Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

The Failed Principle Of Reformed Female Politeness – Exploring Tactical Silence And Voices In Jane Austen’S Sense And Sensibility, Punrada Saengsomboon

Dissertations and Theses

The dichotomy between Elinor and Marianne's manners in Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility is often central to several readings and interpretations of this novel. Based on the debates concerning the culture of politeness in the eighteenth century, some critics see Elinor's social doctrine as the novel celebrated form of polite female manners. However, the paper will argue how the novel instead criticizes the social and intellectual impact this the idealized doctrine of female manners has on young women. The paper will look at three important moments of social interactions in the novel: the party with the Middletons, the …

Defoe’S Robinson Crusoe: “Maps,” Natural Law, And The Enemy, Ala Alryyes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …

Furious: Myth, Gender, And The Origins Of Lady Macbeth, Emma King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis attempts to understand the fabulously complex and poisonously unsettling Lady Macbeth as a product of classical reception and intertextuality in early modern England. Whence comes her “undaunted mettle” (1.7.73)? Why is she, like the regicide she helps commit, such a “bloody piece of work” (2.3.108)? How does her ability to be “bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.81), as Macbeth is commanded to be, reflect canonical literary ideas, early modern or otherwise, regarding women, gender, and violence? Approaching texts in the literary canon as the result of transformation and reception, this research analyzes the ways in which Lady Macbeth’s gender, …

Taming The Beast: Heathcliff As Dog In Wuthering Heights, Anna Cittadino

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the human/animal distinction in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, focusing specifically on the animal within Heathcliff, and the way this animal undermines his ability to be human as a result of the violence and abandonment he endured in childhood.

The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris

Theses and Dissertations

Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …

Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn

Theses and Dissertations

John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …

Perplexed Poetics: Romanticism And The Vortex Of Ideologies, Jaime Luque Lau

Student Theses and Dissertations

In three parts, this thesis explores the tension between the critical and emotional poetics in Romantic poetry, as well as the entanglement of individual will and politics. As a point of entrance, the first part focuses on the major and current trends of scholarly discourses about Romanticism. I will examine Jerome McGann’s influential book of criticism on Romanticism, Romantic Ideology, in juxtaposition with Marc Redfield’s The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. In particular, the discussion of the two books suggest the problems of aesthetic-political and historical discourses; specifically, I argue that McGann’s critical examination of “Romantic ideology” …

Queer Pregnancy In Shakespeare's Plays, Alicia Page Andrzejewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together queer and feminist theory, this dissertation examines Shakespeare’s representations of pregnancy divorced from their promised duration and promised end, revealing that the pregnant body is not wholly symbolic of futurity, chastity, or even heterosexual desire. In queer readings of Shakespeare’s plays and in the methodological debates that inform them, the pregnant body has been conspicuously absent, despite being often subsumed into definitions of heteronormativity and procreative reproduction. In feminist work on Shakespeare’s pregnant characters, scholars largely conflate pregnancy with maternity instead of considering the ways in which these women might engage in non-heterosexual forms of intimacy and eroticism. …

Revolutionary Joy: Affect, Expression, And Community In Milton's England, Stephen Spencer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

To express joy in revolutionary England was deeply paradoxical. English Protestants frequently described the experience as indescribable, owing more to the agency of God’s grace than the subject’s will. And yet, the public expression of joy was considered a Christian duty, an important means of affirming and galvanizing community. In Revolutionary Joy: Affect, Expression, and Community in Milton’s England, I argue that the constitutive paradox of Protestant joy renders its expression a potent form of political speech amidst mid-seventeenth century transformations to the English church, monarchy, and parliament. In an era where apocalyptic expectation put pressure on affective experience …

Divided Loyalties: Family And Consent To Marriage In Late Middle English Literature, 1300–1500, Jennifer R. Alberghini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Studies of marriage and family can help us learn how medieval women lived. This dissertation focuses on “consent theory,” which explains the medieval definition of marriage. According to the Church, a marriage was made valid by the couple’s consent, not outside pressures. This theory, as we might expect, conflicted with practice: children—daughters especially—were expected to be obedient to their parents and marry approved partners.

Medieval England’s legal system came down on both sides of the issue. Rape accusations were made by parents who disapproved of their daughter’s choices, and court cases evaluated the validity of a marriage made without parental …

Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher

Theses and Dissertations

In Jane Eyre and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Brontë and her literary inheritor, D.H. Lawrence, locate the potentially revolutionary romance between their protagonists in natural settings, distant from the social sphere, in order to demonstrate the un-naturalness of an administered capitalist society in which class distinctions work in dehumanizing ways.

Sylvia Plath And "The Bigger Things": War, History, And Modernism At Midcentury, Reagan Lothes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sylvia Plath and “the bigger things” explores the ways in which Plath’s “confessionalism”—so often read as antithetical to T. S. Eliot’s notion of “impersonality”—constituted not a break from modernism but rather a negotiation of its transatlantic legacy. In doing so, it works against a long-standing critical tradition that has defined Plath, who was living in England as she composed her Ariel poems, as nonetheless a distinctly American poet and one focused uniquely—and, as some have claimed, even pathologically—on the self. An examination of Plath’s published work, including interviews, statements of poetics, journal entries, and letters, in the context of a …

“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez

Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.

Politics, Eugenics, And Yeats’S Radio Broadcasts, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Much has been written about the right-wing politics and eugenicist sympathies of Yeats’s late-1930s poetry in general and about On the Boiler in particular. Yeats’s focus on Ireland’s degeneration and his calls for its regeneration through cultural (and even biological methods) coincided with his dalliance with the Irish Blueshirts and his frustrations with the transformations of the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera. However, these years also proved to be Yeats’s most active in terms of radio broadcasting, with six of his nine broadcasts made between 1937 and 1938. In this essay, I read Yeats’s broadcasts, in particular “In …

Dear Son Of Memory: Milton's Engagement With Shakespeare, Bradley Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dear Son of Memory establishes new lines of inquiry into Milton’s engagement with Shakespeare, exploring explicit verbal allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in Milton’s works, as well as echoes of characters, scenes, and themes. It argues that Milton viewed Shakespeare sympathetically, rather than as a rival and it therefore revises the legacy of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” model, which still dominates scholarship in Milton studies today. More specifically, this project offers evidence from Milton’s early poems to show that Milton regarded Shakespeare as a fellow vatic poet and a friendly influence who helped him to dramatize the two central tenets …

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19^th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …

Shakespeare And Chaucer: Dream Visions And Dramatic Designs, Michael Plunkett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores echoes of Chaucer's dream visions in two of Shakespeare's late plays, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare turns to Chaucer's dream visions, particularly The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame, not to use them as narrative sources, but to appropriate conventional elements of artistic self-exploration and self-definition in them. Chaucer's dreamers, who are also writers, read classic stories in bed, dream dreams that react to those stories, and then wake up and write new poems that report on what they have read …

Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent …

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …

“Community In Solitude”: The Solitary Self, Social Critique, And Utopian Longing, Colin S. Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the discourse of solitude in early modern English literature was used to construct a fantasy of resistance to political and social corruption and internecine conflict. Furthermore, the rhetoric of solitude and the positioning of oneself as an outsider, as “uniquely separate from society,” in Andrew Bennett’s terms, led to the development of an early modern authorial identity in opposition to the world, opening a space that allowed social critique and utopian desire to flourish. The notion of disengaged resistance, or what we might call disengaged engagement, is the key component of the rhetoric and practice of …

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

Debt's Poetry In Timon Of Athens, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …

Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The character of Job starts in literature, a trope and archetype of the suffering man who potentially gains wisdom through suffering. Job’s characterization informs a comparison to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and finally Melville’s Moby-Dick. These versions of Job rally, fight, and rebel against a universe that was once loving and fair towards a more chaotic and nihilistic one. Job’s suffering is on the mark of all tragedy because he not only experiences a downfall, he gains wisdom through universalizing his torment. The Job trope not only stresses the role of suffering, it …

In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Creator And Creation: Artistic Development In Herman Melville’S Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities And James Joyce’S A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Magdalena M. De La Cruz

Dissertations and Theses

This study focuses on the primary protagonists of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Pierre Glendinning and Stephen Dedalus, as well as Isabel Banford, a supporting character in Melville’s novel, to illustrate how the tensions of contemporary society have a direct influence on the artist-hero’s representations and perspectives on self-realization. This thesis will draw on the major concepts of the artist and artist fiction as put forth in Otto Rank’s Art and Artist (1916), Herbert Marcuse’s “Der Deutsche Künstlerroman” (“The German Artist Novel”, 1922), and Maurice …

Writing Indigenous Identity In Herman Melville And Joseph Conrad's Polynesian And Malay Archipelago Novels, Catherine L. Black

Dissertations and Theses

The thesis of this paper is that cross-cultural writing can be done with the right methods of communication, such as engaging narrator and education—or simply sensitive, imaginative writing. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad’s five books set in the Polynesian and Malay Archipelagos—Typee and Omoo and the Malay Trilogy (Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue)— are used as master models of how to write indigenous characters with rich characterization in pivotal roles, even circa 1846 and 1896. The unique perspective and technique by which they did this is explored, a technique and perspective not …

Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

In a 1960 letter to a friend, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett, “I’ll buy his goods hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty; his work is beautiful.” What do we learn if we take the word “beautiful” seriously? Rereading Waiting for Godot backward through Betrayal, this article argues that Beckett’s landscape, typically read as a realization of postwar angst, is in fact one released of the pressures of contemporary living and for Pinter a homosocial Eden. Jerry’s joke upon discovering the adultery—“Maybe I should …