English Language and Literature Commons^™

Beyond Victims & Villains: Teaching Cleland With Haywood & Behn, Christopher Nagle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay explores strategies for teaching Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) in the introductory literature classroom, and why it might be especially valuable to do so at a time when issues surrounding sexual violence, rape culture, and the politics of consent continue to be prominent inside and outside the college classroom.

Shakespeare's Problem Comedies As Self-Critique, John-Paul Spiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I argue that Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well reveal underexplored features common to Shakespeare’s comedies. Often interpreted as “problem plays,” they are more representative of the genre than previously acknowledged. I suggest that Shakespeare wrote them to de-nature and de-familiarize his own practices. The plays present the coercion inherent in the normativizing of marriage as the basis for social and political order. The “happiness” achieved—or at least gestured towards—at the end of Shakespearean comedy restricts human possibilities and is often presented as an imposition or injunction rather than a reflection of spontaneous, collective emotion. In particular, …

W. H. Auden’S Proto-Queer Theology Of 1939-1941, Aaron Bisson

Honors Program Theses and Projects

With the advent of queer theory in the early 1990s, critics have increasingly sought to “queer” texts; that is, seeking out demonstrations of identity that do not fit conventional norms of sex, gender, and sexuality. Given the historic persecution of homosexuals and other “deviants” in the twentieth century, W. H. Auden is an interesting case when viewed through this lens because his expansive career brims with homoerotic (and equally homosexual) undertones.

The Rise Of Totalitarianism, Colonial Mimicry, And Gender And Sexuality In The Twentieth Century English Literature, Shahin Hossain

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Shahin Hossain provides an alternative reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Finding Truth In Memoir, John Abernethy

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis represents four chapters of a memoir. The first chapter is a work of fiction and the remaining three chapters are written in the genre of creative nonfiction.

The completed work will continue this structure and present personal narratives of memoir interspersed with works of fiction. Fiction serves to support and complement the variability and deficits of memory, to fill in the gaps, in the process of revealing the personal truth of memoir. The two genres will be linked in terms of theme, metaphor, and lyric voice..

Fundamental to this thesis is the assumption that a memoir can reveal …