English Language and Literature Commons^™

Salem Belles, Succubi, And The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft And Gothic Erotic Affect, Sylvia Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized …

The Chaotic Domestic: Tracing Affect In Representations Of Nation, Class, And Gender In Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Women’S Writing, Kelly J. Hunnings

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation traces a term I call the “chaotic domestic” in the writing of a collection of eighteenth-century women laboring-class writers: Mary Barber, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. The chaotic domestic in the hands of these writers is multi-layered and affect-driven, focusing as they do on issues regarding nation, class, and gender. As both a poetic trope and the seeming natural and dynamic state of the domestic sphere, the image of the domestic that this set of writers represents and defines is turbulent, unruly, and one that deals with the tangled web of local and global, …

Bad Environmentalism: Irony And Irreverence In The Ecological Age By Nicole Seymour, Delia Byrnes

The Goose

Review of Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

Nineteenth-Century Pets And The Politics Of Touch, Valerie L. Stevens

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nineteenth-Century Pets and the Politics of Touch examines texts of the era in which both humans and animals find empowerment at the point of physical encounter. I challenge contemporary perceptions of human-pet relationships as sweetly affectionate by focusing on touch. I uncover an earlier interest in the close reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that these nineteenth-century thinkers presented what I call a “politics of touch,” in which intimate and often jarring physical encounters allow for mutuality and autonomy. I first turn to Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and protective violence, a condoned ferocity that frequently unites and guards …

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 …