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

Not The Whole Story: Narrative Responses To Contemporary Globalization, Sean Patrick O'Brien

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes contemporary global fiction in English (and, in one chapter, new media literatures such as videogame-based narratives) to examine how individuals, communities, and globalized networks manage differences among historical interpretations, ideologies, lived experiences, and cultural and national traditions making competing demands. Cultural and media theorists like John Tomlinson, Anthony Giddens, Arjun Appadurai, Lev Manovich, and Ian Bogost have demonstrated the overwhelming complexity of life in an age of accelerating globalization. Building on their work and the narrative theory of Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, I explore how literary narratives employ newly prominent composite narrative structures to represent and …

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates Tennessee Williams’s earliest full-length plays, also known as the apprentice plays—Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, and Stairs to the Roof—by comparing, contrasting and contextualizing them in relation to Daniel Chandler’s generic criteria of drama; namely, narrative, characterization, setting, topics, iconography, and staging techniques. The present study also draws upon an extensive body of scholarship pertaining to genre theory, Williams’s cultural contemporaries, and the historical and psychological backdrop of Depression-era America. In these early plays, Williams diverged sharply from the dramatic generic conventions of his day, manipulating them in new …

"How Should One Love?": Alternative Love Plots And Their Ethical Implications In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer J. Carpentier

Dissertations

In reading Victorian fiction through an ethical lens, I am attentive to questions of what constitutes the good, loving, w ell-lived life. It is my contention that Victorian writers turned to fiction - specifically, the rapidly emerging novel form - to explore the ethical implications of being in love, and the problem s occasioned by erotic love. The writers I examine modify the basic Aristotelian search for a specification of the good life for human beings: they used novels as testing grounds for the ethical question, "How should one love?"

My study of 19th-century British fiction reveals a strain of …