English Language and Literature Commons^™

He Had Two Women To Die For, Ireland And The Missus”: Mothers As Abject And Sons As Scapegoats In Edna O’Brien’S House Of Splendid Isolation And In The Forest, Emily Nix

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the protagonists in Edna O’Brien’s In the Forest and House of Splendid Isolation and applies Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. In doing so, I attempt to give a richer understanding of O’Brien’s masculine and feminine characters and how their constructed identities are based on their cultural circumstances and positions in their societies. I use Kristeva’s theory of abjection to analyze the single women in these novels, Eily and Josie, who become metaphorical single mothers by the invasions of young men into their homes. Then, I apply Girard’s theory of the …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

Caliban The Savage : Shakespeare’S Critique Of Colonialist Misappropriation Of Indigenous Identities, Leonard Aquil Hughes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis engages with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, analyzing the character Caliban as a critique of British colonialism. I argue that Caliban is not intended simply as a begrudged antagonist, but as a figure intended to represent New World natives. Shakespeare’s “savage” also acts as an on-stage embodiment of Africans and other victims of British imperial exploits that suffered subjugation and hegemony. With this character, Shakespeare provides a demonstration of the relationship between Europeans and the colonized, while challenging the very institution of colonialism. Such a work provides valuable post-Shakespearean insights as well. Caliban contributes directly to the dialogue surrounding the …

Cyberspace Vs Green Space: Nature’S Psychological Influence In Neuromancer, Blade Runner 2049, And The Stone Gods, Zackery Castle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cyberpunk science fiction is often set in dystopian futures where capitalism and rapid technological growth have rendered the planet ecologically devastated. The people of these worlds are host to numerous mental illnesses that many attempt to cure with drugs, entertainment, or other aspects of their fast-paced existences, but these solutions are rarely successful. When characters come to embrace the remnants of the natural world, however, they typically show signs of mental healing as the result of exposure to nature. This thesis analyzes William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods alongside research …

A Shift In Perspective: Temptress Witch To Realistic Woman, Caroline Conroy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In mid-20th century Anglo-American translations of The Odyssey, Odysseus is painted as a courageous, clever king while the briefly-featured Circe is portrayed as a temptress witch. This dichotomy changes, however, by the time these characters are featured in early 21st-century adaptations of Homer’s work; both released in 2018, Madeline Miller’s Circe and Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing reclaim Circe’s depiction by portraying a Circe-like character as a powerful protagonist, aware of her strengths and weaknesses. By analyzing the archetype of the witch and how it is reflective of patriarchal society’s efforts to reduce and isolate women’s power, I argue …

Henry D. Thoreau’S Color Red, Relationship To Nature, And Religious Imagery In Robert Frost’S “Rose Pogonias” And Other Poems, Jennifer Fry

English Department Theses

In the estimation of contemporaries such as book critic Julian Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau sought to leave a legacy of influence behind him. He never saw such attention in his lifetime. Yet, he found a willing audience in Robert Frost, who began reading his works with gusto at the age of 22 and later listed Walden as one of his favorite books. Reading Frost’s own works reveals ample influence of Thoreau’s writings over Frost’s artistry—in terms of the color choices used, but also in advocating a certain view of nature, as well as the use of pagan imagery within his …

Debating Birds Upend The Hierarchy Of Nature In The Owl And The Nightingale And The Parliament Of Fowls, Caragh Vasko

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

A World Ruled By Unknowns: The Psychological Effects Of The Supernatural And Natural Worlds In Emily Brontë'S Wuthering Heights, Jordan Cymrot

Student Theses and Dissertations

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847 at a point of collision between Romantic thought and Victorian ideals. Her novel exemplifies a developed and deliberate effort to represent a world ruled by forces out of one’s control, the most evident example of this being the supernatural force that overtakes the novel. In her precise focus on the language and natural landscape that bind this novel together, her characters emerge as representative of the psychological complexity produced by the coexistence of the mundane and the extraordinary. My thesis focuses on the effects of the natural landscape and the forces that …

Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …

In Praise Of The Peaks: Science, Art, And Nature In Kojima Usui’S Mountain Literature, Aaron Paul Jasny

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Meiji period (1868–1912), a newly constituted Japanese nation sought equal standing among the global powers it encountered with increasing frequency, by updating and modernizing in various fields of knowledge and cultural production. Science and technology were adopted and adapted from the nations of the West in order to bolster the economy, improve infrastructure, and ensure the health and well-being of the Japanese people. Meanwhile, literature and the arts were refashioned to make them more suitable for dealing with modernization, urbanization, empirical and rational thinking, and a regard for individual autonomy and subjectivity. Meiji Japan witnessed numerous innovations, which …

Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher

Theses and Dissertations

In Jane Eyre and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Brontë and her literary inheritor, D.H. Lawrence, locate the potentially revolutionary romance between their protagonists in natural settings, distant from the social sphere, in order to demonstrate the un-naturalness of an administered capitalist society in which class distinctions work in dehumanizing ways.

"Dawn And Doom Was In The Branches": Eros Revisited In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Fernando M. Duran

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Magic Of A Strange Sky : Nature And The Mysticism Of Memory In Beckett's Trilogy, Daniel James Warhol

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This essay attempts to examine the later prose of Samuel Beckett within the frame of a growing body of critical research that aligns the author’s universal philosophy of the human condition with Indian and Buddhist philosophies. Inspired by the research of Lidan Lin, in her essay “Samuel Beckett’s Encounter with the East,” and Paul Foster’s Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, I take up a similar line of inquiry, choosing to focus on moments in the trilogy that are concerned with contact between the individual and the natural world. While many critics have …

Emily Dickinson's Echology: A Listener's Reconceptualization Of Citizenship, Consciousness, And The World, Beth Ann Staley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

What I call Emily Dickinson’s “echology” combines the terms “echo” and “ecology” to understand how Dickinson’s work echoes – and is an echo – of the world and how, consequently, her work resides not just in her handwritten documents and their publication in various editions but in an ecology that’s tied to the earth that hosted her, the air that faced her, and the sea kept her listening. To assess the critical value of Dickinson’s echology, this dissertation begins by apprehending how the story of the echo is a story about sound masking, specifically about how the echo that is …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

Annie Dillard: At The Altar Of Nature, Kelley A. Kasul

Masters Theses

This thesis intends to delve into Annie Dillard’s time spent at Tinker Creek. Why Dillard chose to go into nature is critiqued, as well as what she found. One of the things it appears Annie Dillard sought and found was a connection to the Divine. She had been searching for this connection in various churches but had not found what she needed there. There is another, perhaps more pressing, issue of the mystical journey Dillard went on as well. This was an internal journey, not a physical journey. Both of these topics are vetted for the purposes of furthering the …

“While The Imagination Strains / After Deer”: William Carlos Williams’S Interrogations Of The American Transcendental Imagination And The Proto-Suburban Scene, Tyler Wagner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poet’s ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is …

Dogs, Cats, And A Lambkin: Speechlessness And The Animal In Ulysses, Pierce R. Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This essay explores the status of the animal and the consequences of animal speechlessness in Ulysses, mainly focusing on encounters with dogs and cats. Through these animal encounters, Joyce provides a foundation for understanding the complications faced by the Bloom family in grieving their deceased infant son.

Outside Classroom: Unstructured Outdoor Play In Early Childhood Education, Valerie Lockhart

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This independent study examines the benefits of unstructured outdoor play in early childhood education through the lens of an original children's book and correlative research.

Of Wilderness, Forest, And Garden: An Eco-Theory Of Genre In Middle English Literature, Barbara L. Bolt

Theses and Dissertations

“Of Wilderness, Forest, and Garden: An Eco-Theory of Genre in Middle English Literature” proposes a new theory of genre that considers the material elements of the natural environment in Middle English literature composed between 1300-1450 CE. Instead of treating the setting as just a backdrop for human activity, I posit that the components of the environment play a role in the deployment of the narrative by shaping the characters and influencing the action. More than an acknowledgement of the particular natural features, this study explores the role that these components play and how they give us a deeper understanding of …

Responsibility And Responsiveness In The Novels Of Ann Radcliffe And Mary Shelley, Katherine Marie Mcgee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the ways in which humans interact with and respond to other humans and nonhumans in Ann Radcliffe's and Mary Shelley's novels. I argue that in light of the social and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, Radcliffe and Shelley call not so much for Revolution or drastic reform but for a change in the ways in which individuals respond to the needs of others, both human and nonhuman, and take responsibility for each other. The ways in which humans interact with the nonhuman inform the positive and negative practices that they should use to interact with …

Tied In Lusty Leese: Animalization And Agency In Troilus And Criseyde, Kendra Marie Slayton

Masters Theses

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a tale fraught with ambiguity, and particularly so concerning issues of gender, agency, and free will. Critical readings often focus on depicting TC as Chaucer’s didactic portrayal of a flawed and transitory humanity, with Troilus’s death and transcendence taken as the primary lens through which to seek final meaning in the poem. However, I argue that Chaucer’s use of natural tropes, vocabulary, and artistry also reveal that the poem, before it reaches its transcendental ending, indicts not only the mortal world at large but more specifically the at-times misogynist conventions of the genre itself. Specifically, …

"To Taste Her Mystic Bread" Or "The Mocking Echo Of His Own": Uses Of Nature In The Poems Of Emily Dickinson And Robert Frost, Ian R. Weaver

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The central question to this thesis is: how is knowledge about nature created? A comprehensive study to adequately answer this question would be impossible; therefore, this thesis focuses on two prominent American poets’ approaches to nature: Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. These poets’ nature poems are comparable for several reasons with a few being that both lived the majority of their lives in New England; both have had a significant impact on American nature writing; and both use nature as central to their work. But most importantly, Dickinson’s and Frost’s poetry are comparable because they have seemingly opposed approaches to …

Lizard Girl And Other Girl Stories, Melinda Beth Keefauver

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the notable lack of the comic mode in contemporary ecofiction and aims to integrate humor and ecological inflection through the female narrative voice. Comedy and ecology rarely intersect in literary fiction. Ecofiction tends to be unfunny because the category grows out of the nonfiction tradition of nature writing, a genre that yields solemn, reverent, meditative essays that lack humor. Also, works of ecofiction can seem didactic, lacking the complexity, richness, and ambiguity that characterize literary fiction. Furthermore, literary critics often view comedic stories as lacking in literary quality. However, comedy has an intensifying effect on narrative, imbuing …

Cross-Cultural Ecotheology In The Poetry Of Li-Young Lee, Sienna Miquel Palmer Dittmer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the cross-cultural ecotheology of contemporary American poet Li-Young Lee by looking at the intersection of the human, the natural, and the sacred in his poetry. Close readings of Lee's poetic encounters with roses, persimmons, trees, wind, and light through the lens of Christianity and Daoism illustrate the way Lee is able to merge the Eastern concepts of interconnection and mutual harmony with Western ideas of sacredness and divinity. This discussion places Lee in direct conversation with modern and contemporary ecopoets who use the creative energy of language to express our moral and ethical responsibility to the world …

Redefining Self In The Midst Of "Things": Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Kristin Lowe

Theses and Dissertations

In this essay, I examine the role of material culture in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980) to understand how the prominent presence of material culture introduces complex questions about the relationships among objects, reality, and the self. By recognizing objects' fluidity of meaning, Housekeeping offers its characters a way to see their individuality and conceptions of reality in a similar state of flux. Significantly, it is in the act of recognizing that the socially accepted uses of objects are not necessarily "natural" parts of existence, and, like elements of the natural world, the meanings and uses of these items are …

Looking For Adam: An Analysis Of The Works Of Marilynne Robinson, Kristina Y. Zavala

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Many scholars have analyzed the works of Marilynne Robinson, focusing their work on analyzing her novels separately instead of as a whole according to her views of Calvinism and other faith-related themes. This thesis will take apart all of the essays in The Death of Adam, examining each of them for the most important views and opinions expressed by the author. These issues have served to evolve Robinson‘s opinions in such a way that to analyze her novels according to only her religious views would be an injustice. By examining the use of certain aspects of the novel form, this …

From Rivers To Gardens: The Ambivalent Role Of Nature In My ?Ntonia, O Pioneers!, And Death Comes To The Archbishop, Graham Kirkland

English Theses

Though her early writing owes much to nineteenth-century American Realism, Willa Cather experiments with male and female literary traditions while finding her own modern literary voice. In the process Cather gives nature an ambivalent role in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes to the Archbishop. She produces a tension between rivers and gardens, places where nature and culture converge. Like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather confronts the boundaries between humans and nature.

The Level Of The Beasts That Perish: Animalized Text In Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, Christie Anne Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Although Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's 1839 social reform novel Helen Fleetwood has long been understood as a commentary on the dehumanizing effects of factory work, her use of animals to represent factory workers has not been considered in analyses of her depictions of dehumanization. Considering both the growing interest in the animal/human divide during the early nineteenth century and Tonna's own direct contributions to discussions about animals, in this essay I examine the role that animals play in negotiating definitions of humanity and nature in the novel. I argue that idealized, "Edenic" animals and corrupted, "industrial" animals are integral to Tonna's …