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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii May 2023

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …


Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian Apr 2021

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …


Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait Jan 2021

Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the deer scenes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well.” Both raise questions about man’s right to hunt animals with impunity. Shakespeare’s Jaques superficially takes up the issue of animal rights whereas Wordsworth’s personification of the stag evokes the reader’s sympathy for the animal.


Beyond The Words: Paratextual And Bibliographic Traces Of The Other Reader In British Literature, 1760-1897, Jeffrey Duane Rients Sep 2019

Beyond The Words: Paratextual And Bibliographic Traces Of The Other Reader In British Literature, 1760-1897, Jeffrey Duane Rients

Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compounding technological improvements and expanding education result in unprecedented growth of the reading audience in Britain. This expansion creates a new relationship with the author, opening the horizon of the authorial imagination beyond the discourse community from which the author and the text originate. The relational gap between the author and this new audience manifests as the Other Reader, an anxiety formation that the author reacts to and attempts to preempt. This dissertation tracks these reactions via several authorial strategies that address the alienation of the Other Reader, including …


Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn May 2019

Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn

Theses and Dissertations

John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …


"I Dare Not Venture A Judgement”: Spirituality And The Postsecular In Hogg’S Confessions, Conor Bruce Hilton Feb 2019

"I Dare Not Venture A Judgement”: Spirituality And The Postsecular In Hogg’S Confessions, Conor Bruce Hilton

Theses and Dissertations

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious …


Public Records, Private Texts: Richard Carlile's Publication Of The Age Of Reason And The Birth Of Public Domain, Andrew S. Doub Jul 2017

Public Records, Private Texts: Richard Carlile's Publication Of The Age Of Reason And The Birth Of Public Domain, Andrew S. Doub

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1818 and 1824, radical printer and publisher Richard Carlile made a determined effort to disseminate copies of Thomas Paine's banned text The Age of Reason in England. Despite strict censorship laws and harsh legal penalties used to curtail previous publishers of this title, Carlile employed a number of creative techniques that kept Paine's deistic writings in print and in circulation during the Regency period. These included republishing public domain court documents when he was charged with seditious libel and reading The Age of Reason in its entirety into testimony during his trial, making it part of the public record. …


Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter Dec 2016

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …


Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations And Relocations Of The Autobiographical Self In Terry Tempest Williams's Finding Beauty In A Broken World, Sharman Tullis Gill Jun 2015

Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations And Relocations Of The Autobiographical Self In Terry Tempest Williams's Finding Beauty In A Broken World, Sharman Tullis Gill

Theses and Dissertations

Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World employs literary techniques that suggest dislocations and relocations of the human subject in ethical modes of being. Through narrative techniques, multidisciplinary language, and themes of conversation, gift-exchange, listening and response, Williams reflects ecological humanist mosaics, suggesting cooperative regeneration—an intersection of material beings facilitated by an ethical human imagination that listens, receives, and gives toward patterns of beauty, including, but not limited to, being human in a collective world. This eco-critical analysis of Williams’s work affirms the human being in post-humanist philosophy and repositions relational Romanticism for the 21st century.


Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones Dec 2014

Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, not as the culminating point to which her writing inevitably led, as is frequently imagined in accounts of her life and work, but, instead, as the product of an intricate process of revision that highlights her investment in genre. Versions of many of the poems that Robinson included in Lyrical Tales originally were published in newspapers and periodicals. Rather than seeing the changes as a move toward a best or most mature or inspired version, I argue that Robinson revised to meet the requirements of her new genre, the lyrical tale. I …


Discovering The "God Within": The Experience And Manifestation Of Emerson's Evolving Philosophy Of Intuition, Anne Tiffany Turner May 2014

Discovering The "God Within": The Experience And Manifestation Of Emerson's Evolving Philosophy Of Intuition, Anne Tiffany Turner

Theses and Dissertations

Investigating individual subjectivity, Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to Europe following the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, and his resignation from the Unitarian ministry. His experience before and during the voyage contributed to the evolution of a self-intuitive philosophy, termed selbstgefühl by the German Romantics and altered his careful style of composition and delivery to promote the integrity of individual subjectivity as the highest authority in the deduction of truth. He would use this philosophy throughout the remainder of his life to encourage his audience to experience the same process he did.


Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden Nov 2010

Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden

Theses and Dissertations

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield …


The New Feminine Rhetoric: Wollstonecraft, Austen, And The Forms Of Romantic-Era Feminism, Elisabeth Louise Guyon Mar 2008

The New Feminine Rhetoric: Wollstonecraft, Austen, And The Forms Of Romantic-Era Feminism, Elisabeth Louise Guyon

Theses and Dissertations

Countering traditional claims that the feminist movement all but vanished during the early nineteenth century, this thesis suggests feminism remained prominent in both the literature and rhetoric of the time. In tracing the development of the "New Rhetoric," a rhetorical movement that aimed to accommodate new principles of the Enlightenment, I focus in part on the rhetorical battle between Edmund Burke, with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Thomas Paine, with his Rights of Man. From there, I suggest that Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in the wake of the Burke-Paine debate and drawing upon the rhetorical philosophy of George …


Libertas Reborn: A Legend Of Florence And Leigh Hunt's Literary Revival, Adrianne Gardner Malan Jul 2007

Libertas Reborn: A Legend Of Florence And Leigh Hunt's Literary Revival, Adrianne Gardner Malan

Theses and Dissertations

According to traditional accounts, following the premature deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron in the 1820s, literature in England fell into a sort of slumber until the late 1830s and early 1840s, when a new generation-a generation we now call the Victorians-came on the scene. Literary scholarship has tended to ignore this period of slumber as an uninteresting gap between the two dynamic movements of Romanticism and Victorianism. It was during this transitional period, however, that Leigh Hunt, one of the most radical of Romantic figures, wrote and staged A Legend of Florence (1840) in an attempt to stimulate a …


The Byronic Myth In Brazil: Cultural Perspectives On Lord Byron's Image In Brazilian Romanticism, Matthew Lorin Squires Mar 2005

The Byronic Myth In Brazil: Cultural Perspectives On Lord Byron's Image In Brazilian Romanticism, Matthew Lorin Squires

Theses and Dissertations

Byron's reception in one of the nineteenth century's largest and most culturally significant post-colonial outposts, Brazil, has been virtually ignored in English studies. The implications of Lord Byron's influence in Brazil are extensive since he was overwhelmingly popular among poets but also subversive to the nationalistic aims of Brazilian Romanticism. Nearly all of the well known Brazilian Romantics were not only influenced by him, but translated him. Their notion of what it meant to be "Byronic," however, differed from ideas held in Europe. The Brazilian Byronic hero was more extreme, macabre, and sentimental, lonelier, darker, and deadlier. Byron had various …