English Language and Literature Commons^™

Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet, Thomas Hamilton Cherry

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines …

Isaac Watts And The Culture Of Dissent, Andrew Eli M. Yeater

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Although Isaac Watts wrote hymns in the early eighteenth century, some of his hymns, such as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” survive today as well-known hymns. However, little has been written about the rhetorical effects of his hymns. This thesis demonstrates that, like any other literary work, Watts’ hymns can be analyzed rhetorically. This thesis analyzes Watts’ hymns with the aid of Louis Montrose’s New Historicism, showing how Watts’ hymns were impacted by the English culture in which he lived and how they impacted the religious culture to …

The Wizarding Words Of J. K. Rowling: Literary Merit In The Harry Potter Series, Brenna Sherrill

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Since hitting bookshelves in 1997, the Harry Potter series has taken the popular culture world by storm in an unprecedented way, breaking sales records for both books and films, and dramatically increasing readership among young readers. Despite its immense and unique success, this series, like many other examples of pop culture, doesn’t often receive the credit it deserves with respect to its literary merits. However, it is undeniable that the Potter books reflect many of the traits found in all great works of literature, including complex character development and abundant literary devices that elevate the intellectual level of the series. …

Ua68/6/2/4 Potter College Of Arts & Letters English Student Organizations Sigma Tau Delta, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records of Sigma Tau Delta.

Ua68/6/2/3 Potter College Of Arts & Letters English Student Organizations English Club, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records of the English Club including minute books, programs, and banquet records.

Ua68/6/1 Emeriti, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Wku English

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by the Editing and Publishing Class regarding the work of retired English department faculty. This issue includes articles about Karen Schneider, Joseph Millichap, James Flynn, Elizabeth Oakes and Joe Survant.

Ua68/6/2/2 Potter College Of Arts & Letters English Student Organizations Speculative Fiction Society, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records of the Speculative Fiction Society.

Conscious Reconstruction: The Effects Of Second Language Acquisition On Self-Perception Of Gender Identity, Geneva Ged

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Gender interacts with other facets of English Language Learners’ social identity like race and ethnicity to guide their learning experiences, desires, and outcomes; however, much of traditional Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) research has focused on how motivation and language learning beliefs differ between male and female English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students with the intent to identify difference, if it exists. English Language Learners who are studying abroad or who have immigrated to the United States have already established a gender identity influenced and created by their experiences in their first language …

Bones, Frogs, And Killers: The Corporeal Oppression Of Women In The Patriarchal, Christian South, Shawna F. Felkins

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Both Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison create female protagonists who face corporeal oppression in their works The Color Purple and Bastard out of Carolina, respectively. It these protagonist’s feminine gender that allows the men in their lives to control them. Connecting these two authors and validating there assertions of the power of patriarchy to oppress women through the physical body, is author Lillian Smith and her work Killers of the Dream. There is a connecting thread running through these works that explains the reign of patriarchal oppression in the South: Christianity. Women, especially those in the Christian culture of the …

Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Steampunk is a progressive literary genre that evokes, imitates, and re-imagines the nineteenth century and favors the Industrial Revolution ideals of science and technology. In a historical framework, it mixes nineteenth-century conventions and retrofuturistic machinery with science fiction and fantasy elements. Steampunk authors are able to radically redefine socio-cultural implications that affect both past and contemporary societies. The following study explores the multitude of characteristics that define Steampunk literature as an interdisciplinary study. Chapter 1 explores the definitions and literary genres that construct Steampunk and includes a brief literary history of Steampunk works. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherie Priest’s novel …

Wilson, Gordon, 1888-1970 (Sc 773), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 773. Copy of an English workbook entitled Forward Steps in Thinking and Writing (ca. 1933), of which Gordon Wilson was a collaborator. Also letter relating data about the book, 1973.

Ua35/11 Honors Program, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Honors Program. Includes brochures, awards programs, student handbooks, newsletters and research publications.

Foreclosure And Other Essays, Derick Brandon Strode

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

My dad had early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I first knew something was wrong with him in 1995. He was 49 then, and I was just about to start the eighth grade. That’s the summer his company backed him into a corner and told him to quit or be fired. He had worked there 14 years. They said his behavior was changing, and they thought he was doing it on purpose. It took seven years to get an actual diagnosis. The doctors looked for everything. They just thought he was too young.

I’ve relied on materials found in my parents’ house …

Reading Ineffability And Realizing Tragedy In Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, Michael E. Gray

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Victory Garden, Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 classic hyperfiction, presents a nonlinear story of U. S. home front involvement in the First Gulf War in a way that facilitates confusion and mimics a "fog of war" sort of (un)awareness. Using Storyspace to build his complex narrative, Moulthrop incorporates poetry, fiction, historical references, and low-tech graphic novel type elements. Among the graphic components are all-black and all-white screens that function as variables. Overtly, these screens speak of closure and signify unconsciousness; however, their nonverbal role may also be linked to the ineffability trope as used by Dante Alighieri and re-interpreted by contemporary …

(Re)Incorporating Poetry Into The Secondary English Curriculum, Bethany L. Riggs

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This essay and unit plan examine and defend the teaching of poetry in high school English courses as a vital, practical, and major component of a curriculum. The instruction of poetry in public schools is strictly limited today, yet students gain skills through humanities classes that cannot be learned through other courses, such as critical thinking, self-expression, and analyzing abilities. These skills are translatable to additional subjects as well, including composing music, interpreting languages, evaluating arguments, solving problems, drawing conclusions, and understanding difficult concepts. How poetry is taught must also be examined, with regards to specific strategies, structural guidelines, and …

Rpw Birthplace: Where It All Began, Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Confessions Of A Footnoter, Paula Newman Miner, James A. Perkins

Robert Penn Warren Studies

In his “confessions,” the Footnoter, one of the three editors of the Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, shares trade secrets, spins tales, and recounts anecdotes of success and failure in his attempts to bring understanding to metonymy, synecdoche, allusion, and suggestion as well as to identify individuals mentioned in the letters of Robert Penn Warren, particularly his attempt to discover the identity of the very skillful and amusing writer Paula Newman Miner and her attempt to remain an enigma wrapped in fog living quietly on Cape Cod with her husband and her Loenbergers.

A Critical Look At Robert Penn Warren’S New (And Old) Criticism On Satire, Michael Sobiech

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Although a father of New Criticism, Warren did not always restrict his analysis of a text to the text itself. In his work with John Marston’s satires, Warren appears to go against what will become key attributes of New Critical theory. This essay explores Warren’s work with Marston’s satires, in particular examining his historicizing of the text, arguing for a more complicated view of Warren’s New Criticism.

About The Advisory Group To The Center (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Contents (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Dedication Page (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Robert Penn Warren And Photography, Joseph Millichap

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren’s career and canon demonstrate his more than casual interest in photography, much like those of several contemporaries in the Southern Renaissance. Warren’s 1972 essay about photographer Walker Evans recalls how photographs in the 1930s opened the emerging writer’s imagination to the power inherent in any art form to revise commonplace perceptions of social and subjective reality. Evans and many other photographers thus influenced Warren in his use of photographic tropes for an artistic transformation of the visual art of photography into the verbal art of literature. My close readings of recreated photographs in several major works of …

The Windhover And Evening Hawk Shudder In Sync: Gerard Manley Hopkins And Robert Penn Warren, D.A. Carpenter

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The author traces the philosophical and poetic similarities between Robert Penn Warren and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In doing so, he addresses the meditative process that Warren and Hopkins use in their work in order to demonstrate human connectedness to each other and nature in the form of what could be called a mystic unity. Integral to this meditative process is Hopkins’ idiosyncratic concepts of “inscape” and “instress,” which are defined and explored by the author while demonstrating how Warren’s work is in dialogue with these concepts, particularly in his 1968 collection of poems, Incarnations.

About The Birthplace (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editor’S Foreword (Volume 9), Mark D. Miller

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Circle (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University

Student Creative Writing

The fine arts magazine of Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green.

Ua68/6/3 Potter College Of Arts & Letters English Administration, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by English Department faculty and staff regarding the administration of the unit.

Title Page (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Circle

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Robert Penn Warren’S Emblematic Imagination In All The King’S Men, Thomas J. Derrick

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren’s use of a static image with an explanatory motto has not been traced to its roots in Renaissance emblems. Warren’s coy responses to interviewers about the historical basis of the Huey Long story were balanced by admissions of the literary influence of Elizabethan and Italian culture. Realistic and imaginative events provided material for the author’s deep and slowly developed technique of a dynamic relationship between image and idea. Three phases of development are noticed in Warren’s fiction. His preliminary experiment was seen in the 1943 novel, At Heaven’s Gate; his intermediate development came in his 1950 novel, …