English Language and Literature Commons^™

Genetic Engineering As Literary Praxis: A Study In Contemporary Literature, Taylor Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers the understudied issue of genetic engineering as it has been deployed in the literature of the late 20th century. With reference to the concept of the enlightened gender hybridity of Cyborg theory and an eye to ecocritical implications, I read four texts: Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean, Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Brood – originally released between 1987 and 1989 as Xenogenesis – Simon Mawer's 1997 literary novel Mendel's Dwarf, and the first two books in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction MaddAddam series: 2003's Oryx and Crake and 2009's The Year Of …

My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While there exists some scholarship affirming the aesthetic and intellectual connections between transcendentalism and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is to date no substantial study of what role Ralph Waldo Emerson singularly played in the inheritance of that tradition. This essay seeks to validate Emerson as Bishop's literary parentage, an influence that, though not immediately identifiable, greatly shaped her creative process. In so doing, it addresses the critical mistakes which have prevented a thorough discussion of Emerson's relevance and, moreover, negatively dominated the imagination of Bishop scholarship. As an exploration of the writers' shared iconography, their mutual metaphors, the …

The Machine, The Victim, And The Third Thing: Navigating The Gender Spectrum In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Lindsay Mccoy Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, …

Harvesting The Seeds Of Early American Human And Nonhuman Animal Relationships In William Bartram's Travels, The Travel Diary Of Elizabeth House Trist, And Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, Leslie Blake Vives

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct …

The Rage Of The Wolf: Metamorphosis And Identity In Medieval Werewolf Tales., Jessica Lynne Bettini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The metamorphosis of man to beast has fascinated audiences for millennia. The werewolves of medieval literature were forced to conform to the Church's view of metamorphosis and, in so doing, transformed from bestial and savage to benevolent and rational. Analysis of Marie de France's Bisclavret, the anonymous Arthur and Gorlagon, the Irish tale The Crop-Eared Dog, and the French roman d'aventure Guillaume de Palerne reveals insight into medieval views of change, identity, and what it meant to exist in the medieval world. Each of these tales is told from the werewolf's point of view, and in each the …

The Excursion: A Screenplay Adaptation Of Francis Brooke’S The Excursion., Jennifer Sim Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My master’s thesis consists of a screenplay adaptation of the Eighteenth Century novel The Excursion by Francis Brooke, as well as an Introduction that details the writing process of the main text. In order to prepare this manuscript, I began with a study of both Francis Brooke and her novel as part of Dr. Judith Slagle’s Eighteenth Century British Novel course and developed my work to completion through independent research on and application of my findings on the screenwriting genre. The concluding product is a three-act screenplay which maintains the original period setting, speech, and costuming while adding such contemporary …

The Intricacies Of M.F.K. Fisher: Discovering A Kaleidoscopic Hybridity, Elizabeth Lee Sleeper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to analyze M.F.K. Fisher's socio-historic role and the components of her texts as a means to interrogate the categorization of her writing, to identify her authorial voice, and to see how it all contributes to and proves that Fisher is a `kaleidoscopic' hybrid writer. I utilize theoretical positions such as New Historicism, Feminism, Genre Theory, and Everyday Theory to help me identify and explain the hybrid tendencies of Fisher's writing. It is not a comprehensive study of her texts in light of these theories, but rather, it is a broad overview in order to demonstrate alternative readings …

Serial Fictions: A Collection, Danielle Rado

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of fiction that is not only a compilation of short stories, but a "serial collection". That is, the stories are organized into series, and these series placed in a series as well, making up the book. The purpose of this organization is to figure out to what extent the arrangement of stories significantly contributes to the reader's understand of, and engagement with, the particular elements of each story as they are both replicated and modified within and throughout the series. If plot is, as E.M. Forster describes it, the narrative of events with an emphasis on causality, then …

Margaret Cavendish's Exploration Of Consciousness In Her Writings, Cynthia Lynne Rogan De Ramirez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a time when women had few property rights, were given scarce educational opportunities, and were viewed as incorrigibly irrational, the largely autodidactic English intellectual Margaret Cavendish is fascinated by knowledge and how to secure for herself a place in the micro- as well as macrocosmic community of letters. In particular, Cavendish holds an abiding interest in what we now call "consciousness" which she attributes to every piece of matter. Throughout the universe, the three aspects of matter--inanimate, sensate, and rational--are omnipresent. While throughout all of Cavendish's eclectic literary creation, consciousness is the unifying principle. Her exploration of consciousness …

"Pieces In A Pattern": Virginia Woolf And Family Memory, Kirsten Marie Thoming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By examining two memoirs written by Virginia Woolf and one memoir written by her father, Leslie Stephen, along with Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, I will investigate the memoir genre, particularly in the context of understanding a shared history. These four texts provide a means of analyzing how texts form a discourse and what can be learned when conversational roles are determined. By grouping these four works together, one can better understand the rich genre of memoir, while also getting a glimpse of the powerful complexity and narrative intricacies of the Woolf/Stephen family conversation.

Austen, Byron, And Scott: Domestic Virtues And Fashioning History—Britain 1805 Through 1819, Joan Garden Cooper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

James Chandler in England in 1819: the Politics Of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism says that the second-generation Romantic writers were in essence historicist. According to Chandler, the literary work of England in 1819 is concerned with its own historical self-representation. Romantic writers can be regarded as fashioning the history by which they must be understood. Chandler regards Romanticism as a crucial period because despite the relatively short span of years to which it is usually assigned (1790-1830), close attention has been paid to its literary activity (3). Chandler's concern is "with writings that seek to state …

Rebel Discords: George Meredith's Metrical Art, Jason Wayne Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

George Meredith is perhaps best known for his innovative contributions to the Victorian novel. Unfortunately, his formal experiments in poetry have gone unnoticed. This dissertation seeks to rectify this problem by examining Meredith's metrical art and the ways in which he departs from the metrical tradition. The first chapter of the study evaluates his early poetry, most of which is derivative and metrically conventional. Despite. Only two poems are considered prosodically innovative, “The Death of Winter” and “South-west Wind in the Woodlands.” The second chapter discusses Meredith's experiments with the sonnet tradition, particularly as they relate to his most famous …

The Lady Of The Lake And Chivalry In The Lancelot-Grail Cycle And Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Amanda Marie Ewoldt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I …

Swinburne's "The Tale Of Balen": An Edition With Critical Commentary, Warren Hill Kelly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Warren Hill Kelly's Swinburne's The Tale of Balen: an Edition with Critical Commentary comprises a variorum-like edition of the poem that records all variances of the poem evident in its manuscript through its first and second editions, Chatto & Windus 1896 and 1904, or those editions produced during the poet's lifetime and therefore potentially bearing evidence of his editorial input. The edition forms as its basis the poet's final intention expressed in the manuscript, and notes all alterations within the manuscript and the first two published editions, and by coupling the edition's text with the notations pertaining to the manuscript, …

A Laudable Ambition Fired Her Soul Conduct Fiction Helps Define Republican Womanhood, Female Communities, And Women's Education In The Works Of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, And Susanna Haswell Rowson, Jessica Crystal Workman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the major works of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and Susanna Haswell Rowson, three major writers of the 1790s whose writing responds to the ideologies of the early American Republic. I suggest that Murray, Foster, and Rowson write conduct fiction which responds to the changing attitudes toward women and education after the American Revolution. Using fiction, these authors comment on the republican woman, the need for women’s education, and the necessity for women to gather in communities for support. Despite the prevailing notion that reading too many novels would corrupt young women, Judith Sargent Murray’s novella, …

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom And Nationhood In Seventeenth-Century Drama, Kelley Kay Hogue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century Drama posits that the importance of sixteenth-century martyrologies in defining England's national identity extends to the seventeenth century through popular representations of martyrdom on the page and stage. I argue that drama functions as a gateway between religious and secular conceptions of martyrdom; thus, this dissertation charts the transformation of martyrological narratives from early modern editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to the execution of the Royal Martyr, Charles I. Specifically, I contend that seventeenth-century plays shaped the secularization of martyrdom in profound ways by staging the sacrificial suffering and deaths of …

Colorism In The Spanish Caribbean: Legacies Of Race And Racism In Dominican And Puerto Rican Literature, Malinda Marie Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the impact of colorism on Spanish Caribbean literature--more specifically, works of fiction and memoir by both island and diaspora writers from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Colorism, or discrimination based on the shading of skin, manifests itself in Spanish Caribbean literature in a variety of ways. It is often used as a marker of class and/or class difference; it may reflect and/or play a part in shaping cultural standards of beauty or attractiveness; and it signifies the entrenched complexities of the Spanish Caribbean's history of conquest and colonization. Colorism appears in these texts as both a …

"Subject To Change" : The Composition Course Syllabus And Intersections Of Authority, Genre, And Community., Christopher Michael Alexander 1976-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an investigation of composition's disciplinary conceptions of the course syllabus, from its often-relegated position as textual object to a more interactive and complex subject of our discipline. The course syllabus is an example of an occluded genre, operating behind the scenes while serving commitments and obligations of a dominant ideology. This position as an occluded genre offers opportunities for composition instructors to thoroughly examine what our syllabi are really doing. By further exploring how we think about course syllabi, we can contribute to the development of our own teaching, as well as the teaching styles and practices …

Black And White On Black: Whiteness And Masculinity In The Works Of Three Australian Writers - Thomas Keneally, Colin Thiele, And Patrick White., Matthew Israel Byrge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

White depictions of Aborigines in literature have generally been culturally biased. In this study I explore four depictions of Indigenous Australians by white Australian writers. Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) depicts a half-caste Aborigine's attempt to enter white society in a racially-antipathetic world that precipitates his ruin. Children's author Colin Thiele develops friendships between white and Aboriginal children in frightening and dangerous landscapes in both Storm Boy (1963) and Fire in the Stone (1973). Nobel laureate Patrick White sets A Fringe of Leaves (1976) in a world in which Ellen Roxburgh's quest for freedom comes only through …

Creativity With Purest Energy: How Sir Thomas Wyatt Introduced Modern English Poetics, Jeffery R. Moser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The court poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) asserts a special confidence and boldness of the individual and his poetics that stand at the forefront of an ambitious, sure and powerful England which eventually came into place during his life and afterwards. Wyatt marks the start of a new literary period when humanity and art gradually diverged from religious rites and instruction, dramatic impulses for romantic love and mere desires for adventure, allegory and narrative to favor instead modern demands and conscious intellectualism. Wyatt's poetry best represents this distinct literary break from his native medieval predecessors and from writers who …

Byron And 'The Barbarous . . . Middle Age Of Man': Youth, Aging, And Midlife In Don Juan, Melanie J. Parker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For Byron, the knowledge that he would one day have to become old was always on his mind. By the time Byron had relocated to the Continent, the idea had become something of an obsession. Thirty had always been Byron's turning point, the age at which youth would have to end and he would have to become an old man. Upon finally reaching that age, Byron found himself in a place much like Dante's selva oscura--dark, confusing, fearful, but with no other way left to go. There are allusions to this opening scene throughout Don Juan. It is …

Adventures Of Kody A Children's Visual Storybook And Interactive Web Site, Matthew L. Walsh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In order to experience unconditional love, prejudices must be exposed and overcome. People often meet others with a disability or handicap and unknowingly treat these individuals negatively. As a middle school teacher, I have often witnessed students behaving cruelly towards those that are different. When my dog became a paraplegic I was inspired to develop a project to assist young readers in the development of conscientious actions towards individuals with disabilities. This document chronicles the development, procedures, and outcomes of the process behind that artistic endeavor. The artistic elements of this thesis project are a written children's storybook and an …

A Screen Of One's Own The Tpec And Feminist Technological Textuality In The 21st Century, Amy J. Barnickel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze the 20th century text, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (2005), and I engage with Woolf's concept of a woman's need for a room of her own in which she can be free to think for herself, study, write, or pursue other interests away from the oppression of patriarchal societal expectations and demands. Through library-based research, I identify four screens in Woolf's work through which she viewed and critiqued culture, and I use these screens to reconceptualize "a room of one's own" in 21st Century terms. I determine that the new "room" is …

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must …

Uncertain Identity: Medical Practitioners In Doctor Thorne And Middlemarch, Denis Illige-Saucier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The medical practitioners who play leading roles in the novels Middlemarch by George Eliot and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope are examples of a new breed of professional medical men that emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century in England. The new class of general practitioners held licenses from the old hierarchical system of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, but they were the driving force in favor of reform and professionalization in medicine. The 1858 Medical Act was an important step on the path toward a new conception of the medical practitioner, and the development of that new medical identity …

Replacing The Priest: Tradition, Politics, And Religion In Early Modern Irish Drama., Leslie Ann Valley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland's identity was continually pulled between its loyalties to Catholicism and British imperialism. In response to this conflict of identity, W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory argued the need for an Irish theatre that was demonstrative of the Irish people, returning to the literary traditions to the Celtic heritage. What resulted was a questioning of religion and politics in Ireland, specifically the Catholic Church and its priests. Yeat's own drama removed the priests from the stage and replaced them with characters demonstrative of those literary traditions, establishing what he called a "new …

The Passions And Self-Esteem In Mary Astell's Early Feminist Prose, Kathleen A. Ahearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, Enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory. An entire chapter in the dissertation is devoted to Astell's use of Descartes's theory of regulating the …

Pow/Mic: Prisoners Of Words/Missing In Canon: Liberating The Neglected British War Poets Of The Great War., Larry T. French

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the First World War ended in 1918 and anthologies began to emerge, limited attention has been paid to the poets of this era. While a few select male poets have achieved canonicity, women war poets of this era have fallen into enigmatic obscurity.

The intention of this paper is to expound, explicate, and expose the difficulties relating to gaining entry into the canon of English literature, especially where the poets of The Great War are concerned. This paper discusses the absence of the most profound and foreshadowing poems written during the war through research of scholarly journals and out-of-print …

In The Wor(L)D But Not Of It : Literacy Practices Of An Amish Community In Southeast Ohio., Tabetha Adkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Following in the tradition of scholars who treat literacy in context such as Deborah Brandt, Shirley Brice Heath, and David Barton and Mary Hamilton, I conducted my dissertation research not in an academic classroom but in the valleys of Hanley, a (pseudonym for a) town in southern Ohio, where I visited Amish homes, farms, and businesses. Using Brandt's model in Literacy in American Lives , I interviewed 25 Amish men, women, and children to study the uses of literacy in school, church, work, and daily life. I also attended community events such as an auction and a wedding to observe …

Jean Toomer And Carl Van Vechten: Identity, Exploitation, And The Harlem Renaissance, Phil Shaw

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jean Toomer's Cane is considered one of the literary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, though the many of his philosophical ideas which inspired it are dismissed. Inversely, Carl Van Vechten's influence as an advocate and patron of African American art is foundational though his Nigger Heaven is dismissed. However, there are commonalities in each authors identity positioning and subsequent exploitation of the black Harlem Renaissance ethos. Further, their utilization of Gurdjieffian principles of objectivity and primitivist images of blacks links and explains, in part, how their identities contributed to the ideas expressed in the novels.