English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female …

'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings …

Monstrous Mobility In Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde And Dracula, Autumn Danielle Weese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Late Victorian Gothic texts that are central to theories on monstrosity in terms of mobility by examining Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula. The goal of this project is to survey the ways in which two exemplary monsters, Mr. Hyde and Count Dracula, promote mobility for others and themselves as an inherent part of their monstrosity. The variety of this mobility is demonstrated by examples showing how monsters move and encourage movement in ways that are social and transformative as well as physical. Because social mobility is essential to these movements, this study also considers the …

"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Juvenile Asylum, founded in 1851, was one of New York’s first institutional responses to the problems associated with the poor. It, and the theories of asylum that undergird the institution, still exist today in the form of Children’s Village. The location of Children’s Village, located just a few hundred yards from my home, prompted me to consider the distance between my family and the children who reside at Children’s Village; between my historical context and that of the children who resided at the New York Juvenile Asylum - and their parents who surrendered them there; and between …

Does It Mean? Gene Wolfe: Perverse Puzzle Maker, Marc Anthony Aramini

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The goal of this study is to re-examine the possibility of determining authorial intention, focusing on an author considered by many to be sui generis, science fiction grandmaster Gene Wolfe, well known for his confusing and difficult texts. Wolfe has a reputation as a “puzzle box” writer. Chapter One will trace some of the critical controversy surrounding his reception. Chapter Two will touch on a shift in recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism from poststructural and deconstructive tenets to a more authentic trust between author and reader, attempting to minimize the implications of the hermeneutic of suspicion without decreasing the richness …

The Pleasures Of Conversation: Samuel Johnson's Social Epistemology, Brandon Schneeberger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study traces the role of conversation in the epistemology of Samuel Johnson. Exploring the transitions of epistemology and pedagogy occurring during the Renaissance, I argue that Johnson pushes against epistemologies that overly stressed the role of reading. For Johnson, knowledge growth occurs through a means of reading, writing, and conversation: one reads broadly and deeply for information, one writes to make thoughts more concise, one converses to exercise, or test, those thoughts with others who bring various perspectives. This dissertation examines these ideas in Johnson’s epistolary essays in his periodical The Rambler, showing how Johnson’s ideas of conversation are …

Transfer In The Writing Center: Tutors Facilitating Students' Understanding Of Transfer, Shannon Nicole Tuttle

Theses and Dissertations

Transfer, a highly researched topic in composition studies, is a topic of increasing interest to those in writing center studies. Writing centers are an ideal location for the application of transfer because tutors can provide more opportunities for guided practice, application, reflection, and metacognition in a one-on-one setting; thus, students may learn more effectively, through application, the writing skills they may receive via instruction in their classrooms. Previous writing center studies have implemented transfer-focused curricula to help tutors better facilitate transfer in their tutorials. These curricula have focused on training tutors to understand and apply transfer to their tutorials, but …

“A Woman’S Story”: Lady Macbeth And Performing Femininity In The Early 1600s – Late 1900s, Phyllis Lebert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses gender studies to understand the themes of gender performance further, and more specifically, femininity, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It also explores the many ways feminine gender performance has changed as society has changed. Thus, proving gender is performative rather than innate. It does this by examining first the text within the context of Elizabethan society. Moreover, by examining three pivotal performances of Lady Macbeth through history within the context of their social structures as well. The three performances are that of Sarah Siddons in the Late 18th Century, Ellen Terry in the 19th Century, and Judy Dench in …

Maternal Criticism: Reading Two Middle Eastern Women Writers As Nonviolent Peace Activism, Charlyn Marie Ingwerson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advocates for reading the literatures of two Middle Eastern women writers through a Maternal Critical lens that recognizes the demands of universal vulnerability in characters who resist violence, and responds in Maternal communities of Readers that connect readers to characters, readers to writers, and readers to other readers, carrying the struggle for equity forward. My unfolding argument, centered on Maternal Critical activity in the novels of Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh and Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, demonstrates how literature by these Middle Eastern women is part of a narrative context of women’s peacemaking and resistance to violence, a part …

Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender And Affect In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Gracie Mae Bain

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender and Affect in Victorian Sensation Fiction” explores the interactions between the shock of reading sensation fiction and the affective potential of the genre using Sara Ahmed’s definition of the killjoy and the affect alien. The sensation genre, as explained in its name, is potentially useful when thinking about affective ties in the Victorian period. The first chapter, “Tracing Sensations: Finding and Following the Killjoy” explores the affective footwork that readers of sensation fiction are asked to perform in their sympathetic process with the female villains and fallen heroines. Affective tools employed by sensational fiction create …

Losing Faith: Emily Brontë'S Revolutionized Religion, Emily Renee Holmes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Losing Faith: Emily Brontë’s Revolutionized Religion” discusses the role of religion in her novel Wuthering Heights and her poems set in the mythical world of Gondal. Through close readings of both her prose and poetry, this paper seeks to understand the relationship between the dark, vindictive nature of Brontë’s characters and their hopeful ending. The first chapter, Here’s The Situation, discusses the situation as set up by the novel, focusing specifically on Catherine and Heathcliff. I discuss the violence and codependence of their relationship, their Gondal predecessors, their fascination with each other as well as their torment when apart, and …

"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In “‘We Are Strangers in this Life’: Theology, Liminality, and the Exiled in Anglo-Saxon Literature,” I analyze the theme of exile in the theological literature of the Anglo-Saxon era as a way of conveying the spiritual condition of eschatological separation. The anthropological theory of liminality will be applied in this dissertation as a way of contextualizing the existence of the exiled, and the multiple ways in which exile is enacted. The intervention of the theory of liminality in this dissertation offers a methodology and vocabulary for assessing what exile means in terms of a spiritual identity, how it operates in …

Breaking The Fourth Wall, Esther Elizabeth Karram

Masters Theses

This creative, non-fiction thesis is written in memoir form and analyzes how a person perceives reality, how that perception is broken, and how a person copes with the limitations of a new reality. In examining my life, I came to realize that many of my performative tendencies stemmed from a desire to be loved and the belief that love was contingent upon perfection. What follows is my struggle to try to maintain that perfection, the failure to do so, and the slow acceptance of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world.

Visions Of Hell, John Wilson

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This creative thesis addresses paintings and other visual representations of different Buddhist Hells and responds to them through written poetry. Visions of Hell is a compilation of eight poems inspired by several of the many Buddhist Naraka, or Hells. These “ are not the traditional “Hells” one might imagine today, if anything, they were closer to our notion of Purgatories. Each hell is reserved for specific types of sinners —the type or crime dictating the appropriate hell to inhabit. However, this causal relation, typically present in works of Buddhist art, is not used in the poems. This compilation narrates the …

Folklore-In-The-Making: Analyzing Shakespeare's The Tempest And Adaptations As Folklore, Heather Talbot

Student Works

This paper explores the similarities between folklore and Shakespeare's play,The Tempest. Not only is The Tempest an example of a folkloric story, this paper looks at how this play calls to attention the importance of story and the need for story to adapt in order to survive. Folklore is an oral tradition that is living, or continually adapting. Shakespeare's plays, while written are also performances which can be adapted through interpretations and by adapting to new genres. It is this adaptability which allows Shakespeare's works to continue to thrive and it is this adaptability which will determine how …

Transported To Botany Bay : Class, National Identity, And The Literary Figure Of The Australian Convict, Dorice Williams Elliott

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined.

Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for …

The Viking Dialogue Narrative: Egil’S Saga And Storytelling, Gabriel Hazeldine

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Egil’s Saga invites inquiry about its composition with its unique use of poetry and prose. Its origins in the traditions of the Icelandic sagas grounds the text within a historical and cultural context that, while still under debate, guides the student of the Icelandic sagas in understanding the likely authorial purpose and intent behind the structure and motives behind the sagas and their tellers/writers. Egil’s Saga’s composition not only retells the life narrative of its titular poet but speaks to the purpose of storytellers and their craft.

A Sample Of Understudied Works In Aberdeen Ms 123, Bailey Ludwig

English and Creative Writing Honors Papers

This project examines and transcribes various understudied texts from the University of Aberdeen’s MS 123 in order to create a more complete picture of this manuscript. Chapter one looks at the “Sultan Letters” and “List of Kings,” two fictional texts discussing politics, and their evocation of crusades and travel romance genre conventions. The second chapter looks at the intersection of poetic form, vernacularity, gender, and religion in the poem “Modyr of Maries III” and excerpts from the Golden Legend. Finally, the third chapter examines two medical texts, “Diet & Bloodletting” and “32 Perilous Days,” for their conventionality, vernacularity, and …

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination Of Lolita's And Pride And Prejudice's Costume And Revisionist Adaptations, Courtney A. Duchene Ms.

English and Creative Writing Honors Papers

This project examines costume and revisionist media adaptations of Lolita and Pride and Prejudice to see how adapters have altered the texts in order to increase the agency of the female characters. It consists of four chapters: one on the 1962 and 1997 cinematic costume adaptations of Lolita; one on the 1995 BBC mini series and the 2005 film costume adaptations of Pride and Prejudice; one on the Pride and Prejudice revisionist adaptations, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and the 2012-2013 Youtube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; and one on the revisionist film adaptations of Lolita, The Diary …

Music, Shakespeare, And Redefined Catharsis, Megan Jae Hatt

Student Works

The definition of catharsis has changed since the time of Aristotle. A person does not only experience catharsis out of pity or fear from theatric tragedies; they also experience it through laughter, love, and simply immersing themselves into the emotions presented by different forms of media. This essay reviews the catharsis one can experience through contemporary music and Shakespeare as they become submersed in the emotions and spectacle of each respective media. In this essay, I compare and contrast contemporary music and Shakespeare text and performance in order to relate them to this new definition of catharsis by including different …

The Effects Of Neocolonialism On Indigenous Peruvians, Christina Nelson

Honors Program Theses and Projects

In this world, there exist histories that do not make it into textbooks or school curriculums. There are events that are born in the shadows of suppression, with victims stifled so much so that they have no means of telling their stories. Historical happenings do not always have the privilege of being accurately recorded where the pen meets the paper. Instead, these instances linger in the air, passed on from one generation to the next by storytelling and song, aging into myth. Colonization, or the act of settling into a foreign land and establishing dominance over the natives, has history …

“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.

From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe

English MA Theses

Superheroes have always been used as tools of escapism. From their insurgence into popular culture in the 1930s, to their animation in television programs, and appearance in films in the late 1970s until now, superheroes have allowed audiences an avenue through which they could imagine an alternate, utopian reality. Through the analyses of modern superhero films, audiences are able to connect how the genre reflects larger social and political fears in the wake of such unexpected realities: fear of annihilation after the 9/11 attacks and existing in a potentially unsafe America following the election of Donald Trump. The superhero film …

Disabled Gods: A Critical Disability Studies Analysis Of Ancient Greek Myths, Haley R. Graham

Undergraduate Research Symposium

There has been a popularization in society of the Right hemisphere of the brain being responsible for creativity, and the Left hemisphere being responsible for logical and analytical thinking. However, it is not fully understood whether there is an underlying, neuroscientific basis to these claims or if such claims can be rendered factual. Recent studies have been conducted, revealing that right brained leaders emphasize in innovation and managing whereas left brained leaders focus on continuous improvement and planning (Kumar & Sharma 2016). The right and left hemispheres do possess interconnectedness, however as this study has shown, individuals tend to possess …

Brennan, Mary Kate (Fa 1284), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1284. Student interview conducted by Mary Kate Brennan with renowned Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller. Brennan’s focus throughout the interview is on “the cultural sensitivity and awareness that permeates Miller’s poetry.” Miller also touches on what he considers to be the central themes of his work, the struggles and triumphs of communities within the Appalachian region, and pride in cultural heritage. The collection contains a detailed index, interview summary, transcription, index cards with questions, and a reel-to-reel audio tape of the interview.

The Pedagogy Of Harry Potter: Teaching The Fantastic, Kayla Danielle Davis

Student Theses and Dissertations

The many disputes regarding teaching fantastic literature are extensive, especially when the literature in question is controversial and/or directed at younger audiences. However, it is my personal belief that these fantastic novels, primarily the Harry Potter series, should not only be taught in the secondary and/or higher-learning environments, but even studied in-depth due to their versatility and personal appeal to audiences of all ages and identities. A course like this is needed in order to elevate the comprehension of literature through the lens of a worldwide phenomenon that so many people have both cherished and immersed themselves within over the …

Children As The Power Of Shakespeare, Samantha Rowley

Student Works

An dive into how children are used in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. While there has been some extensive research on numerous of Shakespeare’s minor characters, some of his other characters, the minors, have been focused on less. Because they fly under the radar, Shakespeare uses these “minor” characters in order to subtly manipulate his audience, using them as a source of pathos in much the same way adults use children to manipulate audiences while silencing the actual opinions of the children they claim to represent. However, though he may often use children for this effect due to their fragility, Shakespeare …

Choosing Advocacy

Occasional Paper Series

Two articles comprise this publication. In "Beyond the Story-Book Ending: Literature for Young Children About Parental Estrangement and Loss," Megan Matt analyzes over 30 books for young children on the topics of abandonment, estrangement, divorce, and foster care. She observes that this loss might appear as an event within the story or as a fear articulated by a young child. She states that, as an educator, she hopes that she can make the children realize that their own stories are "real" and legitimate, no matter what messages they might encounter or fail to encounter in the media. In "Walking the …