Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes

Theses and Dissertations

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …

“The Heighe Worthynesse Of Love”: Visions Of Perception, Convention, And Contradiction In Chaucer’S Troilus And Criseyde, John J. Hertz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three images associated with the manuscripts and early printed editions of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which I have dubbed “Prostrate Troilus,” “Pandarus as Messenger,” and “Criseyde in the Garden.” These images are artifacts of contemporary textual interpretation that “read” Chaucer’s text and the tale of Troilus. They each illustrate the way in which Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde “read” images, gestures, symbols, and speeches within the narrative, and they show how these characters are constrained and influenced by their individual primary modes of perception. Troilus reads but does not analyze. Pandarus actively reads his own meanings into messages. …

The Odcombian Climber: How Thomas Coryate Employed Media For Social Advantage, Julian T. Neuhauser

Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), the writer, traveler and social climber, embraced various media in order to achieve social gains. This thesis surveys the content and materiality of writings by and about Coryate to investigate the nature of his sociability. The study begins by drawing on John Hoskyns’ (1566–1638) poem, “Convivium philosophicum,” to explore how Coryate used oral and social performance to create a unique form of sociability through which mockery is transmuted into praise. This thesis then addresses how Coryate’s sociability factored into the conflation of aspects of manuscript and print media in the production of the “Panegyricke Verses” that were …

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …

The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola

Theses and Dissertations

A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.

Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the utility of the novels, short stories, critical writing, and generically indistinct work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Ligotti in developing a critique of the contemporary manifestations of liberal humanist social, economic, and political subjectivities. To this end, the concurrence of formal fragmentation and sublime aesthetics in early Gothic fiction models the manner in which narrative structures can appropriate structural tropes of dominant institutions, critically reflecting ideological fracture. Read according to the assemblative approach outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, these authors serve as a productive and incisive response to the hegemony of capitalist territorialization with …

The Transition From The Psychical To The Psychological: An Examination Of William James’ Influence On Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw”, Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will show that, in its original form, “The Turn of the Screw” acted as a monument to the intellectual unity shared between Henry James and his brother William. Through evaluating James’ biography, memoirs, and letters with William, this thesis will illustrate the subtle collaborative inspirations that initially helped James write the first twelve-part serial edition of “The Turn of the Screw” for Collier’s Weekly, which ran from January 27, 1898 until April 16, 1898. I will also demonstrate the effect of William’s philosophy and his death on the revisions James’ made to his story as published in the …

Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths

Theses and Dissertations

Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton have been ceaselessly studied in isolation to one another, but undergraduate students must begin to study them in conjunction. Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” serves as social critique of medieval misogynist practices that allows students to study social practices as they study his language. Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost reflects the religious and social instability that marked the Interregnum of the English Civil War, allowing Eve to embody the culture’s desire to return to a virtuous Church. Students will learn to examine the space of the authorial paradox, primarily the questions of authority that …

G.A.M.E.: A Hypermedia Edition Of James Mcneill Whistler’S The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, Amy Colombo

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were …

Constructing The Christian: Agency And Emulation In Old English Poetry, Jennifer Ross

Theses and Dissertations

Old English religious verse - born out of a productive fusion between pre-existing Germanic ideals and Christian value-systems brought to England at the end of the sixth century - grapples energetically with the question of how people ought to live morally upright lives pleasing to God. In Beowulf, Judith, Juliana, and The Dream of the Rood, a model for the believer/God relationship is constructed from a common pattern of the Germanic thane/lord relationship, but, like garments cut from the same cloth by different tailors, each poem crafts its subject differently. Still, each is constructed around a …

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …

Victorians And The Underground, Melissa Mcdaniel

Theses and Dissertations

The Victorian Age created a revolution in technology that defined the age and has fostered its social ideologies. In every civilization, the technologies of the time reflect the social issues of the culture. For instance, the development of the printing press in the fifteenth-century revealed desires for higher literacy rates; the invention of the cotton gin incited the social injustices of American slavery; the progress of the Internet embodies this century's attachment to fast-food, fast-money, and fast-information. Likewise, in the Victorian Age, the invention of underground tunnels exposed some important social issues which developed in the period. Just as the …

Formulating Fantasies: Marriage In Victorian England And George Eliot's Middlemarch, Liza Welch Barnes

Theses and Dissertations

One of the oldest states of existence known to humanity, marriage is a traditional state of being, uniting one man and one woman to love, honor, cherish, and protect each other for the rest of their lives. In Victorian England, however, many men and women questioned traditional expectations concerning marriage. Society's norms in Britain dictated that marriage was the ultimate goal in the nineteenth century, and, according to Barbara Weiss, "there has perhaps never been an age (or a literature) as relentlessly pro marriage as the Victorian period" (67).

However, many issues concerning marriage disturbed some freer-thinking Victorians, including novelist …