Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Eco-Material Rifts In South Asian Anglophone Fiction, Muhammad Manzur Alam

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

I examine how South Asian Anglophone fiction represents the evolution and derangement of postcolonial ecologies, especially how unrelenting colonial and capitalist interventions affect the symbiotic relationship between subaltern people and nonhuman entities. The conceptual methodology develops from Karl Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” which illustrates how capitalist exportation of crops causes loss of important soil nutrients because the nutrients are consumed in distant locations and not returned to the original soil. My concept of “eco-material rifts” extends Marx’s idea to contend that the “rifts” have grown into more complicated and difficult to remediate modes of material rifts today. I scrutinize …

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a divergence between Woolf’s vision of private physical spaces necessary for creating art and that of some feminists of color such as Alice Walker, Ortiz Cofer, and Gloria Anzaldua. Both Woolf and these contemporary scholars agree on the importance of physical spaces for female artists. However, they disagree on the nature of these spaces. Woolf’s private physical space is a room with a lock on the door whereas these writers’ room is the kitchen table, the bus, or the welfare line. Walker and like-minded writers challenge the narrowness of Woolf’s room because her locked room is a luxury …

Another Time, Another Place: The Truth Of Silence In J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Sara T. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

Through Lucy’s rejection of the criminal justice system, Coetzee's Disgrace operates as an allegory for the failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to provide individual justice and reparations to victims of Apartheid.

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio

Uprooting Medievalism: Ya And The Future Of Fantasy, Zoe Phillips

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This thesis looks at the development of the young adult neo-medieval fantasy genre, measuring famous works from the Medieval period against works such as Tolkien's, to examine the impact of female protagonists and female authors on the genre and readers alike as neo-medieval fantasy continues to gain in popularity. Works examined include: Beowulf, Lanval, Le Roman de Silence, The Hobbit, Uprooted, and The Hero and the Crown.

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Exploring The Truths And Fabrications Of Sir John Mandeville, Jake Sanborn

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presents a unique and nuanced perspective of the Eastern World during the time of the Crusades. By critically analyzing the still-unknown author’s depictions of the Eastern lands and their peoples, I demonstrate that it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the status of Christianity during the late 14th century. The Travels comments upon the concepts of Eastern religions and cultural practices in a way that is remarkable and surprising — instead of reacting to such topics with hostility or aggression, the likely-Christian author of The Travels is willing to learn from those …

The Language Of Rats: Unwelcome Animals And Interspecies Connection In Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Kieran Leigh Lyons

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Language of Rats: Unwelcome Animals and Interspecies Connection in Global Contemporary Fiction consists of three essays examining the representation of what I call unwelcome animals in contemporary Anglophone novels from the United States, Nigeria, and India. These animals often live alongside humans yet are perceived as threats or annoyances. Literary depictions of this fraught relationship reveal, and sometimes critique, the intellectual structures that shape how we understand and represent interspecies connections. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the interspecies dimensions of contemporary fiction by bringing together the fields of environmental criticism, animal studies, postcolonialism, and U.S. Southern studies. …

"And Gladly Wolde He Lerne": Facilitating Discussion Based Learning About Medieval And Regency Literature Through Interactive Technologies, Emma Vallandingham

Honors Projects

A series of reading guides for Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Frankenstein, that utilize interactive technologies to facilitate student engagement with and discussion of the texts. Each reading guide consists of an overview of the text, relevant historical context, and reading and discussion questions for students to answer. Some reading guides also have corresponding answer guides that provides sample answers as well as hints and tips for answering the questions.

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …

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.

"Wand'ring This Woody Maze": Deciphering The Obscure Wilderness Of Paradise Regained, Brooke Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The setting of Milton’s great sequel is puzzling, being called a desert and a “waste wild” (IV. 523) repeatedly and at the same time including descriptions of protective oaks and woody mazes. These conflicting descriptions conjure up several questions: In which environment does the epic take place? Because Milton is so detailed in his adaptations of biblical narrative the inclusion of trees is quite perplexing. While he does tend to expand biblical narrative quite frequently – e.g. Paradise Lost – he rarely initiates a change without just cause. The crux of this particular change centers on what this just cause …

Postcolonial Urban Vernacular Narratives In Contemporary Britain, Kathryn N. Moss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the ways in which three postcolonial writers in Britain (Samuel Selvon, James Kelman, and Suhayl Saadi) have used the vernacular as a medium for third person narrative fiction. In doing so, they have emphasized the legitimacy, beauty, and utility of languages sometimes considered debased and ugly even by their own speakers. I argue that this shift from the margins to the center of dialect or minority language in fiction is a radical—and relatively recent—one, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. By utilizing the vernacular as a medium for third person narratives, these authors are bringing non-prestige vernacular voices …

Shape, Space And Typeface: Mapping Black Subjectivity Through Caribbean Aesthetics, Samantha Stephens

Master’s Theses

The Caribbean is frequently imagined and aestheticized by the image of the basin, which limits the way the region is confined in geographic and historic terms. By conceptualizing the poets as mapmakers, the collections by Kei Miller, Olive Senior, and M. NourbeSe Phillip reference the container of the basin but remediate it in poetic terms. The movement towards a distinctive lack of containment illustrates the dynamic literary and geographical operations of the Caribbean, linking typography and topography. Reading with a new lens, including digital resources that re-spatialize these poems, demonstrates the complexities that characterize the formation of these texts and …

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …

“Donning The Skins”: The Problem Of Shapeshifting In The Saga Of The Volsungs, David Mudrak

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

“Fafnir became so ill-natured that he set out for the wilds and allowed no one to enjoy the treasure but himself. He has since become the most evil serpent and lies now upon his hoard” (Byock 59). Regin, recounting the tale of his brother’s transformation to Sigurd, describes an act of shapeshifting, a magical transformation of one’s body. While many scholars of Icelandic sagas focus their attention on the family sagas because of the clear message they provide for the Icelandic society, the magical elements of the mythical sagas also offer insight into the cultural workings of that people. In …

The Ethics Of Perception In Transatlantic Romantic Poetry, Charles W. Rowe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Ethics of Perception in Transatlantic Romantic Poetry is a report on the ethical significance of British and American Romantic poetry composed between 1785 and 1865. This study focuses on the poems of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Its central claim is that these poets composed a body of work that sought to show readers how their sustained attention to everyday perceptual experience could lead them towards a more empathic way of being.

The first chapter argues that the late-eighteenth century poet William Cowper is the initiator of the ethically-oriented poetry of perception that Wordsworth, …

Being Together: Imaginaries Of Coexistence And Resistance In Contemporary South Asian Writings, Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Being Together is a critical inquiry into selected writings that produce a counter-hegemonic imagination of pluralism, coexistence and cultural resistance to the violence, dispossession and exclusions perpetuated by nationalist, racist and neoliberal forces in South Asian and South Asian diasporic contexts, primarily spaces within or associated with Sri Lanka. Due to the historical role the nation, homelands, native culture, sovereignty, and self-determination have played in liberating South Asia from the clutches of British colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, these ideas have enormous political valence to the socio-political lives of the communities that consider the region their homeland today. While this …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

How To Live: Lessons From Old English And Old Norse/Icelandic Wisdom Literature, Rhys Frazier

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Medieval wisdom literature is a genre that is difficult to define and it has not been extensively studied. Scholarship is typically concerned with translation and manuscript emendation concerns and with identification of sources in addition to an analysis of religious influences. There has not yet been any scholarship concerned with the ways in which religious themes and concerns about life after death are meant to influence the behaviors and attitudes of the living reader. The present study seeks to analyze the ways in which the Old English poems “Maxims I,” “The Gifts of Men,” and “The Fortunes of Men,” as …

"Devoted To Influenza": An Analysis Of English And Nigerian Archival And Literary Depictions Of The 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic, Kendra Klein

All NMU Master's Theses

This project examines how the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is discussed in memoirs, letters, and fiction. I focus on both British and Nigerian sources to compare how different areas of the world portray the cultural significance of this disease. In the first chapter, I analyze two unpublished archival texts: the letters of Dorothy Sutton (1918), a nurse during World War I and the memoir of Private H.J. Youngman (1969). Both sources, housed in the collections of the Imperial War Museum in London, describe the symptoms and scope of the influenza pandemic. The chapter also looks at Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway …

Workers, Athletes And Artists: The Historical Continuity Of White Control Of Black America, Courtney Walton

Masters Theses

From the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, black Americans have been subject to different forms of control. This subjection of blacks to societal demands arose in part because black people are viewed as inferior to white people. Because of this misconstrued perception, black people are forced to present an acceptable level of blackness to prevent punishment. Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (1938), Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain" (1926) detail their lives at the tum of the …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Misassembled Monsters, Jenn Brown

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is a narrative of personal and material history. Through my work in painting, sculpture, and installation, I seek to share my story of emotional armoring in an attempt to connect to an audience. In my work, I look to my personal memories of growing up in a small, midwestern town and armoring myself with emotional barriers against its social construct of “normalcy.” Inspired by Medieval suits of armor and the characteristics of Goth culture throughout history, I employ my work to present the stage of a theatrical battleground. Creating each of my pieces is a fight for the …

“The Idea Of Self In The Land Of Self-Help”: Globalization And A Structure Of Feeling In Mohsin Hamid’S How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Sharmeen Mehri

Theses and Dissertations

Focusing on the novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this paper examines Mohsin Hamid’s experimentation with narrative structure and the idea of the split self through the context of Frederic Jameson’s dialectic of the cultural and economic dimensions of globalization and David Harvey’s take on Postmodernism.

Who Died: Redefining The Elegy Through Affect And Trauma, Brittney La Noire

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project introduces the claim that death literature, specifically elegies and epitaphs, do not rely on set structure or content, but rather are poetic effects of trauma and affect. Both have been defined and redefined by critical scholars, but there is still a division about their use. The beginning of the project will pull together Paul De Man, Cathy Caruth, Theresa Brennan, and Diana Fuss to apply the theoretical principle of trauma and affect transhistorically through Theocritus, John Milton, and Percy Shelley. The final portion will be an original creative collection of elegies combined with epitaphs as ending couplets about …

Between Settlers And Sovereignty: Literary Solidarity And Anti-Colonial Discourse In Territorial Hawai‘I, 1887–1959, Trevor J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project reclaims a history of anti-colonial discourse and collaborations among Asian settlers and Native Hawaiians between 1887-1959 in Territorial Hawai‘i, drawing from archival works, including King David Kalākaua’s poetry, correspondence, and speeches regarding the Hawaiian monarch’s responsibilities toward Asian laborers, Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole’s speeches about Hawaiian land rights and Asian farmers, and texts written by local Asian authors of the early 20th century, including Fred Kinzaburō Makino, Takie Okumura, James T. Hamada, Wai Chee Chun, and Noboru Itamura. Through this recovery of texts, I show how the racialization of Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants by the U.S. territorial …

Depictions Of The Western Artist In Colonial South Africa: Turbott Wolfe, Chloe Bazlen

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores what the role of the artist provides to the colonial novel. Using William Plomer's novel Turbott Wolfe, the role of the Western artist in colonial South Africa is examined and critiqued, putting it in conversation with the art theory of Roger Fry and the Primitivism movement. In doing so, it explores themes such as desire, miscegenation, complexity, and carnival, showing that while artists partake in society, they also remain critical of it, responding to it in their artwork.

Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals …