English Language and Literature Commons^™

Not So Immaculately Conceived: Imagining The Protestant Madonna 1850-1910, Deborah Ann Scaperoth

Doctoral Dissertations

Pius IX in the 1854 Bull Ineffabilis Deus defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as the belief that Mary; mother of Jesus, was from the moment of her conception free from the "stain of original sin." This idea was a part of ecclesiastical tradition, but prior to this time, the church had not officially defined Mary's sinless nature in writing. The publication of this definition, along with published accounts of Marian sightings, contributed to an already heightened awareness of her in a literate, culturally aware public. As a result, Protestant writers who sought to invoke her image interpreted a …

Democracy And Capitalism In The American Western, Michelle C. Greenwald

Doctoral Dissertations

In “Democracy and Capitalism in the American Western,” I argue that the Western consistently dramatizes the tensions between democracy and capitalism while revealing the cultural structure of feeling at the time of its production. Since the first modern Western, Wister’s The Virginian (1902), the genre has expressed a concern that the balance between democracy and capitalism has been upset and that this imbalance has engendered or exacerbated other social problems. The genre generally worked to promote consensus about progress until the breakdown of the liberal consensus in the 1960s, when Americans’ belief in progress was shaken, resulting, in turn, in …

"Green In The Mulberry Bush": Quentin, Lancelot, And The Long Shadow Of The Lost Cause, Amy Renee Covington

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project is to examine the immensely popular post-Civil War "Myth of the Lost Cause" which developed in the Southern states after the Confederate defeat. Its primary tenet was the belief in a chivalric antebellum Southern society, complete with genteel plantation owners, faithful slaves, and an Edenic landscape. The myth also exalted the bravery of the Confederate soldier and the quiet heroism of the belles left behind. This carefully crafted fantasy was the product of an organized, sophisticated public relations campaign which originated in the former Confederacy and was quickly adopted by other parts of the country. …

Highway 11, Devon Koren Asdell

Masters Theses

Created in 1926, US Route 11 runs from the Canadian border at Rouses Point, New York, to just shy of New Orleans at an intersection with US-90. In Bristol, Virginia, the highway splits in two -- 11-E and 11-W -- and then reunites in Knoxville, Tennessee. This highway serves as the main thoroughfare for many small towns and cities, and it is known by many names -- Lee Highway, Andrew Johnson Highway, and Kingston Pike, to name a few. As many of the residents of these small towns might attest, it is easy to take a highway for granted when …

Embodying History: Women, Representation, And Resistance In Twentieth-Century Southern African And Caribbean Literature, April Conley Kilinski

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation illustrates how twentieth-century Southern African and Caribbean authors of English fictions recuperate the metaphorical and material female body from the male-centered project of British colonization by employing the female body as a site of resistance through representations of illness, eating disorders, and racial and gender performance. I include works by men and women as well as white and minority authors to illustrate how the female body becomes a point of convergence for narratives of resistance in these postcolonial works. Since each narrative is informed by hybridity--through syncretism, miscegenation, and contact with the metropolis through immigration--I argue that each …

From The Voice To The Violent Act: Language And Violence In Contemporary Drama, Richard A. Bryan

Doctoral Dissertations

Aleks Sierz coined the phrase "In-Yer-Face Theatre" to categorize a new generation of plays written by a group of upstart playwrights in Britain and America. In addressing these plays, I draw upon recent contributions within the social sciences in order to understand better the interstices of language and violence in this drama. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the social considerations at the heart of these plays. Although frequently criticized for a perceived lack of social consciousness and a seemingly gratuitous use of profanity, prurient sexuality, and graphic violence, these writers in fact continue, and contribute to, a tradition of theater that …

Remember The Ordinary, If You Can’: Metaphor, Memory And Meaning Of 9/11 In The Leading Articles Of The Times Of London, Anne Snellen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is developed in conjunction with the Center for Applied Phenomenological Research at the University of Tennessee and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, to examine how the editorial pages of The Times of London sought to provide a collective understanding of the events of 9/11 during the first year after the attacks. Leaning on the methods of historiography, phenomenology, and rhetorical analysis, this study offers an interdisciplinary approach to discovering meaning translated through the interrelated processes of conjuring historical memory, inventing novel, figurative terminology, and building narrative structures to frame our understanding of events. This study considers how …

Active Submission: The Subversion Of Gendered Binary Oppositions In Three Post-War Novels Authored By International Women, Rebecca Annette Napier

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore a controversial dimension of feminist literature: that dimension concerning female masochism. My study centers on international novels written by women after World War II. The novels are The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, Gordon by Edith Templeton, and The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. This thesis examines three highly individualized tales of control and power that posit female masochism as means for “active submission.” I claim that while the feminist politics of these texts is ambiguous, protagonists of these novels redefine masochism as “active submission,” and as a result, they challenge the …

Chaucer's Questioning Impulse: Reading The Dream Visions And Troilus And Criseyde, Anita K. Bergeson

Doctoral Dissertations

Models of medieval reading often describe a process that divorces emotion from intellect or that sees the reader in a position of dominance over the text. This project examines rēden, with its overlapping meanings of interpretation, counsel, advice, and control, and reading scenes in Chaucer’s early dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde. In these poems. Chaucer uses rēden to question and reassess acts of reading as an interactive process between text and reader. In the Book of the Duchess, reading is emotive interpretation that consoles neither the narrator nor the Black Knight. The House of Fame explores reading …

Liminal Bodies, Leslye Stewart Ford

Masters Theses

This collection of thirty-three mostly free-verse poems explores the liminal, or threshold, modes of being encountered by bodies, especially in conjunction with other bodies, with places, and with the spirit or the divine. The sections of the manuscript progress from exploring the interstices and large gaps between women and girls, mothers and daughters, to the merging and colliding of lovers, friends, even rapists, to place and its ability to root the body to shadows of the past and present, to the merging of the divine with the human. As a collection, each section seeks to explore the body as a …

Liberalism, Communitarianism, And The Search For Utopia, Jennifer Marie Vanden Heuval

Masters Theses

This thesis traces the development of utopian literature through the lens of the liberal-communitarian debate. As Jürgen Habermas asserts, utopian thought plays a vital role in the positive development of society. Habermas also observes that utopian energies are failing in modern society and that this limits our ability to achieve an affirmative community. I agree with Habermas’s assessment and therefore here I examine literary representations of utopia with the hope that utopian energies can be revived. As I argue here, literary utopias can inspire and guide us towards positive societal change. In chapter one, I examine the utopias of the …

The Politics Of Abstraction: Race, Gender, And Slavery In The Poetry Of William Blake, Edgar Cuthbert Gentle

Masters Theses

This study examines the relationship between the poetry of William Blake and the abolitionist movement gaining force in England from 1789-1793. The poems The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and "The Little Black Boy" (1789) express sympathy with this movement, depicting racial prejudice and oppression in unsparing ways. However, other aspects of the poems threaten to undercut this message, such as the equation of corruption with black imagery and purity with white imagery. This is a sign of Blake's limited scientific and theological understanding of race, which leads to an inadequate portrayal of enslaved Africans. Because his interests …

Making The Margins Legitimate: Travel, Family, And National Identity In Eighteenth-Century British Fiction, Teresa R. Moore

Masters Theses

This study examines the first novels of Frances Burney and Tobias Smollett in order to analyze the effects of inner, familial forces and outer, worldly forces on the narrators’ national identity. Written thirty years apart, the novels follow a remarkably similar plot structure to arrive at different configurations of national identity. I argue that success creating a fictional character who fully enters British society is ultimately dependent upon the author’s own sense of marginalization. Indeed, Burney and Smollett configure their sense of Britishness around their own social positions as a woman and Scot respectively. Finally, these findings maintain that the …

Politics Of Representations: Snow Man And Bait By David Albahari, Damjana Mraovic

Masters Theses

The thesis analyzes stereotypes about the Balkans in two novels, Snow Man (1995) and Bait (1996), by contemporary Serbian writer David Albahari (b. 1948), and how these assumptions, mostly imposed by the West and its tradition of reading the East/the Balkans, are internalized or problematized in these works. This thesis also includes a new, original interview with Albahari conducted by the thesis author. The thesis addresses a change in Albahari’s poetics from metafiction typical for the 1970s and 1980s, to epic forms, which encapsulate the totality of historical experience, in the 1990s. Ultimately, the thesis points out a paradox in …

Social Student Bodies In The Im World: Digital Vernaculars And Self-Reflexive Rhetoric, Stacey Lynn Pigg

Masters Theses

Recent rhetoric, composition, and literacy scholarship has refocused attention on the body’s role in reading and writing, arguing against abstracting literacy practices and texts from material situations, contexts, and the physical bodies who create them. This scholarship challenges descriptions and accounts of emerging media and digital writing situations as “disembodying.” This thesis argues that in the “IM world” in which incoming college students learn to write by participating in online communities, their digital writing can be considered “embodied” as real-world, socially-situated practice. By actively participating in online communities, many incoming college students learn distinct online language practices outside of school; …

Dismantling The Master’S Schoolhouse: The Rhetoric Of Education In African American Autobiography And Fiction, Miya G. Abbot

Masters Theses

This thesis examines rhetorical understandings of education for African Americans in literature of three important time periods of American history. From the post-Reconstruction South, to Northern cities in the 1950s, and finally to 1990s Los Angeles, this is an examination of how African American authors of fiction and autobiography have presented the relationship between literacy acquisition and identity. Underlying the historical and rhetorical examination is the argument that, for African American students, the virtue of the educational space is dubious. It is at once the gateway to the "American dream" of prosperity, and the venue for the reinforcement of systemic …

Gender, Power, And The January-May Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Esther Liu Godfrey

Doctoral Dissertations

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1848 Jane Eyre, Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax responds to Jane with certain dismay at the thought of her forty-year-old master marrying the twenty-five-year-old Blanche Ingram: “I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea of the sort” (163). Yet to Mrs. Fairfax’s great surprise,Rochester later makes an “unequal match” with an even greater disparity in age to Jane, ultimately bringing the novel to a sentimental close. Marriages with large age differences form an important narrative frame in nineteenth-century British literature, and they conveniently merge disruptive and conservative forces. Although they play with normative codes of …

What Is Left, Andrew Michael Najberg

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project was to create a collection of poetry that examines the self as a muted element in foreign environments. When placed in a foreign culture, our roles as observers are enhanced due to our limited inclusion within the perceptual frame of references of the cultures and people we observe. Ultimately, the foreigner becomes a parallel sub-system of the dominant foreign culture until such time that he or she makes a direct intrusion into that culture. This level of mutability allows the observer access to cultural elements and interactions inaccessible from within the cultural identity.

The principle …

Living With Curious Pain, Casie Janelle Fedukovich

Masters Theses

"Living with Curious Pain" is a collection of poems written between August 2004 and March 2006. This collection largely focuses on the broad mining history of Southern West Virginia, and some of the pieces closely examine the lineage of the Vances, a mining family still living in the area. "Living with Curious Pain" is divided into two parts, which delineate the poems by their content. "Breathing Lessons" concerns itself with unearthing the hidden histories of mining families, kept silent by cultural constructions. "Body Lessons" shifts the focus away from history and looks deeply at the effects of such history on …