Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

“[T]He Observance Of Trifles": Mapping Imperial Assemblages In Nineteenth-Century British Serialized Crime Fiction, Dana Joy Gavin

English Theses & Dissertations

This project investigates representations of the ecological and Imperialist relationships in a selection of serialized crime fiction texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (appearing in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly beginning in 1891). I examine serialized crime fiction published in the nineteenth century as a map of the ecological and Imperialist relationships established through the nineteenth-century British publishing industry. Serialized crime fiction was both popular and profitable, representing not only commercial success but one that tapped into the reading populace’s imagination. Readers craved serialized stories …

Inviting Submission: Isabella Beeton At The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 1856-1865, Julie Megan Sorge Way

English Theses & Dissertations

Isabella Beeton, creator of the iconic domestic manual Beeton’s Book of Household Management, died suddenly in 1865, just before her twenty-ninth birthday. Her popular book survived to codify stereotypical Victorian female ideals. Yet the “Mrs Beeton” mythos camouflages a remarkable talent: far from domestic drudgery, Beeton maintained a vibrant career as a writer and editor at the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM), traveling widely to research the latest fashions and laboring behind the scenes to ensure the magazine’s success. Closely examining Beeton’s EDM work demonstrates how these formative, productive years shaped her later, more popular writing. Such a …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

"Sample Speech I' The Market-Place": The Habermasian Public Sphere In Robert Browning's The Ring And The Book, Anthony Thomas Garcia

English Theses & Dissertations

In The Ring and the Book, Browning presents a spectrum of twelve dramatic monologues to tell a complicated murder story in 17th century Rome. Browning delves into the environs of 17th century Italy in creating the backdrop for the narrative in Books Two, Three, and Four, supplying these voices to provide historical and social context to the private matter of domestic violence. Understanding the function of this leading triad necessitates investigation into the relation of community and public space to the act of uxoricide. The counter-position of "Half-Rome" in Book II and "The Other Half-Rome" in Book III produces …

Mary Stuart And The English Sonnet Tradition: A Reassessment, Megan K. Mize

English Theses & Dissertations

Queen of Scotland practically from birth, Mary Stuart occupied a unique position of authority for a woman in the early modem moment. As Stuart struggled to solidify her power in Scotland, she represented the threat of female agency within a patriarchal culture. Stuart's political opponents used her personal correspondence, including a sonnet sequence known as the Casket Sonnets, as a means of illustrating Stuart's supposed abuse of power. In the Sonnets, Stuart reversed Petrarchan gender roles, placing a female in the masculine role of the aggressive lover. As monarch, Stuart could not escape the political implications of her personal desire, …

The Progression Of Literary Representation Of Female Friendships In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Debby Bangert

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Inside The Fairy Ring: Jane Eyre And The Victorian Fairy Tale, Kimberly Alford

English Theses & Dissertations

Focusing on nineteenth century literature in England, this paper explores the relationship of fairy tales to the realist novel. Even though the novels of the time are best known for being grounded firmly in realism, the world of fairies, existing most prominently in nineteenth-century children's literature, crept into novels and stories written for adults. The novel Jane Eyre, frequently discussed regarding its treatment of nineteenth century social issues, contains gothic and romantic elements alongside the realist mode. These elements contribute to a "transformation" of the text into a fairy tale. The novel becomes a fairy tale not in structure alone, …

Strange Embedded Fellows: The Socio-Narrative Radicalism Of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Romance, E. Jordan Sellers Jr.

English Theses & Dissertations

Through a close narratological analysis of Ann Radcliffe's romances, this thesis will demonstrate that the form of Radcliffe's novels is fundamentally linked to her contemporary cultural contexts. Although traditional criticism of Radcliffe rather dubiously labels her a conservative writer and regularly cites her heroines and servants as idealized and submissive stock devices, this project will demonstrate that her characters have significant subversive agency based in narrative structure, which subtly points to the radicalism of Radcliffe's politics. These conventional readings of Radcliffe's novels have too long separated the concerns of servants, women, and Radcliffe's own politics. It is only when we …

A Man's Home Is His Castle: A Look At The Relationship Between Fathers And Children In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Miranda M. Johnson-Parries

English Theses & Dissertations

In western society, the father is one of, if not the most, significant roles possible for a man. In the 18^th C bourgeois family, he was especially crucial. In the novels of Jane Austen, the father, even when absent, is a central figure: Dead fathers influence their children by their lack of planning and absence, while a physically present, but mentally distant father has much the same effect. I will analyze how seemingly peripheral male characters within Jane Austen's novels react to their stations in life and try to manipulate them in a similar way to Austen's much analyzed …

The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse In Burney, Austen, And Eliot, Elizabeth H. Harlan

English Theses & Dissertations

Free indirect discourse, a narrative technique used in third-person novels, occurs when the private thoughts of a character are voiced in a narrative passage and no indicator such as "she thought" is present. This technique, also known as represented thought or style indirect libre, is a blurring of the line between the character and the narrator. Although popularized in the works of Jane Austen, free indirect discourse can be traced back even further to Fanny Burney and it first appears as third person narratives are beginning to replace epistolary and journal-like novels. Some have attributed the development to a growing …

The Nautical Quest, Bradford S. Warner

English Theses & Dissertations

Despite crossing genres and continents, strong literary connections exist between Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Poe's novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Melville's novel Moby Dick or the Whale. The works are similar in terms of plot, symbolism, and other artistic devices. Ties between any two of the works have been mentioned in literary scholarship over the last century, yet I have located none involving all three.

None of the present criticism has revealed that each work utilizes several important literary devices, such as a quality of incorporation of source material (including travel …

Lord Byron's Heroines, Cathy Douglas Rodreguez

English Theses & Dissertations

Byron as a poet, aristocrat, and Romantic, began as all the other poets of his time, in a traditional fashion. But unlike the other poets, Byron began to develop a heroine who would become a voice for the realities of society. Despite the fact that Byron had many love affairs, he also respected women, believing in their right of autonomy within society. He considered them his equal, relishing lively debates with them on many topics. Byron's heroines embodied sentimentalism, integrity, morality and intelligence, which in turn subtlety influenced society to respect a woman's desire to openly express her emotions. What …

An "Earthly Paradise": William Morris's Later Prose Romances, Carolyn Adele Gardner

English Theses & Dissertations

William Norris, prominent Pre-Raphaelite poet and early Socialist thinker, devoted the final six years of his life not to poetry or Socialism, but to the creation of a new literary genre, the prose romance. Following the initial publication of the later prose romances between 1890-1896, few critics have attempted to analyze Norris's last works; moreover, those who have done so, have generally either dismissed the romances as escapist fantasies or twisted the narratives of these romances in an attempt to demonstrate the presence of Marxist allegories thought to accord with Norris's Socialism. Yet Norris's later prose romances, uniting his philosophies …

The Laissez Faire Political Vision Of John Milton In Paradise Lost, Gerald Keith Delles

English Theses & Dissertations

John Milton's Paradise Lost, a work subject to an indefinite variety of readings, is here dissected to reveal the nature of Milton's political epistemology. Using his prose as the soil from which his ideas sprang and the whirlwind political climate of seventeenth century England as the catalyst of these ideas, the goal is to connect the implied political content of Paradise Lost with corresponding points in the prose and actual events of Milton's time, with the intent to form a blueprint of Milton's "political vision." Eden and Heaven from Paradise Lost offer a link between labor without constraints and the …

The Vital Life: D.H. Lawrence's Response To A Dehumanized World, Rebecca Recce White

English Theses & Dissertations

As D.H. Lawrence experienced World War I and the Industrial Revolution, he recognized the inner spirits of men and women being valued less in the midst of war and industrialism. Lawrence's novels, short stories, and other works dramatize this dehumanizing process. Of his novels, five will be examined in this study: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Pivotal relationships between men and women are outlined by Lawrence to illustrate the ways in which they either reflect or challenge society.

Lawrence gives the readers a view of the modern age torn apart …

Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity To War: Its Roots And Its Impact On Her Fiction, Jane Hamovit Lauter

English Theses & Dissertations

Virginia Woolf saw the nightmare of war as a form of madness which posed a threat not only to individual human life, but to art and culture as well. Her many tragic personal experiences with death together with the fact that she lived through World War I and the beginning of World War II, caused in her a keen sensitivity to the transitory nature of life. Because Woolf saw militarism and the violence of war as blindly chauvinistic and utterly wasteful, war became for her a source of anger and contempt as well as fear.

Woolf's response to war had …

Spatiality In Ulysses And Cubism, Lingchei Chen

English Theses & Dissertations

The paper is a study of James Joyce's Ulysses and Cubism in modern art. Both forms, as the paper presents, use similar techniques to establish multidimensionality in the work of art. In a spatial novel like Ulysses, because of its techniques, the reader is allowed to experience exactly what the characters experience as Joyce presents every aspect of the Dublin life simultaneously. A Cubist painting does the same. As the Cubist painter captures every side of the object and simultaneously presents these different views on the canvas, the spectator is therefore able to apprehend the object from every possible angle, …

Biographical Themes In T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry, Jeo-Yong Noh

English Theses & Dissertations

Throughout his career, T. S. Eliot developed his central poetic doctrine, the theory of poetic impersonality. Because of the importance of this theory to Eliot, a question is raised about its importance to his own poetry. Some recent critics, examining Eliot's poetry in the light of his memoirs and biographies, have found that Eliot was not governed by his theory. My thesis is designed to continue this investigation which so far has been done incompletely and randomly.

This investigation finds that Eliot suffered from a congenital double hernia, from his disastrous first marriage, and from general poor health. Furthermore, in …

The Priest In Gulliver's Travels, Mary Virginia Green Mathews

English Theses & Dissertations

Dr. Jonathan Swift was a priest of the Church of England. For a sermon, he wrote: "I look upon myself, in the capacity of Clergyman, to be appointed by providence for defending a post assigned me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can." He is ever-present in the role of priest in Gulliver's Travels. The Anglican Church is a State Church. For centuries it has taught profound truths through ritual and symbolism. Dr. Swift used Christian symbolism and political allegory in Gulliver's Travels, being fully aware that his contemporary readers would perceive and understand the underlying dimension …

Unifying Principles In The English Renaissance Sonnet Sequence, Deborah Fairfield Heatwole

English Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis, the structural and thematic development of the English sonnet sequence during the years of its greatest vogue is examined in detail. The sonnet itself, as the basic unit of the structure of a sequence, is analyzed, and the various characteristics of the sequences themselves are investigated. The sequences of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton are discussed in separate chapters.

The basic contention of this thesis is that, while many sonnet "cycles" are mere collections of discrete sonnets, the major sonnet writers of this period constructed sequences that are highly organized along stylistic, …

Samuel Becket's Use Of "Silence", Russell V. Watkins

English Theses & Dissertations

Silence is an important aspect of modern literature. No other living writer has made more adept use of silence in his fictional works than has Samuel Beckett. In this thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the M.A. degree in English, I provide an in-depth study of Beckett's use of silence both in his prose works and in his plays. Not only does this thesis provide an in-depth study of Beckett's use of silence, but it also provides a brief survey of how Beckets use of silence has gradually evolved in his fictional works, and comments on the significance of …

An Exploration Of The Roots Of The Feminist Heroine In The Lives And Selected Works Of Robert Browning And Thomas Hardy, Pamela L. Smith

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

The Use Of Analogy In The Learning Process In Piers The Plowman, Carol Eason Jones

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Fresh-Robed/ In Flesh: The Incarnation Theme In The Poetry Of C. S. Lewis, Margaret P. Anderson

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

John Galsworthy And The Theme Of Unhappy Marriage And Divorce: 1895-1911, June Moosbrugger

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Animal Imagery In The Comedies Of Ben Jonson And William Congreve, Carl Raymond Ludwigson

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Visual Imagery In The Shorter Fiction Of D. H. Lawrence, Archie Leland Simmons

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

The Expression Of Despair In Three Hardy Novels, Brenda J. Casey

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.