English Language and Literature Commons^™

Uncertain Inheritance: The Motherless Heiress In Big House Novels, Anna Bedsole

Theses and Dissertations--English

Thus, Uncertain Inheritance traces the heiress in Anglo-Irish Big House novels situated at key times of change for the Irish Ascendancy. The Gothic triad of orphaned heiress, dead mother, and sinister uncle does not belong exclusively to the realm of Irish Gothic authors, but rather this triad is used for different discursive purposes than in its English counterparts. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Sommerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1903), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) use the Gothic trope of absent mothers both to address anxieties about and to question the Irish “half” of the Ascendancy Anglo-Irish …

Madness Narratives: Victorian Textual Responses To The Insanity Diagnosis, Jonathan Glenn Tinnin

Theses and Dissertations--English

In Madness Narratives, I examine four understudied texts at the intersection of Victorian asylums, patients’ lack of voice, and resistance narratives. I argue that these texts all reject the silencing power of the insanity diagnosis as they represent patients, former patients, and asylum reformers creating counternarratives that call for recognition of the patients’ humanity and right to be heard. In my first chapter, “Narrating Insanity: Constructing the Madness Narrative in Charles Reade’s Hard Cash,” I assert that Reade’s 1863 novel proposes a nuanced understanding of the insanity diagnosis as a collaboratively-composed story that justifies the confinement of the …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …

But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr

Theses and Dissertations--English

“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …

Outsiders To Whom? Reimagining The Creation Of Young Adult Literature In The United States, Kyle W. Eveleth

Theses and Dissertations--English

The study of young adult literature has become widespread within Children’s and Young Adult Literature specifically and literary studies as a whole. However, the term “young adult” which defines and focalizes both the literature itself and the ostensible readers for whom it is produced remains a poorly-examined area. The present study examines the creation of one branch of what we now call “young adult literature” from its roots in the United States in the early twentieth century to its emergence as a dominant literary form in the mid-to-late 1960s. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile emerging professional, psychological, sociological, …

Fathers And Sons In Modern British, Irish, And Postcolonial Fiction, Alison Hitch

Theses and Dissertations--English

In this dissertation, I examine the portrayal of filial relationships in the fiction of James Joyce, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith. I assert that each of these authors, albeit in different ways, uses the archetypal father and son relationship to interrogate the formation of national identity and the concept of national belonging in modern, anticolonial or postcolonial cultures, including Ireland at the dawn of the twentieth century and Britain in the late twentieth century. Chapter one focuses on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). I argue that rather than solely bonding in …

Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20^th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19^th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the …

Unmournable Bodies: Gothic Postcolonialism And The Spectre Of Loss In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Anuradha Roy's Sleeping On Jupiter, Sitara Kannan

Graduate Thesis Collection

"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is …

We Know Where You Belong At: Institutions And Marginalized Bodies In The Literature Of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, And Eudora Welty, Michelle Lynn Ayers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis portfolio explores how three southern authors used fiction to push back against social norms. The literary works of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty depict the ways in which marginalized bodies are socially regulated and punished. By using Michel Foucault’s theories about power and knowledge, I explore how each of these works uses surveillance to regulate social behavior and what happens to marginalized bodies that refuse to conform to the norm. In Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition, Dr. Miller uses his “medical gaze” to diagnose problems within the black community while also elevating himself above his …

Swings And Their Relation To Resiliency, Lauren Soto

Honors College Theses

No abstract provided.

Rewriting The Human-Animal Divide: Humanism And Octavia Butler's "Amborg", Aparajita Nanda

English

The relationship of philosophy and the human-animal divide is a long one. One could begin with the anthropocentric assumptions of liberal humanism that go back to the Great Chain of Being, a concept of the nature of the universe that traces its lineage to antiquity. The term designates three defining features of the universe: maximal diversity of life, a serial communication within each group, and a hierarchical division of all living beings from God to the simplest forms of existence (Encyclopedia Britannica 2015). This essay challenges the liberal humanist emphasis on humans as being the central focus of the universe …

Wandersoul Of The South: Situating 20th Century Alabama Poet Clement Wood In A Literary Tradition, Skye Rozario

Honors Program Theses

The following is a literary study on 20th century Alabama poet Clement Wood. As a writer, Wood lived and worked mainly in Alabama and New York, and was greatly involved and connected to the literary movements Modernism, the Southern Renaissance, and American Romanticism. He published many poems, short stories, and criticism in a variety of literary magazines, wrote his own columns, and edited journals as well. Though Wood was heavily involved in this community, his work is under-researched on the whole. Wood’s poetry attests to his mastery of rhyme and form and mainly focuses on the value of nature in …

Bad Gurley Feminism: The Myth Of Post-War Domesticity, Erin Amann Holliday-Karre

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

According to feminist history, the 1950s constitute a lapse in feminist literature as women in the post-war era were ushered into the realm of domesticity. In this article I argue that this perceived literary “gap” was both created and perpetuated by feminist historians and scholars who insist that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was the defining feminist text of the time. I offer an alternative discourse to that of Friedan by presenting feminist writers who challenge, rather than adopt, masculine ideology as the means to women’s empowerment. I end by encouraging feminists to allow commonly dismissed feminists from the …

The Revolt Against Mourning: Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, And Beyond, Andrew Leo Beutel

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Revolt against Mourning calls into question the widespread critical alignment of literary modernism with Freudian melancholia. Focusing instead on “mourning,” through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I demonstrate how their depictions of this notion overturn both its traditional and contemporary understandings. Whereas Freud conceives mourning as a psychic labor that the subject slowly and painfully carries out, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner convey it as a destabilizing, subversive, and transformative force to which the subject is radically passive. For Freud, mourning is a matter …

Criterion, Volume 37, 2019, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy

Editor-in-Chief: Eva Enriquez

Black Panther: Some Thoughts On Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, And Black Pixels In The Film (With An Aside On Ava Duvernay’S A Wrinkle In Time), Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Menippean Satire In The Digital Era: Gary Shteyngart’S Super Sad True Love Story, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Howard Weinbrot argues that Menippean satire tends to be produced in eras of "broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political or generally intellectual values" (7). It protests cultural decadence and decline by incorporating contradiction into its form, using "at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy" (6). Although it may feature memorable characters, the Menippean mode primarily targets diseased and dangerous ideas or habits. It is encyclopedic in range and ambition, absorbing and parodying different discourses and genres while constructing a narrative via debates, fantasies, annotations (either …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “The Poet”, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan, including discussion questions, for teaching Emerson's essay "The Poet" (1844).

Burning The Breadboard: A New Approach To The Optimist’S Daughter, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

This paper takes several angles of approach towards more deeply understanding central tensions in The Optimist’s Daughter. Goaded by Fay, the novel’s heroine struggles between her need to control and defend a past she feels is under attack and her intimation that her family’s life and values can’t truly be honored by such methods. The narrator also tells us that Laurel seeks to be “pardoned and freed” (OD 179)—but why, and from what? Welty’s text explicitly connects the possibility of pardon with Laurel forgiving her parents. How might we understand this tie between forgiving others and being pardoned oneself? Key …

Byron's Ambivalent Modernity: Touring And Forced Migration In "Don Juan", Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Epigraphs, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Hannah Cowley, A Day In Turkey; Or, The Russian Slaves (1791), Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

Perhaps one of the most intriguing documents of women’s place in the theatre in the 1790s, Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey uses Eastern despotism to explore women’s relation to the French Revolution and to the public sphere. A complex blend of proto-feminist critique, orientalist voyeurism, and Francophobic homophobia, Cowley manipulates the stock material of the late eighteenth-century theatre to generate a fantasy of feminine directorial power. In the play’s most remarkable scene, Cowley’s alter ego manipulates the political and sexual plots of the comedy from the isolation of the seraglio, thereby providing a model not only for women’s political …

Victorianists And Their Reading, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter investigates how the most recent batch of new literary-critical interpretive methods takes inspiration from Victorian readers and reading. We consider the institutional context in which recent method debates have unfolded before turning to survey new methods, including distant reading, surface reading, curatorial reading, reparative reading, referential reading, literal reading, and affective reading. We show that these apparently very different interventions in literary scholarship’s method all have in common their attraction to the nineteenth century not just as an object of study but as an inspiration for method. And these nineteenth-century-inspired methods also seek to reconfigure the boundaries of …

Southern Chapter Of The American Conference For Irish Studies Records, Zach S. Henderson Library Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection consists of records of the Southern Chapter of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Materials include correspondence, meeting programs and minutes, reports, and membership lists. Much of the material concerns the annual meeting and other activities of the organization from 1989 to 2014.

Find this collection in the University Libraries' catalog.

Love In The Time Of Sickness: On Race, Disability, And Intimate Partner Violence, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] Constructing The Adolescent Reader In Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

Bookshelf

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, …

[Introduction To] I And You, J. David Stevens

Bookshelf

The four stories in J. David Stevens’s I and You focus on immigrants and their families, characters trying to find the merge point between the China of a previous generation and America today. A teenage son puzzles over his father’s obsession with American football. A Texas lesbian falls for an international graduate student. A divorced middle-aged woman tries to right an old wrong in the life of a man for whom she serves as caregiver. Through episodes where intimacy falters in the face of palpable distance, characters must confront unknowable details in the lives of even those closest to them: …

[Introduction To] Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, And The Politics Of Humanism, Nathan Snaza

Bookshelf

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends …

The Commandment, James Armstrong

Bryant Literary Review

Brontë enthusiasts tend to be a bit fanatical. A university hosts their conference each summer, and grown men and women- not just scholars, but librarians and secretaries and retirees- pay for the privilege to live in cramped dorm rooms for a week, eat lousy food and attend lectures on Villette and Agnes Grey and storm imagery in Wuthering Heights.

Is It Alice, Amy Or Anne?, George Longenecker

Bryant Literary Review

Huddled with four other nameless people,

who sleep on cardboard and blankets,

in the entry of a garage alcove,