English Language and Literature Commons^™

Gender Performativity In H.D.'S Sea Garden, Angela Sanigar

Theses : Honours

Sea Garden was the first book of poetry written by H.D. in 1916. Read through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of performativity, the book can be interpreted as an investigation of gender and identity in ways that challenge the confines of heteronormativity. Ultimately, I will argue that the poems work in ways close to Judith Butler's sense of 'queer', although as will become clear, my 'queer' reading of H.D.'s Sea Garden differs from the dominant queer readings of her work that currently exist. To this end, I will then discuss how Sea Garden operates as a community of different …

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …

The Virgin's Daughters: Catholic Traditions And The Post-Colonial South In Contemporary Women's Writing, Elizabeth M. Beard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the texts of contemporary women writers who consciously engage dominant Catholic, American, and southern ideologies in their narratives and who posit Louisiana as a liminal, hybrid space. Building upon postcolonial concepts of hybridity and performance of cultural memory, I trace a “pathway” to feminist recovery and reclamation of ancestral memory and spirituality in Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr, Rebecca Wells’ Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Brenda Marie Osbey’s All Saints, and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana. The authors enact spiritual and cultural reclamation through the written expression of key components of postcolonial reconstruction of …

Children Of Men: The American Jeremiad In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Science Fiction And Film, Joseph Franklin Brown Jr.

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation considers the dynamic and resilient influence of the jeremiad, an early American religious and literary mode, on contemporary American literature and culture. It argues that the polemical, dystopian, and apocalyptic narratives so abundant in twentieth-century literature and film participate in an ingrained literary tradition that accounts for society's misfortunes as penalty for its social and moral evils while, at the same time, emphasizing an American exceptionalism born out of a belief in the society's election through its covenant with God. The project makes connections between early-American texts and related works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and …

Fatal Passion: The Early American Conspiracy Plot And Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Rebecca Bossie

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Using the Bavarian Illuminati scare of 1798, this work attempts to trace how Charles Brockden Brown uses these conspiracy narratives to plot other important eighteenth century narratives in his first novel, Wieland, and its companion piece Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. This Thesis covers a broad range of topic important to the eighteenth century, but focuses more specifically on eighteenth century politics, historiography, patriarchal and family values, and women's work and voices in literature.

Language, Emotion, And Imagination: Constructing Human Identity Through Hemingway's Work, Gorka Diaz

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines how Hemingway’s use of language evokes emotions in his stories and how his particular way of evoking emotions affects readers. Hemingway’s style of providing vivid experiences for readers centers on the image as the dimension where emotions are offered, but also the dimension where the writer’s work converges with the reader’s reception of it. The reader reconstructs the text through the act of signifying emotions. This process of signification is made possible only through the use of the reader’s imagination. The study of the relation between emotion and imagination emphasizes that readers decode fiction as they decode …

The Prophetic Imagination Of P. B. Shelley, Andrew O. Winckles

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In his “Defence of Poetry,” Shelley claims, “Poets… were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets.” As such, even a cursory glance at Shelley’s poetry and political beliefs reveals an interest in what is wrong with the world, how to fix it, and what will happen if no action is taken. However, current studies fail to fully assess what makes up the prophetic imagination. They confine discussions of Romantic prophecy to discussions of prophetic inspiration, futurity, and rhetoric – divorcing the work from its impetus for social change. The prophetic imagination, as utilized by Shelley, is …

Here Tunggë Made Here Slayn: Dangerous Speech Acts In Four Exempla From Robert Mannyng Of Brunne’S Handlyng Synne, Emily Russell

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I consider four exempla from Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne: “The Tale of the Bloody Child,” “The Tale of the Sacrilegious Carolers of Colbek,” “The Tale of the Midwife Who Christened the Child Wrongly,” and “St. Gregory’s Tale of the Nun Who Spoke Naughty Words.” I read these exempla through the theoretical texts of Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Mary Douglas, as well as others, and conclude that speech acts, whether deviant or sanctioned, make identity at any level (de)constructable. I hope to show that while this is particularly noticeable against the historical …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“The Liquor Is Not Earthly”: The Tempest And The Downfall Of Native Americans, Sally Shader

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of The Sublime In Thomas Gray’S “Ode On A Distant Prospect Of Eton College”, Sophie Condon

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Recontextualizing Guy Endore’S Babouk In The Shadow Of Orientalism, Nathan Sacks

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Natives And Their Returns In Thomas Hardy’S The Return Of The Native, Jason Burger

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 11 Fall 2009

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

A Language Of Grief: Spectacular, Textual, And Violent Expression In Titus Andronicus, Connor Guy

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream: Wittman Ah Sing Foresees Postethnic Humanity, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream" examines the postethnic and the posthuman in fiction by Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler, and Isaac Asimov.

Lights And Shadows - 2009, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Gothic Cordelias: The Afterlife Of "Lear" And The Construction Of Femininity, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

Addresses the gap for an analysis of Shakespeare's relation to the Gothic.

The Gothic novel transports you to a strange and fascinating world quite unlike your own, far away from the calm drawing rooms of Regency England. It is the ultimate escapist literature. It is this world, and its mutually beneficial relationship with Catholicism, that Dr Maria Purves so beautifully illuminates for the reader.

Disrupted Constructions: Joe Christmas's Formation Of Race And Sexuality In Light In August, Victoria M. Bryan

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

William Faulkner intended Joe Christmas to be a tragic character who would constantly seek an identity. He combats any threat to his safety—be it physical, mental, or emotional safety—with violent reactions that generally manifest in outbursts toward women for threatening his conception of his sexuality by coercing him into an intimate relationship. At many points throughout the novel, Christmas associates himself with the black race and endures all of the ridicule that comes with it just to believe that he knows a little bit about his personal history and allows his racial confusion to influence his construction of his sexual …

Review: Abe’S Honest Words, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

Character Themes: Courage, Caring, Citizenship

Review: Song Of The Water Boatman And Other Pond Poems, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Review: An American Plague: The True And Terrifying Story Of The Yellow Fever Epidemic Of 1793, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Review: Savvy, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Review: The Top Of The World: Climbing Mount Everest, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

New And Unimproved: Atheism's Brash But Ineffectual Makeover, Karen Swallow Prior

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

It's Bigger And Hip-Hop: Richard Wright, Hip-Hop, And Masculinity, Marcos Julian Del Hierro

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In Native Son, Richard Wright presents a view of the impoverished, inner-city from an insider's perspective, which reflects the anger and hate brewing towards the rest of the nation as a result of living under harsh, isolating conditions. Wright's main character, Bigger Thomas serves as an archetypal ghetto figure both in his attitudes and the treatment he receives from Anglo Americans. Additionally, the reception of Native Son by a majority white reading audience also reflected the voyeuristic thrill of the bourgeoisie when consuming cultural products by African Americans. The selection of Wright's novel into the Book of the Month …

Templeton's Peace, Trent Devell Hudley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This novel is a work of fiction.

V.S. Naipaul And The 1946 Trinidad General Election, Aaron Eastley

Faculty Publications

On 1 July 1946 the first election featuring universal adult suffrage was held in Trinidad. As reported in the island’s leading newspaper of the day, the Trinidad Guardian, the “privilege of a lowered franchise” expanded the electorate nearly tenfold, from approximately 30,000 to 259,000 eligible voters (“Momentous”). This was a precipitous change, especially in a colony where voting even on a limited scale had only been instituted a couple of decades before (1925), in an era when lingering doubts about the qualifications of nonwhites and women had motivated the institution of property, literacy, and age requirements that disenfranchised all but …