Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

"Not What They Have Chapter And Verse For:" On Judgments, Assumptions, And Expectations In Austen And Eliot, Piper Dutton

Departmental Honors Projects

The nineteenth century left lasting impacts on our contemporary world, from political and economic developments to social and philosophical ones, and this extends to literature in the development of the novel as a major form. Jane Austen and George Eliot played integral roles in this maturation of the novel, as well as what Elizabeth Sabiston calls “the emerging female text and voice,” and thus both they and their art form merit continued reading and discussion (3). Novels are tools of social norms and revolution, and in the nineteenth century functioned as tools of the author in teaching their morals, worldviews, …

Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Realism As Weaponry: Challenging Victorian Ideals Of Femininity In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret And Wilkie Collins' Armadale, Taylor Aalgaard

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Samuel Beckett's Theory Of Repetition, Kennedy Carpenter

Online Theses and Dissertations

The thesis explores playwright, Samuel Beckett, and his use of repetition within four of his plays. The way in which repetition is discussed and shown in his plays displays Beckett’s own theories about repetition such as the futility and meaningless of life that repetition brings about, how repetition causes stagnation, repetition is something people are both trapped in and willing go towards for comfort, and the only way to break out of repetition is by involving others in one’s life. After literary analysis of repetition in Beckett’s works, his theories are then applied to Beckett’s personal life as a director …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

Gambling: The Dialogue Of Excess In Lanval And The Franklin’S Tale, Fanrui Shao

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Marie de France’s Lanval and Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale are two medieval stories based on the Breton form of poetry called the lai. Both texts focus on rash actions, in particular thoughtless utterance, committed by virtuous foreigners, and the consequences that ensue. On the surface, the outsiders suffer xenophobia and the disfavor of the local patriarchy. But their true problem is the “excess” that they carry with them. Communities censor the circulation of this excess, i.e., all people, objects and relationships that either come from outside or deviate from local norms. Reading excess in these tales through the lens …

Amplifying Agency And Presence Of Native American Women In 21st Century Literature, Rachel Mitchell

Dissertations and Theses

This project analyzes Native American women's voices and agency through their presence in a variety of 21st-century literary genres. The texts illuminate a clear presence of Native American authors who actively write Native American female characters that are powerful and take agency over their bodies and stories. The examples of Native American female characters allow readers to see more realistic and relatable figures within literature. Chapter one focuses on the empowering Native American female protagonists in Larissa FastHorse’s What Would Crazy Horse Do? (2019) and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty (2020). The playwrights offer crucial insight into more empowering and complex …

“What We Ought To Say”: Debating The Morality Of Dishonesty And Equivocation In King Lear, Markelle Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

King Lear does not reveal the nature of honesty but provides a stage on which the morality of honesty can be debated. The play questions whether honesty is inherently moral at all, or if there are ways in which honesty can be considered harmful and even immoral. Other scholars have noted this as well in characters such as Edgar and Kent, but missing from the critical conversation are the ways in which Cordelia is the pillar of moral goodness in the play, and how her own paradoxical honesty and dishonesty were what enabled Lear to “see better” and ultimately, to …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

The Tragedy Of Caspian: C. S. Lewis And His Trauma, Chandler Hanton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis reconsiders C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a type of scriptotherapy that enabled Lewis to process and come to terms with a life full of serious and significant traumatic events. Trauma theory offers a vehicle for us to consider the alignments and connections between Lewis himself and his fictional creation, Caspian. In the specifics of both characterization and incident, Lewis mirrors the events and relationships that instilled and healed the trauma in his own life. In situating Caspian as his alter-ego, Lewis allowed his writing to function as a gender-specific therapeutic process for addressing the effects of his …

The Value Hierarchies Of J.R.R. Tolkien And His Legacy: A Reimagining Of Fantasy Fiction And The Propagation Of Colonial Racism, Alexander Richburg

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

J.R.R. Tolkien’s impact on modern fantasy fiction is remarkable. However, while some of the changes to the genre ushered in by Tolkien’s work are positive, other aspects of his legacy are more problematic. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are based on his colonial worldview. They are biographical in that Tolkien draws heavily from his life experience to tell his stories. The biographical influence manifests in a hierarchical representation of everything from trees and their ancestry to the elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs that populate his fiction. The hierarchies are value structures and the …

Beyond What's Missing: Silence In Women-Authored Novels From Wollstonecraft To Shelley, Kelli Wilhelm

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation responds to and intends to subvert binary interpretations of silence, particularly women’s silences, as representing either submission or resistance to oppressive institutions and societal expectations. I examine five women-authored novels from British Romanticism. The first half of this dissertation focuses on three radical works of the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House. The second half discusses two well-known early nineteenth-century novels, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Through examinations of these novels, I discuss how silence functions …

"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Beasts And Bestiality, Deities And Deification: Boethius’ The Consolation Of Philosophy In Milton's Comus, Bret Van Den Brink

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Milton’S Cardinal Directions Symbolism In Paradise Lost, Micah Gill

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Desperate, Exploited, And Abandoned: Laborers In "Life In The Iron-Mills" And Today, Danielle Durning

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 24, 2022, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.