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Articles 121 - 150 of 406
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Introspections Into Rational Fanatics And Thoughtful Deceivers: Examining The Use Of Memoirs In The Works Of James Hogg And Charles Brockden Brown, Tucker Foster
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and …
The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey
The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female …
'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp
'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings …
Resonances Of Love And Social Complexity In The Circadian Novel: Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, And Mulk Raj Anand, Mikayla Marie Peters
Resonances Of Love And Social Complexity In The Circadian Novel: Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, And Mulk Raj Anand, Mikayla Marie Peters
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Both Mulk Raj Anand and Christopher Isherwood admired and borrowed from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to build their own circadian novels. This thesis attempts to apply three major theories from three different disciplines - narrative theory, sociology, and psychology - to three major circadian novels to explain how societal pressures and the past influence the protagonists' connections with others. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Anand's Untouchable (1935), and Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) all use a circadian (single-day) structure to explore how the past influences every decision in a single day. This thesis combines Michel de Certeau's Theory of the Everyday …
Activist Modernisms: Human Rights And Anti-Totalitarianism In Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, Mary Ellen Gray
Activist Modernisms: Human Rights And Anti-Totalitarianism In Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, Mary Ellen Gray
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The period after World War II saw the emergence of a new discourse of human rights, with the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the postwar period and throughout the twentieth century, human rights would often be vieas a set of self-evident, monolithic, and timeless values that had merely reached their full realization after the horrors of the war. This study examines a body of literature from the 1930s and 40s, the wartime moment just before the foundation of the twentieth century universal rights ideology, to explore the process by which theories of human rights are …
Hong & Ramona, Amy Lam
Hong & Ramona, Amy Lam
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This is a novel set in frontier California.
Vicar Victoria: Writing The Church Of England In Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rachel Elizabeth Cason
Vicar Victoria: Writing The Church Of England In Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rachel Elizabeth Cason
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how the organizing force of the Anglican Church and the figure of the Anglican clergyman were used to interrogate social, legal, and historical developments in nineteenth-century fiction. The project outlines how authors reacted to events such as Pluralism reform, the opening of training schools for clergy, and the Oxford Movement. There was a growing importance of institutions (including new physical buildings and Anglican reform movements). Further, the clergy, pushed by the increased expectation to modernize and professionalize, became a specialist career, with raised training and performance requirements. As a …
Disturbing The Ecological Pastoral: An Examination Of Willa Cather's Fictional Spaces In My Ántonia And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Anne Carter Stowe
Disturbing The Ecological Pastoral: An Examination Of Willa Cather's Fictional Spaces In My Ántonia And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Anne Carter Stowe
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Willa Cather is universally lauded for her ability to render landscape into prose. Critics have observed for years that the landscape often functions as the main character in her fiction, or that her characters can easily be evaluated in terms of how deep and successful their relationships to the land are. In an attempt to evaluate Cather’s treatment of two different “Western” landscapes, I will focus first on My Ántonia, one of her most famous Nebraska novels, and second on Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose narrative unravels on the New Mexican landscape. I argue that Cather treats …
Of Mules And Mamas: Four Women, Africana Mothering, And Resistance, Ebony Olivia Lumumba
Of Mules And Mamas: Four Women, Africana Mothering, And Resistance, Ebony Olivia Lumumba
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The black woman’s humanity is unjustly linked to domestic responsibility and, thus, the traditional constraints of mothering. The roles of the mother and the created archetype of the mammy often become marred with the latter role overtaking the former—leaving black children without full benefit and access to their biological maternal parent. With the pervasive threat to black lives present in spaces all over the globe, for women of the African Diaspora, simply deciding to accept the role of a mother to a life that is physically, socially, and economically under siege is revolutionary. Considering this, the act of mothering, especially …
We Know Where You Belong At: Institutions And Marginalized Bodies In The Literature Of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, And Eudora Welty, Michelle Lynn Ayers
We Know Where You Belong At: Institutions And Marginalized Bodies In The Literature Of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, And Eudora Welty, Michelle Lynn Ayers
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis portfolio explores how three southern authors used fiction to push back against social norms. The literary works of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty depict the ways in which marginalized bodies are socially regulated and punished. By using Michel Foucault’s theories about power and knowledge, I explore how each of these works uses surveillance to regulate social behavior and what happens to marginalized bodies that refuse to conform to the norm. In Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition, Dr. Miller uses his “medical gaze” to diagnose problems within the black community while also elevating himself above his …
Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser
Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …
“I’Ve Been Given The Wrong Mother:” Reconsidering Absent Mothers In Postmodern British Literature, Amanda G. Sawyers
“I’Ve Been Given The Wrong Mother:” Reconsidering Absent Mothers In Postmodern British Literature, Amanda G. Sawyers
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Nineteenth-century British authors, in particular, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Austen, often turned to orphaned children as a means to drive the plot of their novels. While struggles such as displacement were often accurately depicted, the abovementioned authors and their contemporaries often glossed over or completely disregarded the trauma and psychological implications felt by these orphans. As psychology gained prominence as a discipline through the works of Sigmund Freud and others, modern British literature saw a shift in its consideration of orphans and, additionally, emotionally absent mothers. This thesis will examine three modern British novels; Ian McEwan’s Atonement, …
American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish
American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study examines three autobiographical texts written in post-World War II America (1959-1973) that take as their subject a straight white man’s reflection on and engagement with the exercise of male power and the forces, both internal and external, that shape the degree to which he is “self-made,” i.e., an autonomous agent able to exert his will within a life domain (domestic, public, and war). Each of these writers engages in surveillance not solely of their own power, but also of the men who influence their experience, using their observations to critique, assert, and question the gendered realities and expectations …
Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay
Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the …
Universal Truths, Verisimilitude, And Hyperreality: Baudrillard’S Simulacra And Simulation In Pride And Prejudice And The Lizzie Bennet Diaries., Kathryn M. Kohls
Universal Truths, Verisimilitude, And Hyperreality: Baudrillard’S Simulacra And Simulation In Pride And Prejudice And The Lizzie Bennet Diaries., Kathryn M. Kohls
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project applies Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Hank Green and Bernie Su’s The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012). By applying Baudrillard’s theory, one can see that Austen’s marriage plot is a shrewd critique of how social simulacra, simulations of reality, dictate how society is structured and interacts. These manipulative simulations are able to be transgressed by the novel’s protagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. Their ability to find an unsimulated real is appealing to contemporary audiences caught in the hyperreality of the internet age. This leads to a panicked production to …
'Where History Meets The Future' : A Historiographic Exploration Of Mississippi : The View From Tougaloo., Khirsten L. Echols
'Where History Meets The Future' : A Historiographic Exploration Of Mississippi : The View From Tougaloo., Khirsten L. Echols
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Where History Meets the Future”: A Historiographic Exploration of Mississippi: The View from Tougaloo explores the historical narratives of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with a special emphasis on Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In particular, this dissertation examines the ways in which Tougaloo’s official history omits the voices of its student populations. It offers, then, a revisionist reading of the school’s history, constructing a narrative from the perspective of students. Based on hours of archival research and examination of the school’s student newspaper, this dissertation constructs a method that incorporates student voices into the historical narrative. The collection of …
There Is Water In The World For Us : The Environmental Theories Of Alice Walker., Janae Lewis Hall
There Is Water In The World For Us : The Environmental Theories Of Alice Walker., Janae Lewis Hall
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The emergence of African-American Environmental thought responds to the ongoing erasure of Black experiences and their perspectives on nature. Mainstream environmentalism maintains a legacy of perceived innocence and incorruptibility towards the land, while Black Environmentalism demonstrates the limitations of that ideology. Limitations include the erasure of history in regards to stealing land from Indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, legalized lynching, forced removal from the land, exploitation in sharecropping, destruction of sacred lands, heavy pollution in urban centers, and harmful environmental policies. For Black and Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to view American soil as innocent. This project surveyed the …
Breaking With Tradition(?) : Female Representations Of Heroism In Old English Poetry., Kathryn A. Green
Breaking With Tradition(?) : Female Representations Of Heroism In Old English Poetry., Kathryn A. Green
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
For the Anglo-Saxons, strength, bravery, and the willingness to put oneself in harm’s way for king and kingdom were not only part of contemporary society but recurring themes in Old English literature. Poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon reinforce the important bond between lord and retainer and the heroic ethos key to that relationship. Women were not historically part of this relationship and, therefore, not subject to the heroic code in the same way; consequently, they are rarely seen as anything more than conventional mothers, queens, wives, sisters, daughters, and virgins, all identified by their relationships to men, …
Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell
Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …
New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff
New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and …
Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft
Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of …
You Are What You Wear: Clothing And American Authors Of The Early 20th Century, Alyssa Quinn Johnson
You Are What You Wear: Clothing And American Authors Of The Early 20th Century, Alyssa Quinn Johnson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Though clothes are often said to “make the man,” they are not frequently said to build a character. This thesis explores the ways in which clothing was a performative tool for those who wore it during the 1920s in America as well as for authors who wrote about this world in which they lived. This study’s theoretical framework is inspired by Judith Butler’s concept of the performative; it is also influenced by historical research into the clothing of the 1920s. Primary texts explored include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and …
Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward A Phenomenology Of The Moving Body In Joyce And Woolf, Lauren Nicole Benke
Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward A Phenomenology Of The Moving Body In Joyce And Woolf, Lauren Nicole Benke
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body's significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is …
Chatter And Chant: Religion And Community On The Renaissance English Stage, Rachel Dunleavy Morgan
Chatter And Chant: Religion And Community On The Renaissance English Stage, Rachel Dunleavy Morgan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines moments in five English Renaissance plays when characters employ religious language in bids to consolidate or to fracture communities. The plays are John Bale's King Johan (c. 1538, revised c. 1560), Nathaniel Woodes' Conflict of Conscience (c. 1581); Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603); Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1611); and John Webster's The White Devil (1612). The types of communities examined most closely are those of a small scale - relationships of individuals to God, marriages, families, friendships, households, parishes, courts - but these appear against the backdrop of much larger communities such as the nation …
Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell
Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals …
Thinking Before You Act: A Constructive Logic Approach To Crafting Performance-For- Development Narrative, Angela Duggins
Thinking Before You Act: A Constructive Logic Approach To Crafting Performance-For- Development Narrative, Angela Duggins
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The intent of this thesis was to test the feasibility of constructing performance-for-development narrative using a constructive logic approach. I created an equation which expressed the sum of non-human-elements as the sum of a narrative with each element serving as a variable. I used a review of persuasion literature to provide insight into the selection and manipulation of each variable. I provided my family as a hypothetical example and used my knowledge of their preferences and communication styles in conjunction with the literature and the equation to craft a narrative which might increase pro-school attitudes in other families like my …
Young Adult Literature And Empathy In Appalachian Adolescents, Kelsey R. Kiser
Young Adult Literature And Empathy In Appalachian Adolescents, Kelsey R. Kiser
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Based on recent research concluding that fiction can increase empathy, this project examines how multicultural young adult literature may encourage empathy in Appalachian adolescents. Empathy encourages prosocial behaviors, but evidence suggests that young adults’ ability to empathize has declined in recent decades. In addition, Appalachia in particular is still a relatively homogenous region as it is majority white, protestant Christian, and heteronormative. Because of this, young adults in Appalachia may encounter few diverse perspectives in real life; multicultural young adult literature can provide diverse perspectives with which teenagers can empathize in a region where they might not have similar opportunities …
Get Thee To A Nunnery: Unruly Women And Christianity In Medieval Europe, Sarah E. Wolfe
Get Thee To A Nunnery: Unruly Women And Christianity In Medieval Europe, Sarah E. Wolfe
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis will argue that the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdæla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts also demonstrate that Queenship grew fragile after the spread of Christianity, and women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe.
From Damsel In Distress To Active Agent : Female Agency In Children's And Young Adult Fiction., Megan Sarah Mcdonough
From Damsel In Distress To Active Agent : Female Agency In Children's And Young Adult Fiction., Megan Sarah Mcdonough
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation analyzes the different ways in which female characters in children’s and young adult fiction can claim agency. Using adaptation theory, feminist theory, and theories of agency and autonomy, this project examines how portrayals of female protagonists have changed to accept a multiplicity of strong females, and why we need these different kinds of characters within our culture. Working with the definition of agency as the choices one makes and the subsequent actions she takes, this dissertation examines how female characters from paradigm shifting texts claim agency. Each chapter uses a specific feminist lens to explore literary texts and …
Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)
Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …