English Language and Literature Commons^™

"Who Only Cricket Know": Sport, Ideology And Emancipatory Politics, George Evans

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Sport is considered to be apolitical. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, sport and discourses around sport support and sustain dominant hegemony in various ways. This is just as true for the public school origins of modern sport as it is for contemporary global sport. Whether it be the capitalist ethic of the American Dream, or the imperial, British, ethic of ‘fair play,’ sport does not exist independent from ideology. Instead, sport is used as a social disciplining tool that underhandedly justifies, disciplines, and “normalizes” social behavior, culture, and dominant ideologies. This thesis begins with an …

Necropolitical Resistance In Early Modern Drama: Violence And Death As Agentive Acts In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Madison Jansen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy has been widely-read by the academic community, but not always for its own sake. Its influence on the Revenge Tragedy genre, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, have been common topics, sometimes at the expense of readings that engage with the play itself. This thesis continues a tradition of applying the ideas of Michel Foucault to the Early Modern era in order to interrogate the role of power, knowledge, and sovereignty. This thesis explores the way that Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, and the related concepts of necropolitics and necroresistance, create significant new ways of understanding the …

The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …

The Transcendentalist’S Mind And Body: The Role Of Illness In Margaret Fuller’S Writing, Elizabeth Anne Slabaugh

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Margaret Fuller’s work is typically known for its influence on the American feminist movement between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century fostered a new way of looking at men and women as dual souls encompassing both male and female traits. While scholars recognize and draw attention to Margaret Fuller’s mental and physical illness, few scholars directly analyze her works through the lens of her illness. My thesis analyzes her writing by considering her illness (both physical and mental) in order to understand how it affected her writing. Scholars such as Jeffrey Steele, Cynthia Davis, …

Window Dressing: Isolation In Cornell Woolrich's Short Fiction, Annika R. P. Deutsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Cornell Woolrich was a prolific American noir detective fiction writer. Though recognized by some as the father of noir fiction, he is often overshadowed by other writers of his era, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Many of the themes found in Woolrich’s writing, particularly isolation and the associated fear and anxiety, are as palpable today as they were in the times he was writing. In this thesis, I argue that Woolrich’s continued relevance is the result of his unique portrayal of American city life. Woolrich utilizes recognizable themes from the noir, mystery, and thriller genres …

Encounters Of The Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange And Identity The Tristans Of Medieval France, England, And Spain, Annie Knowles

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work examines multiple versions of the medieval Tristan story in France, England, and Spain. Beginning with a strong historical situation for the literary analysis, the work uses elements of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies to identify and understand the rhetorical employment of “Oriental” flourishes in the Tristans studied. The work focuses on these Eastern influences as manifested in the characterizations of the Saracen knight Sir Palomides and in the construction, depiction, and commentary upon elements of fin’ amor that permeate the texts.

This study establishes the feasibility of intercultural exchange in the …

"The Country Of Nine-Fingered People": The Southern Mountain Tradition And The Gothic In Faulkner's Intruder In The Dust And Dickey's Deliverance, Kathleen Peterson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the role of the Southern mountain tradition and the Gothic mode in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and James Dickey’s Deliverance. Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, it argues that Faulkner and Dickey appropriated already Gothic elements of Appalachian history in order to create the Gothic characters and settings that would allow them to explore major cultural anxieties of their time. Chapter One gives a brief overview of Appalachian history from the Revolutionary War through 1970. It examines both factual material and fictional portrayals, including the miners’ union strikes of the early 1900s, Mary …

Pois'ned Ale: Gertrude's Power Position In Hamlet, Erin Elizabeth Lehmann

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Hamlet has over 4,000 lines, and Gertrude speaks less than 200 of those lines (about 4% of the entire play), but her roles as a widow, wife, and mother drive much of the play’s action. This document brings together scholarship surrounding Gertrude’s roles within the play and new research into the historical cultural milieu of early modern England focused on working women to learn more about the cultural patterns influencing the creation of this character. What results is the assertion that analogues to Gertrude and her situation in Hamlet can be found in early modern widows who worked as printers …

Towards A Hibernian Hybridity: Joycean Appropriations Of Celtic Mythology And The Realization Of A Modern Irish Identity, Robert C. Ware

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In nineteenth-century Ireland, the Celtic Revival established an Irish identity in opposition to British colonialism through a nativist construction of true Irishness based on premodern, precolonial Celtic mythology, language, and culture. This created a primitive Irish identity situated in a binomial dialectic with a civilized British identity, establishing the Irish as an internal Other for the British imperial self. This effectively justified British colonialism as a necessary catalyst in a teleological progression intended to save Ireland from the uncivilized Irish. This thesis explores how Joyce’s appropriation of literary artifacts of Celtic mythology in “The Dead,” specifically the sovereignty goddess mythology …

How Many Headless Telamons, Torin Jensen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The poems in How Many Headless Telamons initially seek the impossible: origin.

This attempt begins with an examination of the metaphor and, by extension, the image.

In Works on Paper, Eliot Weinberger writes, “Metaphor: to transfer from one place to another. In Greece, the moving vans are labeled METAPHORA” (9). While granting the utility of metaphors in poetic language and thought, How Many Headless Telamons attempts to explore the dilemma of movement itself; that something is to be moved not only pluralizes location, but means that that which needs to move is not where it needs or desires …

Bound Toward Them Are The Course, Zachary John Vesper

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The poems in Bound Toward Them Are the Course deal with the issue of lyric obscurity, the transmission and failed reception of messages. Toward this end, the desire of the lyric to convey despite its veiled nature, the poems' methods of translation serve as an attempt at self-correction, location through triangulation.

The lyric is also a circuit which, at a certain point, closes. Once it has taken in what it needs, the poem becomes its own referent, feeds on its own vibration, a repositional energy. It takes its constitutive elements, rearranges them, forgetting itself (and its transmission) as it continually …

“A Moral Wilderness”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’S The Scarlet Letter, Lehtie Chalise Thomson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter portrays his understanding of Puritan doctrines and culture. He addresses sin and redemption through his primary characters Hester Prynne and the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, whose adultery has resulted in the birth of Pearl and Hester’s scarlet A. He demonstrates Hester’s refusal to publically accept her sin as such. He also outlines the physical demise and spiritual indecision of the minister as Dimmesdale struggles to live two opposing lives. I call attention to how Hawthorne takes his knowledge of the New England Puritans and alters the historical context to emphasize his Romantic views of sin …

Once A Queen In Narnia: Susan And The Divine In C.S. Lewis’S Chronicles Of Narnia, Amanda Kathleen Patchin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia ends with the absence of one the main characters. Susan Pevensie is not included in the reunion at the end of The Last Battle. Other characters attribute her absence to exclusive interest in “nylons and lipstick and invitations.” There is a blank space in Susan’s story related to her absence from The Last Battle and in this space critics have inscribed a variety of meanings. Critics argued that Lewis found beauty and femininity to be suspiciously evil and that in order for a girl to succeed in Narnia she must reject them to become …

Burning Down The Trailer Park, Timothy Owen Davis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of short stories, all of which are set in High Point, NC.

A Culture Of Divisions: Cultural Representations Of La Bruja And La Curandera In Nuevo Mexicano Folklore And Literature, Annemarie Lynette García

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

La bruja and la curandera are recurring, important figures in New Mexican culture, folkloric history, and literature and they carry with them the fear of the unknown that the Spanish surely encountered upon entering the American southwest in the late 1500s to early 1600s. La bruja is a part of the emergence of the culture of divisions that inhabits New Mexico, thus her image as a resistor to the effects of colonization have been transformed over time to be synonymous with evil and the devil. She has been ostracized from her indigenous culture and forced to fall in line with …

Visions/Versions Of The Medieval In C.S. Lewis’S The Chronicles Of Narnia, Heather Herrick Jennings

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

“Everything in the whole story should arise from the whole cast of the author’s mind. We must write for children out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children: differing from our child readers not by any less, or less serious, interest in the things we handle, but by the fact that we have other interests which children would not share with us. The matter of our story should be a part of the habitual furniture of our minds.” —C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

The year 2010 will mark the sixtieth anniversary …

Opium Use In Victorian England: The Works Of Gaskell, Eliot, And Dickens, Jessica Rae Henderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

England’s opium trade with China in the nineteenth century, often conjures up images of a powerful nation, for financial gain and heedless of the damage caused, nefariously thrusting addictive drugs on an unwitting Chinese people and unwilling Chinese government. But this image hides the English side of the story, i.e. England’s own problem with opium. The English imported thousands of pounds for domestic use each year in the 19^th century, and until the late 1860s its sale was completely unrestricted. It was used as a veritable cure-all for various diseases, as well as a relief for any kind of …

Confronting Environmental And Social Crises: Octavia E. Butler’S Critique Of The Spiritual Roots Of Environmental Injustice In Her Parable Novels, Melissa Vargas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We are living in the midst of environmental and social crises. This fact was not lost on late African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose 1993 Parable of the Sower and 1998 Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents depict and critique the current environmental and social crises in the United States. Speaking of Sower in an interview with Essence magazine, Butler says that all she “did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters” (“Brave New Worlds” 164). In another interview with Randall Kenan, Butler describes environmental …

Among The Stars, Bradley Cook

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The left-fielder lays the boy’s things across the passenger seat: a jersey worn by the left-fielder two seasons ago, an autographed baseball in a glass cube, new glove. He folds the note from the boy’s father and slides it into his shirt pocket. Errands: bank deposit, clothes to the cleaners, a list from his wife of items at the store—bread, coffee, Capri Sun for Karl’s lunches. He sits behind the wheel and watches Karl, his son, roughhouse with the neighbor kid. His son is tough, like he used to be. Different neighborhoods, but boys can be tough anywhere. The left-fielder …