Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Bergsonian Blend: Subjective Temporality Within Modernist Aesthetics Of Mental Illness, Lydia Victoria Gervais

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Henri Bergson was a modernist French philosopher who wrote extensively on the topic of the lived experience of time, which he called durée, or duration. His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, was developing psychoanalytic theory in a growing field of psychological study, which serves as a prominent ancestor to modern psychiatry and current psychoanalytical literary studies. Fiction writers of the 1900s absorbed the zeitgeist of melded chronology and consciousness, interweaving themes of time and trauma in their works. Utilizing Henri Bergson’s durée as a philosophical framework, I examine the moralization of time-consciousness in connection with mental illness and investigate representations of …

The Substance Of Reality: Moral Perfectionism In Shakespeare's Hamlet., David Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a selection of and close reading of key passages, I offer an interpretation of Hamlet that seeks to illuminate the play as an important work of moral philosophy, and to situate the play within a strand of moral philosophy named moral perfectionism by Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Hamlet is a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, but when read with attention to moral perfectionism, the play yields additional layers of meaning. Hamlet is a “philosophical drama” that navigates the “moral calling of philosophy”—a text that seems to, almost uncannily, elicit the audience to think reflectively, to ask fundamental human questions along …

Margaret Cavendish And Radical Self-Love, Marina Burandt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Margaret Cavendish was an early modern Englishwoman writer who lived from 1623 to 1673. She wrote under her own name at a time when it was more common for women to write under a pen name, and published almost everything she wrote. Her writings include a multiplicity of genres, from science fiction, poetry, drama, and philosophy, to letters, biography, and autobiography. Cavendish’s style often blends multiple genres and forms, showcasing a modality that is driven by complexity and hybridity. Cavendish was a surprisingly modern figure in many ways, as her writings show. The Description of a New World, Called the …

Narrative Forms Of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, And The Holocaust In 20th-Century British Fiction, David Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Narrative Forms of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, and The Holocaust in 20^th-Century British Fiction examines how British authors explore fascist and Nazi violence through narrative. The texts in this project challenge the popular perception of Nazis and fascists and help to enrich the understanding of these character types in artistic representations of fascism and the Holocaust. I seek to reveal how each author in the three central texts examined presents fascist violence’s march toward the mainstream and the ways ordinary people deal with political violence. Each author critically depicts growing fascist regimes in World War II-era Europe and contemplates …

Gentleman Death In Silk And Lace: Death And The Maiden In Vampire Literature And Film, Emily Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains an examination in the psychosocial significance of Hans Baldung Grien’s “Death and the Maiden” art motif, created during the Renaissance period following the Black Death, and its resurgence in the vampire fiction genre of both literature and film. I investigate the motif in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) as well as their film adaptations by Francis Ford Coppola (1992) and Neil Jordan (1994), respectively. By examining the presence of the motif in art, literature, and film, I found that the common threads across all investigated works were the dominant social …

The Affable Raphael: Milton's Surrogate Instructor In Paradise Lost., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is a beautifully written epic that continues to be a stalwart text in the English literary canon, with unlimited potential for interpretation. In this dissertation I propose that Paradise Lost can be read as a pedagogical lesson for Milton’s “fit audience,” where the author implements his views on education in the context of heaven, hell, and Paradise. In the poem, Milton presents three pedagogical methodologies: first, the wrong way to knowledge is presented through Satan’s manipulations of the fallen angels and Eve; second, the divine way to knowledge is illustrated via Michael’s prophecy to Adam …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

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 …

“It’S Alive!” The Birth And Afterlife Of The Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects …

The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …

Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how medieval authors defined rhetoric and depicted rhetorical practice in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. It begins by analyzing how the field of medieval rhetorical historiography has overlooked the Fürstenspiegel as a rhetorical genre due to its overt reliance on meta-rhetorical handbook genres as the objects of its analysis. This dissertation challenges traditional narratives that positions medieval rhetoric as a primarily academic discipline divorced from political practice by engaging in horizontal reading practices that examine the broader culture of medieval rhetorical practice alongside the definitions of rhetoric found in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. In so doing, this dissertation …

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …

The Terrors Of Everyday Life: The Gothic Novel As A Woman's Conduct Guide To Survival, 1791-1817, Jessica Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Gothic is often associated with the fantastical, with people and events that only take place within our darkest nightmares. In my thesis, I explore how, in the hands of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, the Gothic exposes the hidden dangers of reality perpetuated by conduct literature. Within conduct manuals, thousands of regulations direct women’s behaviors and identify the perfect woman as one who exists passively within the safety of the domestic sphere. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) engage in subterfuge against eighteenth-century conduct literature and expose the realities of the domestic sphere: …

Deforming The Knight: Gawain's Descent Into Monstrosity In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Hannah Held

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sir Gawain has always been marked as a victim in the well-known poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he is much more than that. Standing with the knights of the Round Table, he seems to be the perfect example of what chivalry should look like, especially with an adherence to the common religious beliefs. However, when put into the context of the manuscript in which it was found, Gawain seems to stand as an allegorical figure of the do-not’s of feudal and religious chivalry. Using the lens of Monster Theory via Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and David Williams, I …

Excremental Ecofeminism: Unearthing Waste’S Feminine And Narrative Agency In Early Modern Literature, Courtney Druzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the role of forms of waste in early modern literary texts. It both offers up a theory—known as early modern excremental ecofeminism—for reading period specific texts in relation to waste and articulates how we may do so through close analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the elegies of Mary Sidney Herbert, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, and finally, William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. It chooses a variety of genres across texts from the 1580s to the 1660s both to interrogate …

“It Could Have Happened To Any Of You”: Post-Wounded Women In Three Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Novels, Abby N. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; …

The Failure Of Chivalry, Courtesy, And Knighthood Post-Wwi As Represented In David Jones’S In Parenthesis, Taylor L. Hubbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes David Jones’s In Parenthesis to demonstrate the failed notion of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood in modernity during and after the war. Jones’s semi-autobiographical prose poem recounting his experiences of WWI was published in 1937, nineteen years after the war ended. Jones applied the concepts of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood to his experiences during WWI through In Parenthesis. Jones used these concepts, which originated in the classical period and the Middle Ages, to demonstrate how they have changed over time, especially given the events of WWI. The best way for Jones to demonstrate the impact of WWI …

In A Victorian Fog: Constructing Identities In Female Gothic Novels., Hayley Salo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on feminist criticism and postcolonial theory, this study analyzes conversations about female identity within and around Victorian female gothic novels and how they contribute to the genre’s appeal to modern readers. In particular, it is a case study of how the discourse develops through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Each novel presents the challenges women face when their sense of self is based on the expectations of others, and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre further explore the potential for women to create their own, unique identity while still remaining …

From Byronic To Gothic Blood Sucker: Subversion Toward A Non-Gendered Identity, Hannah Hoover

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Analyzing Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and linking trends of the Byronic hero that have merged into a variety of genres reveal that the hero is a mode of subversive gender expression, which has evolved within the Gothic through feminine desire. Delving into Bram Stoker’s Dracula will provide unique insight into the audience’s desires/expressions of gender. Finding the transition point from the monster vampire of Dracula to Stephanie Meyer’s desirous, sparkling boy-next-door in Twilight will track the trajectory of gender and sexual norms through time. From the foundational adaptation of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights to the repressed vampiric desire …

Exiles, Knowledge, And Power: Utopian And Dystopian Worlds In Early Modern England, Jennifer Topale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research project seeks to investigate the ways in which exiled early modern writers and literary characters engage with power and access knowledge, often through the creation of utopian and dystopian worlds, which either leads to their exilic identities and disempowerment or allows them to renegotiate their identities from the periphery to the center of power. The triadic relationship among the terms exile, knowledge, and power will be analyzed through postcolonial theory, identity politics, and feminist theory. Exiles can be defined as punitive, political, internal, and self-imposed, and some can inhabit more than one exilic identity. Each of these individuals …

Through The Devil's Mirror: The Villain And The Sinthomosexual As Manifestations Of The Death Drive, Andrew Markus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) offers a model for reading queer sexuality and societal place very much in line with that which begins to emerge in early Gothic literature, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796). The Gothic villain aligns with Edelman’s sinthomosexual to illustrate a pattern of victimization and retaliation which results in both the villain and sinthomosexual’s persistent abjection from the social order. However, a close reading of Lewis’s narrative for its depiction of psychological trauma rooted in sexual expression suggests that this queer negativity is not the sum total of …

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

Samuel Daniel’S Lyric Reception: The Role Of Poet-Critics From Wordsworth To Winters, Caleb Mcghee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century …

Govoreeting With Lewdies: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of A Clockwork Orange And Its Translations Across Media And Language, Willie Wallace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Much linguistic research has been done on the fictional argot of A Clockwork Orange, known as Nadsat, but few efforts have been made to expand beyond the classification and analysis of Nadsat. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks at the overarching discourse of A Clockwork Orange and aims to answer three questions: What exigencies and discourses inform the creation of these works? What techniques and power structures are employed in the construction of these works? How do these works shape or attempt to shape the discourse? To answer these questions, I look at three instances of the discourse: …

Living Words; Dying Flesh: The Truth And Testimonies Of Desdemona In Othello And Pompilia In The Ring And The Book, Martha Clare Brinkman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603/4) and Pompilia in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) exemplify female characters whose testimonies highlight their souls’ salvation and demonstrate that they ultimately transcend their domestic roles. This thesis engages historical scholars who discuss the tensions between the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and the state in early modern and Victorian England, and literary scholars who focus on Desdemona and Pompilia as either submissive or possessing agency. This thesis includes the work of developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan, to show how Desdemona and Pompilia emphasize care …

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption In English Restoration Literature, Shawn Watkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption in English Restoration Literature

Over the past several decades, material culture scholars working within the “Long 18^th Century” have identified how the figure of the woman consumer became an ideological nodal point that registered new enthusiasm for emerging economic dynamics (mercantilism, nascent capitalism, etc.) while also expressing masculine anxieties about consumerism and the role of consumable goods in English society. Although many scholars have noted that men functioned symbolically and ideologically as English society’s primary consumers of material goods in the later 17^th century, there is no scholarly work that aims to describe the …

"Within The Hollow Crown": Performing Kingship In Richard Ii And Henry Iv Part One, Angeline Morris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the parallels and connections between Richard II and Prince Hal in Shakespeare’sRichard II and 1 Henry IV and what the results would be if the characters were cross-cast, or played by the same actor onstage, in performance. Criticism on the plays has often addressed the parallels between the two characters, but as of yet no one has examined ways to show this in performance. This paper acts as a form of critical introduction for a proposed combined performance text of both Richard II and 1 Henry IV, arguing that the textual parallels between the two …

Radical Empowerment And Evolution In Fay Weldon’S Menippean Satire: The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil (1983), Jackson A. Rivera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis explores Fay Weldon’s implementation of Menippean satire in her 1983 novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. The present discussion argues Weldon utilizes this specific satiric mode within her novel in order to convey a story of radical female empowerment and evolution that critiques gendered stereotypes of marriage and female roles in society. To make this argument, this thesis applies satire theory, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about Menippean satire, as well as marriage and family psychology, to Weldon’s characterization of wives, husbands, and mistresses throughout the novel. Through this discussion, Rivera demonstrates the effectiveness of …

The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female …

Introspections Into Rational Fanatics And Thoughtful Deceivers: Examining The Use Of Memoirs In The Works Of James Hogg And Charles Brockden Brown, Tucker Foster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and …