne J. Donnelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The discipline of creative writing is charged "as the most untheorized, and in that respect, anachronistic area in the entire constellation of English studies (Haake What Our Speech Disrupts 49). We need only look at its historical precedents to understand these intimations. It is a discipline which is unaware of the histories that informs its practice. It relies on the tradition of the workshop model as its signature pedagogy, and it is part of a fractured community signaled by its long history of subordination to literary studies, its lack of status and sustaining lore, and its own resistance to reform. …

Notes On The State Of Virginia And The Jeffersonian West., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Blank Power: The Social And Political Criticism Of Blank Fiction And Cinema, Ashley Minix Donnelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores a style of literature known as "blank" fiction that became popular in the United States in the mid-1980s, focusing on its stark, limited form, its minimal plots, its focus on commodification, and its scenes of graphic violence. The author presents the argument that filmmakers were producing pieces of cinema during the same time period that are similar in both form and content to the works of blank fiction. These films are a part of a style she labels "blank" cinema.

Blank fiction and cinema are politically charged and highly critical of the social and political situation in …

Early Modern Ecostudies: From The Florentine Codex To Shakespeare., Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, Karen L. Raber

Faculty Books

The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.

Beauty, Objectification, And Transcendence: Modernist Aesthetics In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Pale Fire, Deborah S. Mcleod

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study compares the relation between beauty, objectification, and transcendence in two novels: Oscar Wilde's early-modernist The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Vladimir Nabokov's late-modernist Pale Fire (1962). Though written over half a century apart, the works feature similar critiques of the aesthete's devotion to beauty. While Wilde's novel offers an insider's view of aristocratic Decadence in late-nineteenth-century London, Nabokov's reflects his early influence from the Russian Symbolists and recalls that tradition in the American suburbs of the mid-twentieth-century. Both novels demonstrate the trust that many modernists held in the ability of beauty to offer transcendence over the limits …

Ashes From Falling Stars, John A. Nieves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a book length collection of poetry—all original and by the author. The book has three chapters, each with a different mode of expressing the work’s overall theme: the remnants of unfulfilled wishes. The first chapter deals with ordinary or mundane manifestations of the theme. The second chapter covers extraordinary, but still feasible, variations on the theme. The final chapter deals with subconscious versions of these unfulfilled wishes. It is far more surreal than the other two chapters and exists in a sort of dream-reality.

The poetry included in this work is all free verse. There are narrative …

Bel-Imperia: The (Early) Modern Woman In Thomas Kyd’S Spanish Tragedy, Ann Mccauley Basso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the heart of Thomas Kyd's revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy lies an arranged marriage around which all of the other action revolves. Bel-Imperia of Spain has been betrothed against her will to Prince Balthazar of Portugal, but she is no ordinary woman, and she has plans of her own. Bel-Imperia's unwillingness to participate in the arranged marriage is indicative of the rise of the companionate marriage; it represents a rejection of the arranged marriage that dominated upper class society in earlier years.

This study seeks to throw light upon early modern attitudes towards marriage, focusing particularly on the arranged …

Altered States Of Reality: The Theme Of Twinning In David Lynch's Lost Highway, Alan Edward Green Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a postmodern director, David Lynch makes films which are innovative, evocative, and uniquely his own. The theme of twinning, in particular, is recapitulated throughout the director's oeuvre; however, it is with Lost Highway that the thematic element he addresses takes center stage. The film's main character Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is unable to cope with the trauma in his life. After killing his wife and finding himself on death row, he has a parallel identity crisis; he manages a metamorphosis into a younger, virile Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The method which allows this transformation is the psychogenic fugue: a …

New Visions Of Community In Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison., Magali Michael

Faculty Books

In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the …

Twinkle While You Shake It., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Joy! Rapture! I’Ve Got A Brain!, Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Between Accommodation And Usurpation: Lewis Evans, Geography, And The Iroquois-British Frontier, 1743-1784., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

From The Fallen Tree : Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, And The Roots Of A National Pastoral, 1749-1826., Thomas Hallock

Faculty Books

Anglo-American writers in the revolutionary era used pastoral images to place themselves as native to the continent, argues Thomas Hallock in From the Fallen Tree. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, as territorial expansion got under way in earnest, and ending with the era of Indian dispossession, the author demonstrates how authors explored the idea of wilderness and political identities in fully populated frontiers. Hallock provides an alternative to the myth of a vacant wilderness found in later writings. Emphasizing shared cultures and conflict in the border regions, he reconstructs the milieu of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether …

Beyond Postprocess And Postmodernism: Essays On The Spaciousness Of Rhetoric., Jill Mccracken, Theresa Enos, Keith Miller

Faculty Books

In this collection of original essays, editors Theresa Enos and Keith D. Miller join their contributors--a veritable "who's who" in composition scholarship--in seeking to illuminate and complicate many of the tensions present in the field of rhetoric and composition. The contributions included here emphasize key issues in past and present work, setting the stage for future thought and study. The book also honors the late Jim Corder, a major figure in the development of the rhetoric and composition discipline. In the spirit of Corder's unfinished work, the contributors to this volume absorb, probe, stretch, redefine, and interrogate classical, modern, and …

Dynamics Of Being, Space, And Time In The Poetry Of Czeslaw Milosz And John Ashbery, Barbara M. Jolley

Faculty Books

Many contemporary critics have been interested in Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and have recognized its importance for literary theory. As a continuation of theoretical explorations, this study undertakes a discussion of poetic visions of reality in the works of contemporary hyperrealistic poets, Czeslaw Milosz and John Ashbery. It breaks new ground by applying the key Heideggerian terms, Dasein, space, time, and culture to explore the reality created by and/or alluded to in the contemporary poetry of Milosz and Ashbery. In its final synthesis, the study proposes the comprehensive concept of ontological transcendence as a model to analyze multidimensional contemporary poetry.

Literary Recipes From The Lewis And Clark Journals: The Epic Design And Wilderness Tastes Of Early National Nature Writing., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Feminism And The Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War Ii Fiction., Magali Michael

Faculty Books

Michael analyzes the intersections between feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in recent Anglo-American fiction. While much has been written on various aspects of postmodernism and postmodern fiction and of feminism and feminist fiction, very little attention has been given to the postmodern aesthetic strategies that surface in post-World War II feminist fiction. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse examines ways in which many widely read and acclaimed novels with feminist impulses engage and transform subversive aesthetic strategies usually associated with postmodern fiction to strengthen their feminist political edge. The author discusses many examples of recent feminist-postmodern fiction, and explores …

The Geometry Of James Joyce's Ulysses: From Pythagoras To Poincaré: Joyce's Use Of Geometry For Structure, Metaphor, And Theme, Susan Sutliff Brown

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The extensive, previously unrecognized, use James Joyce made of contemporaneous geometric concepts for structure, metaphor, and theme in Ulysses provides new keys to how Joyce, following the model of his predecessors and contemporaries in Cubism, responded to the revolutions in aesthetics and physics which marked his intellectual milieu. As an examination of pre-publication materials reveals, during the six months before February 2, 1922, Joyce manipulated the pagination of the Ulysses placards and page proofs to impose geometric aesthetic proportions on the overall text and within individual episodes. Most significantly, Joyce aesthetically proportioned the pagination of the disparate eleven "initial style" …