English Language and Literature Commons^™

Incentivized Learning And Libraries: A Comparative Study Of Summer Reading Programs In Connecticut, Andrew Morrison

Honors Scholar Theses

With digital forms of entertainment and media more inescapable than ever, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage children and teens to read. Simultaneously, despite an overwhelming amount of literature demonstrating the educational benefits of reading, especially as a necessity in the summer between academic years, library budgets are shrinking as federal funding nears its end. How do libraries promote summer reading amidst declining interest and decreased funding? Using data from public libraries across Connecticut, this paper investigates how libraries are adapting their children's summer reading programs to a changing landscape, how programs are designed to incentivize reading without eliminating …

Poem No. 123, May 2020, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

The Need For Christian Authors In Mainstream Fiction, Ashley Renea Starnes

Masters Theses

Fiction is an effective and underutilized tool in Christian circles to implicitly illustrate Christian ideas and values to readers of other worldviews. By adopting the writing approach of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Christian writers can enter into the broad discussion of philosophy, morality, and theology going on in popular fiction.

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

Politically Correct Language In George Carlin, Alan Schultz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

American stand-up comedian George Carlin is notable for his long-standing popularity from the early 60s up until his death in 2008. In this paper, I examine George Carlin’s stance on politically correct language. Focusing on his three books Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, I show how his attempts to remove himself from a politically correct system ultimately fail as he adheres to his own ideals of language and morality. Using his texts and various work from Stanley Fish to support these claims, I show how Carlin ridicules the redundancies and hypocrisies …

Tension Within Immigrant Identity In South Asian And Asian Characters In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Everything I Never Told You, And Disgraced, Dania Abdelsalam

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the ways American fiction in the past two decades marked a renewal of the study of the immigrant experience. By examining this renewal, I argue that the conversation is no longer focused on the treatment of assimilation but moves into the psychological shock that transpires after assimilation is achieved. This shock is a critical condition of belonging to two opposing identities. Using Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced (2012), I clarify that these works present protagonists from South Asian and East Asian …

“Life Swarms With Innocent Monsters” : The Monstrosity Of Gender Inversion In Bram Stoker’S Dracula, Natalie Diane Cottrill

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has elicited a range of different interpretations from critics over the years. Readings range from covering issues of race and colonization to science and religion, and everything in between. These interpretations all feature different anxieties relevant to fin de siecle culture, a title given to the period of transition at the end of the nineteenth century wrought with anxiety and conspiracy about what might come next. One of the sources of this unease stemmed from the rapid change in what constituted women's social roles, as well as developing definitions of gender and sexuality. This socio-cultural concern …

Anti-Semitism In American Realist Literature: Edith Wharton’S Sim Rosedale - A Thorn In American Identity, Elizabeth Pantirer

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

How does canonical American literature from the early twentieth century reflect the American Jew and anti-Semitic sentiments? How do these novels portray the American Jew as a threat to American identity? In this thesis, I answer these questions and argue how American literature is a product of its culture demonstrating and reproducing fears and accepted ideologies. These fears perpetuated and solidified anti-Semitic stereotypes and alienated Jews from society. In my research, I examine how literature acts as a cultural product specifically homing in on particular anti-Semitic stereotypes which represent a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fear of "otherness." This analysis will draw …

“Mutually Exclusive” : Exploring Gender And Sexuality In Shakespeare’S Twelfth Night, Caitlin Moran Casey

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The thesis explores the treatment of gender and sexuality in William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will. By examining Shakespeare’s exploration of gender identity and sexual fluidity, this thesis investigates the nature of these elements in relation to the overall theme of the text. While traditionally thought of as mutually exclusive elements, sexuality and gender are juxtaposed throughout the text, causing characters to reflect on their own identities.

Magic In The Classroom: The School Story And The Implications Of Discipline In Harry Potter, Megan Thompson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Set against the history of the school story in children’s literature, the Harry Potter series reinvigorates the genre. Specifically, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone addresses the significance of socializing disciplines within children’s literature while also demonstrating the effects that education has on individuality and maturation through the roles of the characters throughout the series. Perhaps much of what lends Rowling’s work its magical ability as compared to the traditional school story is its free use of traditionalism, as seen in fairy tales, in its narrative style.

Rowling’s writing gestures towards the need for imagination in order to decode a …

Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott

English

This project aims to examine gender as perpetuated in the “Wonderland” trope, paying specific attention to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. At the surface level, these works seem like they don’t have much in common—they come from different cultures, different time periods, and different social contexts. However, to say that these stories are too dissimilar to compare is simply incorrect as both deal with the transitional periods of young girls who are approaching adolescence. Because both stories contain an alternate world in which the main little girl character wanders into and journeys through, …

The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie

English

Tragedy is one of writing’s earliest genres, and yet, why do we involve ourselves in the subject and write our own grief for the rest of the world? This thesis explores the act of tackling the subjects of mental illness and bereavement through the use of memoir, and simultaneously to analyze the use of such subject matter in contemporary fiction. Through creating a memoir of my own charting my journey through mental illness, familial death, and suicide, and analyzing the memoirs and works of those who have been through comparable experience, this thesis illuminates how grief is depicted in the …

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration Of The Voiceless Women In Victorian England Through Three Plays Of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo

English (MA) Theses

This essay establishes the Christian myth within Wilde’s three plays, calling attention to the gender politics that he fought against in the Victorian era. Through Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband I will prove the Christological myth that each play adopts and establish Wilde’s ability to make the religion “transformational.” Wilde’s productions of characters like Salomé, Mrs. Allonby, Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Hester are examples of the “fallen woman” of Victorian England. The treatment of women by women will illuminate the passiveness of the Victorian Woman and their compliance with the patriarchal norm. This norm continues through …

Mirrors Of Our Own: Multiracial Representation In Children’S Picture Books, Kiana Foster-Mauro

Honors Scholar Theses

The United States multiracial population is a fast-growing portion of our population. As the multiracial population grows, so does the need for multiracial representation within books. This study analyzed the representation of multiracial individuals in children’s picture books for ages newborn-8. I identified 75 board and picture books published in the United States between the years 2009 and 2019 that feature mixed race characters. The identified texts were analyzed in a critical content analysis using a framework based upon Critical Race Theory. Through this framework, I examined how multiracial characters in the texts are portrayed, the power dynamics, and what …

Byron And Don Juan: A Case Study And Queer Reading Of The Closeted Libertine, Caitlin Stanfield

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the major theme of homosexuality throughout the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron, ultimately focusing on his 1819 iteration of Don Juan. It presents historically relevant information regarding the sodomy laws, religious sermons, anti-sodomite publications, and other obstacles that, I argue, prevented Byron from expressing his sexuality openly. The queer Byron, of course, exists elsewhere. Through close readings of Byron’s correspondence and of his verse, my thesis argues that we can read Byron’s highly coded, homoerotic jargon for what it is, shedding new light on the active but concealed homosexual community of nineteenth-century England.

Experimenting With Adulthood: Liminal Play In Young Adult Literature., Kylee Auten

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Play is an unavoidable element of literature intended for younger audiences. Many scholars have taken up the task of describing, analyzing, and criticizing displays of play in young adult (YA) literature. Involved in discussions of play are the concepts of performance and innocence. Another way of examining play is through the characters’ state of liminality. Their in-between status provides them with the possibility to push against social expectations, escape the realities of their daily lives, and subvert authority figures. Because characters occupy both childhood and adulthood in terms of societal expectations, they possess some positive and some negative qualities of …

Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres: Utilizing Genres To Explore Literary Themes Through Genre Fiction, Michael W. Rickard Ii

English Theses

Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre’s elements are used to further explore the elements of …

The Psychological Effects Of Patriarchy And Courtship: Eighteenth Century Women’S Mentalities In Pamela And Clarissa, Peter J. Laporta

English Theses

I plan to analyze the effects of a patriarchal courtship system on female mentalities during the English eighteenth-century. Samuel Richardson's first two novels, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), will be used toward this end based on their epistolary format. The usage of these letters and journals will be pivotal to the evidence based on the characters creating a written nexus of their minds and bodies through their writing. I plan to lay out the ways in which the reader can emotionally feel and understand both Pamela and Clarissa's breakdown …

Lexical Complexities In The St. Louis Dialect Island, Larry Lafond, Kenneth Moffett

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The Greater St. Louis “dialect island” poses interesting problems for dialect documentation, partly because Greater St. Louis is a transitional area where many overlapping linguistic influences have left their mark, and also because is an area with new immigrant communities, racial divides, and an aging population.Using a sample from survey and interview data from 815 participants over a seven-year period, we examine lexical diversity in Greater St. Louis, comprising counties both in Missouri and Illinois. We discover that both age and place are robust indicators of lexical selection in Southern Illinois and St. Louis. Our findings provide a concurring rationale …

The Social Cut Of Black And Yellow Female Hip Hop, Erick Raven

English Theses - Archive

Korean female hip hop artists are expanding the definition of femininity in South Korea through hip hop. In doing so, they are following a tradition first established by Black female musical performers in a new context. Korean artists are conceiving and expressing, through rap and dance, alternative versions of a “Korean woman,” thus challenging and attempting to add to the dominant conceptions of “woman.” This Thesis seeks to point out the ways female Korean hip hop artists are engaging dominant discourse regarding skin tone, body type, and expression of female sexuality, and creating spaces for the development of new discourses …

Shahrazad In Appalachia: Surviving Violence Through Stories And The Support Of “Sisters”, Kaitlyn Hill

Undergraduate Honors Theses

When women are lured away from home, they become vulnerable and cannot survive the violence inflicted upon them by their ‘lovers.’ This thesis explores the ties between two distinct cultural regions, Arabic and Appalachian, to examine the violence against women and what allows these women to escape such situations by using Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling and three traditional Appalachian murdered girl ballads.

Many of the women in these stories die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ regardless of their culture of origin. Once removed from their fellow women, they lack a support system that would …

Baby Loved, Gilbert Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

Restoring The Web: Personal And Communal Integration In N. Scott Momaday's House Made Of Dawn And Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Deborah Aminifard

English and Creative Writing | Senior Theses

Restoring the Web asserts that N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony are novelized emergence myths, detailing the emergence of their respective protagonists' identities. Abel and Tayo's journey employ the framework of the "monomyth" of separation, initiation, and return. Explored by the essay are separation from self, family, and community. Community includes the earth and their relationship to the natural world that has left these men on the "edge of oblivion." Navajo healing ceremonies, invoking the supernatural, initiates their emergence journey, a journey of discovery, in which their identity is (re)constructed. As with all heroes …

Ricke And Chus' "The Faithful Imagination: Papers From The 2018 Frances White Ewbank Colloquium On C. S. Lewis & Friends" (Book Review), James Sauer

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Oh, My Stars: A New Map Of The Universe In Paradise Lost, Michael R. Coats

Master's Theses

Milton’s geographical descriptions in Paradise Lost are heavily influenced by his fascination with maps. Furthermore, his design of the universe in Paradise Lost follows a cartographic style that has led to several attempts at mapping it. These attempts, however, have followed the erroneous assumption that Earth centers the universe. As a result, cosmographical maps of Paradise Lost are inaccurate. I argue that Milton’s universe is Deocentric and provide a new map with a pyramid design that places God at the center of Milton’s universe.

“Part Of That (Man’S) World”: Analyzing “Cinderella” And “The Little Mermaid” Fairy Tale Variants Through A Feminist Lens, K. Morgan Mitchell

Honors Theses

Fairy tales are often reduced to nothing more than the moral lesson that can be taught to children. However, when we move past the impulse to search for the simplified moral of the story, we can begin to ascertain the impact of fairy tales on different audiences. This thesis uses both impact theory, which yields a close reading of the textual and cinematic evidence, and reception research, which provides an opportunity to discuss the significance of the material by speculating about the message that readers receive. Under consideration are four variants each of the “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” fairy …

The Typewriter And The Literary Sphere: An Analysis Of Turn-Of-The-Century Literature, Emma K. Holdbrooks

Honors Theses

My thesis explores the typewriter’s impact on early 20^th century American literature. By providing authors with the means to produce work accurately and effectively, the typewriter changed the process of writing. Typewriters also created job opportunities for women, who often served as typists. The typist became the foothold position that changed America’s perception of women in the work force and helped usher in a new social concept, “the New Woman.” To illustrate my claim, I show how the typewriter allowed poets like E. E. Cummings to experiment with spacing. Cummings made the typewriter’s standardization of text and spacing into …

Arthur Clennam’S Navigation Of Social And Physical Setting In Little Dorrit, Danielle Jochums

Anthós

While Charles Dickens is most often noted for his portrayal of squalid urban conditions, he is also able to design and describe a wide variety of settings related to every echelon of the social hierarchy. This literary inquiry delves into Dickens’ world of Little Dorrit. In particular, it investigates how Dickens implements the reciprocal development between setting and character. Focusing on the character of Arthur Clennam, the protagonist of the story and the reader’s guide through the world of Little Dorrit, this query evaluates how Dickens introduces and teaches the reader about the classed and value-laden settings featured …

Gender, Intertextuality & Market Demands: Publishing Children's Picture Books, Mackenzie Scott

Honors Theses

Children’s literature in the U.S. has long since reflected, and also influenced, the nation’s societal and cultural identity. The genre’s representation of gender has historically aligned with traditionally distinct and separate sex-typed roles of domestic or non-domestic behavior. Through textual analysis of 80 New York Times bestselling picture books between 2009 and 2019, this research seeks to determine if publishers and consumers are selecting titles that support or subvert stereotypical gender roles. Prior studies on gender representation in children’s literature have concluded that the prevalence of static, passive female characters and active male characters negatively impacts the identity development of …

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …