English Language and Literature Commons^™

Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth

Theses and Dissertations

The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.

Volume 31, Table Of Contents

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

The Silent Holocaust And Other Myths: The Jewish Body And Intermarriage In The Fiction Of Saul Bellow And Philip Roth, Samuel Gold

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation concerns the legacy within the Jewish American imagination of two related ideas: the pseudoscientific belief in the Jewish body’s inherent physical difference, and the conviction, shared by rabbis, sociologists, and Jewish advocacy organizations in the second half of the 20th century, that Jewish-gentile intermarriage threatened Jewish survival in America. The Jew’s association with illness and debility is central to the Nazi race theories that undergird the Holocaust; the postwar American anxiety over intermarriage responds to that destruction. Fearing that intermarriage may yield a second, “silent” Holocaust through assimilation, American Jewish leaders metaphorically equate exogamy (out-marriage) with genocide.

I …

Gender, Fantasy, And Misogyny In The Age Of Innocence: A Character Study Of Newland Archer, Sonia Comstock

University Honors Theses

In this thesis, I’ll be analyzing Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence through a feminist lens, with a focus on the character of Newland Archer. Specifically, I'll examine who Archer is beyond a surface level, looking at his thoughts and fantasies and exposing his twisted, misogynistic outlook. I'll explore how his delusions affect the lives of the women around him, and how his behavior is reflective of the larger dynamic between men and women in society. Because the novel is written in close omniscient third person, the reader can both assess and align with Archer's mentality; the gap between the …

Expressivism And Its (Dis)Contents: Tracing Theory And Practice From History To Here And Now, Sasha A. Maceira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the theory and practice of expressivism as a pedagogy viable for the twenty-first century. Expressivism, in its inception (1960s), was wrongly perceived in many ways for the seemingly superfluous nature of its intentions; mainly it was targeted as an elitist, individualistic approach to the teaching of composition, only seen as suitable for a privileged student body. What was entirely overlooked that expressivism offered, were the more conventional ideologies and activities, such as process theory and peer review—things we use and cherish to this day. What I discovered through archival research was that expressivism then was inadvertently divided …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Discovering “God Almighty”: An Exploration Of Kurt Vonnegut’S Mythmaking In Sirens Of Titan, Cat’S Cradle, And Slaughterhouse-Five, Megan Joy Kehoe

Masters Theses

In an interview with Charlie Reilly interview, Kurt Vonnegut argues, “The Christ story is marvelous, but it’s not really about people like us” (“Two Conversations” 20). Vonnegut makes clear his appreciation for Christ, though he critiques the gospel’s relevance to humankind. In his own novels, Vonnegut takes from popular religion and creates his own stories, mythologies that are carefully catered to the human experience. In this evaluation of three of Vonnegut’s, I offer a new reading of the author which highlights his use of mythology, his parodies of God Almighty, and his hope for the direction of mankind. I begin …

Folkloric Figurations Of The Green Man In Trauma And Fear, Alexandria (Allie) Remm

English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The ideas surrounding the Green Man and Green Woman narrative provide different cultural functions depending on the historical perspective. A critical examination of the Green Man and Green Woman tradition relying on Freudian, eco-critical, gothic, and trauma terms reveals how the ideas about the Green Man’s purpose coincides with how people use these ideas in reaction to trauma and fear. Lady Raglan was the first folklorist to coin the name “The Green Man” in 1939 during her studies to understand its function in medieval Christianity and paganism. Other scholars like Christine Vogt-Williams studied the Green Man as a racialized cultural …

Dancing With The Devil: Carnival And The True Witch Of The Witch Of Edmonton, James B. Barone

Student Theses

The most obvious carnivalesque aspects in Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton—the Morris dancers and their leader Cuddy Banks, and the shapeshifting demon Dog—have received the bulk of scholarly attention. However, very little has been written about the cagey, pregnant servant girl Winifred, who as I argue in this thesis more fully embodies Carnival’s aspects of rebirth and renewal. Winifred endures the play’s turmoil by inventing and reinventing herself. Her powers of creation are antithetical to the downfalls of the play’s two main characters—Frank Thorney and Elizabeth Sawyer, the play’s eponymous witch—as well as the mischief created by …

The Convergence Of Grace And Nature: Flannery O'Connor's Catholic Imagination, Katerina Jakub

English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

This thesis explores Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic imagination throughout her fiction, incorporating close readings of O’Connor’s short stories with her letters, essays, and prayer journal. The thesis also draws comparisons between O’Connor’s work and that of Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bishop to explore O’Connor’s unique perspective and style. O’Connor’s fiction flows from her Thomistic theology concerning the relationship between grace and nature, which she emphasizes throughout her writing. The first chapter presents a close reading of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair paired with O’Connor’s “Greenleaf” and Benedict XVI’s Deus Caristas Est to argue that eros is fundamentally Christian. Greene …

Responsible Classrooms: Unfinalizability, Responsibility, And Participatory Literacy In Secondary English Language Arts, Emma Jamilah Gist

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines participatory literacy practice in secondary English language arts classrooms. While literacy achievement in this context is often measured according to a student’s ability to receive and repeat predetermined information within the scope of mandated curricula and standardized tests, this study attends specifically to classroom literacy practice that centers authentic, unanticipated, dialogic student response. Within its consideration of literacy practice, this study applies the Bakhtinian notion of unfinalizability to consider those conditions that allow for learning experiences that are not predetermined but are rather uniquely, unpredictably, and unrepeatably co-constructed by individual students, student groups, and teachers. These unfinalizable …

Pursuit Of Happiness In Alternate Realities: The Intersection Of Queerness And The Metaphysical In Haruki Murakami’S Sputnik Sweetheart, Katelyn Morris

Kean Quest

This research aims to examine the intersection of queerness and the metaphysical in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. I intend to accomplish this by focusing on the instances of magical realism as they are presented throughout the narrative and deconstruct them through the escapades of the explicitly queer protagonist Sumire. Sumire is an individual who has never felt sexual desire until she encounters an older woman named Miu. However, Miu underwent a bizarre, fantastical encounter many years ago that “split her in two” as the text puts it, and her ability to feel sexual desire joined her other half on …

'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …

He Had Two Women To Die For, Ireland And The Missus”: Mothers As Abject And Sons As Scapegoats In Edna O’Brien’S House Of Splendid Isolation And In The Forest, Emily Nix

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the protagonists in Edna O’Brien’s In the Forest and House of Splendid Isolation and applies Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. In doing so, I attempt to give a richer understanding of O’Brien’s masculine and feminine characters and how their constructed identities are based on their cultural circumstances and positions in their societies. I use Kristeva’s theory of abjection to analyze the single women in these novels, Eily and Josie, who become metaphorical single mothers by the invasions of young men into their homes. Then, I apply Girard’s theory of the …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

The Ideal Elizabethan Marriage (Or Naught): How Fletcher’S Comedy, The Tamer Tamed Serves As A Sequel, Homage And Riposte To Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Katherine Brillante

Student Theses

In this thesis, I take my cue from Emma Smith, who observes that John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed is “a sequel, an homage, and a riposte to Shakespeare’s own Taming of the Shrew” (xii). While demonstrating Smith’s point, I also explore the ideology of marriage in Renaissance England, considering what it means to be a rebellious woman with respect to that institution. While, as Ann Jennalie Cook observes, “a play is not an exact replica of the customs of the time” (83), these two plays nevertheless illuminate the ways in which marriage customs during this …

Frankenstein’S Creature: Monstrous Chicken Or Grotesque Egg?, Alexandria B. Acero

Gettysburg College Headquarters

Some scholars believe that due to the negligence of Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature became an attention-craving murderous monster. Other scholars believe that the unaffectionate and unnatural way Victor birthed the creature caused his monstrous form. The argument over “Nature versus Nurture” in relation to the creations is irrelevant, however. The creature is only pushed away by Victor due to his hideousness which stems from the environment in which the creature was born. Victor’s societal view on nature and its connection to womanly attributes creates a paradox of a loveless creation and an affection-craving creature within the novel.

Review Of The The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture Of Intimacy, By Danielle Bobker, Mary Peace

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Relative Races: Genealogies Of Interracial Kinship In Nineteenth-Century America, By Brigitte Fielder, Shelby Johnson

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt

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

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

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

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

The Lady’S Museum Project: A Digital Critical Edition In Phase 1 Of Its Development, Now Available For Teachers And Students To Learn Collaboratively Through Charlotte Lennox’S Lady’S Museum (1761-62), Kelly Plante

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

This announcement informs readers on how they can use, and participate in, the Lady's Museum Project (ladysmuseum.com). It discusses the work completed and the forthcoming updates planned for teachers', scholars', and students' use of this first critical edition of Charlotte Lennox's the Lady's Museum, as of spring 2022.

Arabella In The Salon: Teaching Charlotte Lennox’S Female Quixote With Madeleine De Scudéry’S “Carte De Tendre,” Clélie, And Conversations, Nicole Horejsi

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

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Lady’S Museum And Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, And Beyond, Karenza Sutton-Bennett, Susan Carlile

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

This essay argues for the value of teaching Charlotte Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) in undergraduate literature, history, media studies, postcolonial, and gender studies classrooms. Lennox’s magazine, which includes one of the first serialized novels “Harriot and Sophia” (later published as the stand-alone novel Sophia (1762)) encouraged debate of the proto-discipline topics of history, geography, literary criticism, astronomy, botany, and zoology. This essay offers a flexible teaching module, which can be taught in one to five days, that focuses on the themes of early female education and imperialism using full or excerpted portions of essays from the eidolon, “Of …

Mapping The Geographic Imagination In Harriot Stuart And Euphemia At An Hbcu, Leah M. Thomas

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

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart (London, 1750) and Euphemia (London, 1790) offers a transatlantic perspective of the New York region and its diverse population of African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans as understood from a British woman novelist who lived in New York in the 1740s during the time in which both novels are set. In addition to this diversity, her novels demonstrate the conflicts and networks within this part of America, all of which can be explored through historical and geographical contexts of contemporaneous maps. These maps not only engage the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focus …

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’S Harriot Stuart: Romance, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, And Transatlantic Fictions, Marta Kvande

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

Harriot Stuart is well worth teaching because it offers rich possibilities both for discussing literary forms such as heroic romance, epistolary form, and women’s narrative voices, and for investigating topics such the transatlantic experience, colonialism, and representations of Native Americans. Whether in a course focused specifically on Charlotte Lennox’s works or in a more broadly focused course in eighteenth-century fiction, Harriot Stuart can help students learn about the possibilities for women’s empowerment and about transatlantic and racial ideas during the period.

Concise Collections: Teaching Charlotte Lennox, Tiffany Potter

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

The Spring 2022 issue of ABO inaugurates our new Pedagogies feature: the Concise Collections on Teaching Eighteenth-Century Women series. Each issue of ABO will include a Concise Collection on a different female writer or artist, with three to five articles offering critically-informed and practice-based strategies for teaching in survey or theme-based courses for different student audiences. This series seeks to facilitate the innovative and effective teaching of female creatives whose excellence and insight demand inclusion in our classrooms, but who have not yet received the attention they deserve in pedagogy publications, or who might not yet have been encountered by …

Unmasking Polly: Race And Disguise In Eighteenth-Century Plantation Space, Kristen Hanley Cardozo

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

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera has influenced popular culture since its debut. Its 1729 sequel, Polly, has been understudied by literary critics, perhaps because of its suppression in Gay’s lifetime. However, Polly offers scholars new views on British imperialism before an active abolition movement in Britain. Gay confronts the evils of colonialism through his theatrical use of disguise. While other Caribbean plays of the period allow white characters to reinvent themselves abroad, in Polly disguise only intensifies the self, while the higher stakes of plantation space are where the characters meet the fates originally designated for them in The …