Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era, Lorraine Michelle Dubuisson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Victorian Era was one of great social flux; tremendous advances in science and technology called into question deeply held religious beliefs while the changing legal status of women threatened to undermine traditional views of gender roles. Industrialization and the driving economic force of capitalism led to rapid urbanization as well as contributing to shifting class boundaries. In addition, the purpose and responsibilities of the Artist/Poet and, indeed, of art itself were closely scrutinized and hotly contested. Most frequently, historians and scholars of literature have looked to authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson …

Transformational Leadership In The Life And Works Of C.S. Lewis, Crystal L. Hurd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The author of this study explored the works of C.S. Lewis as well as memoirs and scholarship concerning his work to illustrate his transformational leadership. Works reviewed included Lewis's fiction, such as his science fiction trilogy and his children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as his works of nonfiction, such as essays that addressed social issues. The secondary aim for the author of this study was to determine whether the transformational qualities Lewis exhibited also existed in his characters.

Transformational leadership served as the conceptual framework for the descriptive explanatory qualitative design. Essentially the study analyzed the primary …

The Sacrament Of Violence: Myth And War In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Tanya Engelhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My primary aim for this study is to illuminate the Ransom trilogy's inherent psychological and spiritual themes, as well as demonstrate how these themes clarify Lewis's philosophical and political goals for the text. Specifically, by investigating Lewis's mythic imagery and suffering motifs in light of psychoanalytic and theological literary criticisms, I elucidate the reasoning behind Lewis's unique—and at times, horrific—portrayal of fear, violence, and death. I also investigate how Lewis integrates his theology with the horrors of personal and intrapersonal suffering, as well as how he utilizes imagination and myth to explicate the practical (or political) implications of his theodicy. …

Clamor: Malefica, Protest, And The Occult Economy In Early Modern England, Charles Mock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to figure witchcraft practices within a larger economic context whereby cursing and maleficent acts in general might be read as a means of political protest against the political and economic destabilization of comrights. By reading cursing and prophecy as epistemological weaponry, the thesis establishes a theory of early modern terror that corresponds to the effects of these tactics on local and national levels. Readings of traditional witchcraft literature and Shakespeare's Macbeth will hopefully allow for an understanding of witchcraft that is heavily concerned over the nature of agency within the period, particularly with regard to the ways …

The Lady Of The Lake And Chivalry In The Lancelot-Grail Cycle And Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Amanda Marie Ewoldt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I …

A Screen Of One's Own The Tpec And Feminist Technological Textuality In The 21st Century, Amy J. Barnickel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze the 20th century text, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (2005), and I engage with Woolf's concept of a woman's need for a room of her own in which she can be free to think for herself, study, write, or pursue other interests away from the oppression of patriarchal societal expectations and demands. Through library-based research, I identify four screens in Woolf's work through which she viewed and critiqued culture, and I use these screens to reconceptualize "a room of one's own" in 21st Century terms. I determine that the new "room" is …

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must …

Uncertain Identity: Medical Practitioners In Doctor Thorne And Middlemarch, Denis Illige-Saucier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The medical practitioners who play leading roles in the novels Middlemarch by George Eliot and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope are examples of a new breed of professional medical men that emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century in England. The new class of general practitioners held licenses from the old hierarchical system of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, but they were the driving force in favor of reform and professionalization in medicine. The 1858 Medical Act was an important step on the path toward a new conception of the medical practitioner, and the development of that new medical identity …

Replacing The Priest: Tradition, Politics, And Religion In Early Modern Irish Drama., Leslie Ann Valley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland's identity was continually pulled between its loyalties to Catholicism and British imperialism. In response to this conflict of identity, W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory argued the need for an Irish theatre that was demonstrative of the Irish people, returning to the literary traditions to the Celtic heritage. What resulted was a questioning of religion and politics in Ireland, specifically the Catholic Church and its priests. Yeat's own drama removed the priests from the stage and replaced them with characters demonstrative of those literary traditions, establishing what he called a "new …

The Passions And Self-Esteem In Mary Astell's Early Feminist Prose, Kathleen A. Ahearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, Enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory. An entire chapter in the dissertation is devoted to Astell's use of Descartes's theory of regulating the …

Pow/Mic: Prisoners Of Words/Missing In Canon: Liberating The Neglected British War Poets Of The Great War., Larry T. French

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the First World War ended in 1918 and anthologies began to emerge, limited attention has been paid to the poets of this era. While a few select male poets have achieved canonicity, women war poets of this era have fallen into enigmatic obscurity.

The intention of this paper is to expound, explicate, and expose the difficulties relating to gaining entry into the canon of English literature, especially where the poets of The Great War are concerned. This paper discusses the absence of the most profound and foreshadowing poems written during the war through research of scholarly journals and out-of-print …

Bloudy Tygrisses: Murderous Women In Early Modern English Drama And Popular Literature, Alexandra Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and …

Propaganda And Poetry During The Great War., Norma Compton Leadingham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Great War, poetry played a more significant role in the war effort than articles and pamphlets. A campaign of extraordinary language filled with abstract and spiritualized words and phrases concealed the realities of the War. Archaic language and lofty phrases hid the horrible truth of modern mechanical warfare. The majority and most recognized and admired poets, including those who served on the front and knew firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, not only supported the war effort, but also encouraged its continuation. For the majority of the poets, the rejection of the war was a postwar phenomenon. From …

Representations Of The Catholic Inquisition In Two Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novels: Punishment And Rehabilitation In Matthew Lewis' The Monk And Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, Jarad Fennell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge And Opium., Donald John Marotta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coleridge's usual use of opium was through laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. This thesis presents the history of and criticism regarding the poet's use of laudanum and the physical and emotional consequences the drug held for him and his writing career.

Double The Novels, Half The Recognition: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Contribution To The Evolution Of The Victorian Novel., Lori Elizabeth Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Why do we read what we read? Janice Radway examines works that were not popular in an author's time period, but now are affecting the construction of the canon. In her own words, Radway seeks to "establish [popular literature] as something other than a watered-down version of a more authentic high culture [and] to present the middlebrow positively as a culture with its own particular substance and intellectual coherence" (208). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels were considered "middlebrow" and were very popular in Victorian England. Along with this facet, her heroines were considered controversial because they were not portrayed as what …

Eyes In The Text: Surveying The Ocular Aesthetic In Pat Barker's War Trilogy, James Hammond

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1991, British novelist Patricia Barker published Regeneration, the first of three novels that portrayed the exploits of both factual and fictional characters during the darkest days of WWI. Barker's Eye in the Door (1993), followed by The Ghost Road (1995) for which she won the Booker Prize for Fiction, completed the series that explored the effects of combat on the human psyche. What emerges as a dominant feature of Barker's war novels is her depiction of the ocular sense. Reminiscent of Orwellianism, Barker's texts contain a seemingly ubiquitous ocular presence. For example, neurasthenic patients are scrutinized by army psychiatrists, …

Matthew Arnold, The Development Of A Social Critic, Annette Hoines

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since time began, mankind has learned to cope with change as a consistent element of life. History is partly a record of man's response to changes in people, in physical circumstances, in social conditions, in moral attitudes. Change, therefore has always been an integral part of living, but in Victorian England, the changes taking place were so tremendous, so numerous and so widespread in their effect as to have a dominating influence on the work of certain authors or the period. The Victorian period, during the decades 1850 – 1870, rife with change and turbulence, saw the rise of Matthew …

Brighton Rock: Growth In Psychological Insight, Sister Catherine Madigan Dc

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, presented at Xavier University in 1969, examines Graham Greene's novel "Brighton Rock" as a significant early step in Greene's development of psychologically complex characterization. Madigan argues that the novel represents the first sustained combination of three elements in Greene's fiction: the "thriller" plot structure, the "Catholic element" as a framework of belief opposing his characters' actions, and genuine psychological depth, distinguishing it from both his earlier thrillers and his lighter "entertainments."

The thesis compares "Brighton Rock" to Greene's short story "A Drive in the Country," which shares a similar plot but, due to its brevity and narrative point …

The Theory Of Elective Affinities In The Dramatic Love Poems Of Robert Browning, Harry C. Tartt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, submitted to Xavier University in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Master of Arts degree in 1969, examines Robert Browning's treatment of romantic love in his dramatic poems through the theoretical lens of elective affinities, which is a concept borrowed from chemistry and first applied to human relationships by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in his 1809 novel Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). The study traces the origins of the chemical theory of elective affinities from seventeenth-century analytical chemists including Hermann Boerhaave and Torbern Bergmann through Goethe's literary application of the concept to four lovers whose passions operate as blind, irresistible forces …

Shelley's God., Albert Stutzenberger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Virginia Woolf., Virginia Powell Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Of Seventeenth Century And Twentieth Century Metaphysical Poetry., Joseph E. Duncan 1921-1991

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Mutations Of The Gothic Romance., Sarah Virginia Rose

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Theology In Milton's "Paradise Lost", Ernest Joseph Wilderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Xavier University in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Master of Arts degree in 1943, examines the theological content of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost through systematic comparison with the accepted doctrines of Christian and non-Christian religious traditions. The study analyzes six major theological themes in the poem: the Trinity, Creation, Free Will, Satan, the Fall of Man, and the Redemption. For each theme, the author compares Milton's poetic elaborations against the teachings of Catholic Church Fathers including Augustine, Aquinas, Hilary of Poitiers, and Chrysostom, as well …

Bulwer-Lytton's Place In The English Drama Of The Middle Nineteenth Century., Martha Kennerly Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Analysis And Interpretation Of Keats' Endymion., Lucie Lowry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

How Effectual Was Shelley? : A Study In Shelley Criticism., Harriet B. Salin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Treatment Of The Factory In English Novels, 1830-1914., Clara Bell Mclellan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Guide To Hamlet Criticism., Helen Moran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.