English Language and Literature Commons^™

Austentatious Aspirations: How Janeite Women Writers Create And Expand Their Own Cultural Communities Through Recounting And Adapting Jane Austen's Original Works In Literature And Film, Kerri L. Bennett

Student Theses and Dissertations

In comparison to Jane Austen’s purportedly quiet, unassuming life, her six novels have had an ostentatious and extensive impact upon Anglophone literature, culture, and history, particularly through the innumerable adaptations that have been created, written, and produced by her most ardent admirers. As such, this research explores the ways that their various literary and filmic adaptations of Austen’s original narratives both create and expand their communities. Additionally, this project situates Janeite cultural production within the framework of Jacques Derrida’s theory of archival expansion, as well as the scholarship of Claudia Johnson, Abigail Derecho, and Sarah Glosson, among others. The texts …

Novela Negra Y Rol: Adaptación Del Género Hacia Nuevas Narrativas, Daniel Romero Benguigui

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

En sus orígenes, la novela negra llegó a presentarse como una experiencia lúdica, donde se invitó a los participantes a resolver el caso antes de finalizar la velada. De igual manera, los juegos de rol también proponen un desafío para los jugadores, también mediante un conjunto de reglas que aseguran el juego limpio.

Además, estos han demostrado su vinculación a lo literario al adaptar diferentes géneros a los sistemas empleados para el juego, ya fuera la fantasía épica (Dungeons and Dragons, Anima: Beyond Fantasy), el terror cósmico (Llamada de Cthulhu, Rastro de Cthulhu) o …

How To Grow Blurry: Poems, Nathaniel Metz

Canterbury Scholars

In this collection of poems, Nathan D. Metz explores the distance between the word for a thing and the touch or feeling of a thing. Using a variety of forms both established and innovative, as well as free verse and ekphrastic response, these poems are a celebration of art, color, and the sounds of words. After the collection is a series of poems translated both from the original Japanese and Haitian Creole.

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy as works of life writing that leverage the epistolary form to engage their direct maternal addressees and audiences beyond them in revision and reconstruction of identity. Secondary audiences are considered in light of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics,” and the social affordances of the epistolary form and self-constructive affordances of life writing are analyzed in tandem as a hybrid epistolary memoir form. Specifically, this project explores how the epistolary memoir form affords Vuong and Laymon opportunities for the process of personal, relational, and communal identity construction, …

The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

Historical Realism And Stoic Heroes In The Work Of John Williams, Cameron Sepede

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how John Williams’s three major works of fiction — Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus — are narratively structured around three main characters who embody the tenets of stoic and Emersonian transcendental philosophy, respectively. Williams uses these characters to promote and critique preconceived notions of heroic masculinity as structured within these philosophies. Through an analysis of form, this thesis will explore how Williams scaffolds his three main characters around the language and ideas present within each philosophical school. Williams’s portrayal of heroic masculinity, as seen through a feminist perspective, questions the ideal masculine hero, which will be …

Exploring Friendships In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Novels And Adaptations: A Study In Social Media, Fandoms, And Variations, Ashley D. Anderson

Student Theses

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and their adaptations all reveal the importance of friendship and fandom. Utilizing theorists Walter Benjamin and Henry Jenkins the friendship theme is seen in the various stylistic elements in the films and novels; additionally, a look into the fandom presence on social media, their knowledge, and merchandise reveals why the stories have continued to interest audiences over many generations.

Romanticism’S Fellow Creatures, Alastair Hunt, Ron Broglio, Katey Castellanos, Mario-Ortiz Robles

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This panel opens up innovative ways of thinking about Romanticism and “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Over the last couple of decades, the crisis in human relations with animals has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Like the climate crisis, the “animal crisis” originates with the emergence of the industrial form of capitalism in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. Appreciation of this historical constellation can and should become the basis of a renewed Romantic animal studies. However, reading Romanticism as …

Feminist Critique And John Updike's 'Holes', Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Feminism, John Updike

Envisioning A World Without Rape In Late Fifteenth-Century Dream Narratives, Boyda J. Johnstone

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of rape and consent in late medieval literature, partly influenced by the Me Too movement while we continue to grapple with Geoffrey Chaucer’s allegation of raptus. In such a climate, medieval texts that likewise challenge the normalization of rape in literature and society require renewed attention and critical interest. The three fifteenth-century poems I examine in this article, The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and The Isle of Ladies, push Chaucer’s dream vision tradition in a new direction, presenting us with female-centered models of cooperation, care, and governance. …

Holy Matter Making Holy Meaning: Fashioning Memory, Community And Dissimilar Similitude In Middle Dutch Sister-Books And The Book Of Margery Kempe, Godelinde G. Perk

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle Dutch sister-books and The Book of Margery Kempe are fifteenth-century vernacular texts by women chronicling their female subjects’ conversion and arduous attempts at a holy life. They share an (auto)hagiographic enterprise and formal and thematic features, including a display of rags and riches by the vitae’s subjects and a desire for mnemonic engagement on the part of the readers with the text. This article is the first to present the Diepenveen and Deventer sister-books and the Book as conversation partners. I draw on two main conceptual tools: 1) medieval memoria and 2) the notion of “dissimilar similitude” …

A Tejano Story: Resisting Anti-Mexican Violence And The Texas Rangers, Jose Andres Yznaga Jr

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Tejano Story: Resisting Anti-Mexican Violence and The Texas Rangers Writing about Los Tejanos cannot be told without including the Texas Rangers. It only complicates the narrative when writing a screenplay for the big screen. The story cannot be told without acknowledging historical facts; the Texas Rangers came hard against the Tejanos after the battle for Texas Independence even though many Tejanos fought in that war and shared the same vision as their Euro-American counterparts of breaking their ties with the Mexican government. Just However, like lynching across this country, that history cannot be erased, nor can the exploits of …

Attitudinal Study Of Users Of Japanese English, Chisato Oda

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

This paper examines the developmental stage of Japanese English as one of the expanding circle varieties from the attitude perspective. The literature review presents the theories of World Englishes, what Japanese English is, and the previous attitudinal studies on Japanese English. The questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the linguistic attitudes of Japanese English users towards the forms and use of their English. The result suggests that a higher frequency of English use positively affects the acceptability of some of the features of Japanese English, yet at the same time more frequent users of English tend to see the characteristics …

Virginia Woolf & Ecologies: An Introduction, Laci Mattison, Shilo Mcgiff

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

Between Concealment And Revelation: Oblique Modes Of Female Self-Expression In Eighteenth-Century Literature And Life Writing, Sophia N. Sunseri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the social landscape of eighteenth-century Britain as one that was especially inimical to women and analyzes instances in literature and life writing in which female characters and historical figures negotiated the various restrictions they faced in social settings by “hiding in plain sight” and devising alternative strategies by which they might be seen and heard: by engaging in what I am referring to as a play between concealment and revelation. I explore texts where female characters who have been silenced and forced to conceal their presence in social situations craft diffuse strategies through which they express themselves …

Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how queer and postcolonial novels respond to the archive as a determiner of what stories we can and cannot tell through formal experimentation that omits expected elements. Focusing on the subject- and object-making power and the tekhne of inclusion and exclusion that shape the modern archive, I analyze how novels spanning the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century refuse to mimetically reproduce bodies that were traditionally made the object of that knowledge in ways legible to the familiar archival forms. Instead, these novels turn the exclusion of the archive back on itself by manifesting lacunae …

Mood: A Zine Exploring The Value Of Youth-Oriented Media, Patricia K. Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Media is a constant, persistent force in human lives that informs and influences through published, broadcasted, and digitally mediated formats. Mass media industries produce and distribute content consumed by diverse audiences, though the facilitators represent only a fraction of the demographics they serve.

Youth denote one of the most frequently misrepresented groups, with very few practical opportunities for young people to make decisions about the texts available to them. A jarring absence of youth participation in media creation at all levels suggests cultural contributions through art exclude young people's authentic perspectives and desires. Moreover, media portrayals of youth cannot adequately …

Emancipatory And Retributive Labor: Conflicting Representations Of Enslaved Labor In Us And Caribbean Literature, 1830–1855, Michael Druffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emancipatory and Retributive Labor follows the development of a concept that I call emancipatory labor as it appeared in the US and Caribbean during the period 1830 to 1855. Emancipatory labor is a subversive tactic in which enslaved people in the United States and Caribbean redefined a portion of their labor in capitalist terms. Re-theorizing a portion of enslaved labor stakes a claim to agency and humanity according to Western, humanistic logic. Examples of the types of labor being redefined include selling commodities, hiring time, and working “extras” for wages. I use enslaved person Lunsford Lane’s 1842 narrative as a …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Fat Stories, Susan Stinson

English Language and Literature: Faculty Books

The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields.

Comprising over 20 chapters from a range of diverse and international contributors, the Reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that "gender" and "fat" always exist in connection with multiple other structures, …

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological …

Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The mythical city of Troy functioned as an imagined point of origin for many medieval nations, providing a tangible connection to the legendary past and nation-building tools useful for the ruling class. Troy provided a convenient foundation narrative upon which ideas of collective identity could be built for these nations, and England, where construction of a homogeneous past was difficult due to frequent ruptures in its development of communal identity, was an eager producer and consumer of such a legitimizing device. However, the trauma of war and destruction intrinsic in Troy narratives also generates potent political anxiety about the reanimated …

Writing As Liberation: Challenging Yemeni Patriarchal Practices, Sheema Alamari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Patriarchal societies create an environment where men hold power and women are often treated as second-class citizens or are often held as having an inferior status. Throughout history and across cultures, literature has provided a platform for writers to share their stories and express themselves. However, Yemeni women have often been silenced and marginalized due to limited education and censorship. In recent times, Yemeni and Yemeni-American women have turned to storytelling as a means of creative expression and emotional release. This thesis analyzes Zubaida “Jasmine” Sharif’s memoir, Caged in America: One Woman’s Journey Through the Veil, and Nadia Al-Kowkabani's …

Selecting Authority: The Compiler And Female Mystical Sources In Speculum Devotorum, Caitlin J. Branumthrash

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The fifteenth-century Speculum devotorum, or Mirror to Devout People, is best known for incorporating the texts of mystical women into its narrative of the life of Christ, likely because it has an explicitly stated female audience—a nun of Syon. Rather than considering how the female audience may have perceived the female sources in Speculum devotorum, this article investigates the compiler’s views of his female sources based on how he incorporates them into his work. I argue that the compiler treats his female sources as full auctores, but he only includes their works when he addresses what he considers female …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Untangling The Phenomenon Of Teacher Anxiety During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Voices Of Secondary Ela Teachers, Jenise Gorman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hybrid simultaneous teaching, surgical masks, Lysol wipes, and uncertainty capture the zeitgeist of teaching during COVID-19. This study builds on teachers’ daily stressors in the classroom. Many shifts in education that never seemed possible created angst and anxiety in the classroom (Cupido, 2018; Dubey and Pandey, 2020; El Rizaq & Sarmini, 2021; Zuo et al., 2020; Garcia and Piotrowski, 2022). Teachers entered the 2020-2021 school year having to learn many firsts.The purpose of this study was to understand the interplay of work-life lived experiences of secondary English teachers with moments of anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a post-intentional phenomenological …

Colonial Modernity And The Image Of The Gorkhaland Movement In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss, Ubaraj Katawal

Critical Humanities

This article examines some dynamics surrounding the Indian nation-state's treatment of its minority populations, and how Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss seems to abet the postcolonial nation-state's attempt to policing its own people. The article is interested in exploring the impact of colonial modernity in postcolonial human relations. As such, the novel successfully locates postcolonial literary violence in the character of the judge, whose replication of racist treatments on his victims highlights the destructive cycle of violence. At the same time, the novel reinforces ethnic stereotypes against certain ethnicities--at least it leaves much to be desired in countering racist …

Individualism And Nonconformity In Ralph Waldo Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance', Brendan Roof

2023 Symposium

My presentation utilizes the etymology of the word genius to explore Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Emerson would empower the individual in a conformist society to find harmony through nonconformity. The etymology of genius as a spiritual guide reinforces his stance on individualism, namely by qualifying the spirit, or the individual’s discretion, as all-powerful and constant. The word is rooted in the belief that a “spirit attendant” overlooks and guides the host body of each individual. Genius has also been defined as the “personification of a person’s natural appetites.” In terms of Emerson’s genius, man’s inherent appetite to belong to a collective reinforces …