Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Uncovering Ophelia: The Reclamation Of Women's Madness Through Feminist Disability Studies, Amy Crawford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe proclaims that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," and this sentiment remains curiously persistent within the literary world. Artists have looked towards their beautiful muses for centuries as a source of inspiration and introspection, and the faces that these muses wear were often swooning, longing, or even dead. Nineteenth-century British aesthetics solidified a gendered ideology that remains prevalent to this day; in particular, one subculture of Victorian aesthetics that emerged during this period was the Cult of Ophelia: a collection of …

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 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: …

"She Had A Bok To Print, And It Was Her Own Case": Elizabeth Cellier's Malice Defeated As A Critical Contribution To 17th-Century Political Discourse And Postwar Pamphlet Culture, Serena Desai

Honors Theses

Born in London, England during the 1640s-- the peak of the English Civil War-- Elizabeth Cellier was no stranger to political and religious conflict. Rumors flooded the seventeenth-century newsstands: not only was King Charles II a Catholic-apologist who favored the tiny "Jesuitical" faction over the Protestant majority, but he refused to allow Parliament to check his monarchical power. By 1680, the legislature was actively attempting to disrupt his line of succession by preventing the heir presumptive, the Duke of York, from ascending the throne. Ignited by this Exclusion Crisis, several known Protestant "tricksters"--Thomas Dangerfield, William Bedloe, and Israel Tonge, and …

Gawain, Women, And The Hunts: How The Body Influences Human-Animal Relationships In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Meghan Gavis

The Criterion

In the narrative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, women and animals appear, on the surface, to function in a quintessential medieval sense — as physical objects to bolster Sir Gawain’s chivalric image. However, the dynamics between women, animals, and Gawain in this text challenge the human hierarchy presented by other medieval standards. By reading the ritualized hunts as devolving in honorable attention to the animal body and mapping their language onto the Lady’s temptations in Gawain’s bedroom, a feminine reclamation of the body appears. Though Gawain undercuts the Lady and Morgan by reducing them to physical presences, …

18th Century Theater And The Legitimacy Of The Lower Classes, Nina Masin-Moyer

The Criterion

18th century theater developed alongside the expanding role of the lower and middle classes. George Lillo’s working-class tragedy The London Merchant and John Gay’s comedic satire The Beggar’s Opera exemplify how both drama and comedy can bring awareness and legitimacy to the struggles of working-class people. The London Merchant uses cultural references and religious language to elevate the struggles of its titular merchant’s apprentice whereas The Beggar’s Opera uses language of honor and nobility to draw parallels between the criminal underground and high society, both in service of using the medium of theater to acknowledge the middle and lower classes’ …

Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor

The Criterion

For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …

“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 …

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 …

Femininity As Disability In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar., Shae Kirkus, Monika Shehi Herr

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Disability studies is often associated with the treatment of people with physical disabilities, which are defined as features of non-normative human bodies. However, analyzed through the lens of the classical idea of the ideal body, which was first and foremost male, femininity itself is also atypical and therefore confines women to the realm of being disabled.

Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar shows how the feminine is a disability in and of itself. As Plath’s main character and narrator, Esther Greenwood, spirals into her own madness, her condition is only worsened by societal reactions to her declining mental health. …

"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 …

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 …

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 …

Virginia Woolf And The Consolations Of Abstraction, Ella Murdock Gardner

Scripps Senior Theses

Woolf believed that there are “two spheres: the novel; and life,” and her “great difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds” (A Writer’s Diary 203, 208). But with this “great difficulty” comes great possibility; by pointing to the separation of these two spheres within and throughout her works, Woolf finds ways to create meaning from this border. Even as Woolf’s novels deal with the tragic restrictions of social conventions, the insurmountable barriers to communication and intimacy, the petty insignificance of human life and death within the context of an uncaring universe, the abstraction of both their …

Intimacy, Unity, And Shared Consciousness In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Meghan Rose Condas

Scripps Senior Theses

In the novels of Virginia Woolf, the difficulties of deep intimacy are troubled by the limitations of language and the fear of shame and vulnerability. What can characters express, and do words have the ability to appropriately describe their feelings of love and desire? Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves grapple with the penetrability of the mind and the potential for shared thought between characters. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf utilizes Clarissa and her relationship with men to highlight how eroticism and affection are inhibited by shame. To evade the anxieties of articulating romantic feelings and …

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.

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

Publications and Research

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.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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.

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.

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 …

Toward An Archaeology Of Manuscripts, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing …

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 …

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 …

Introduction: The Alabama Conference On Medieval & Renaissance Scottish Literature: Reframing And Mediation, Tricia A. Mcelroy, David Parkinson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the broader theme of the 16th International Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, held at the University of Alabama in 2021, and comments briefly on the four papers that follow.

Preface To Ssl 47.2, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the issue contents and briefly describes plans for forthcoming issues, and notes the recent deaths of two longtime SSL contributors, Henry L. Fulton (1935-2021) and Edward J. Cowan (1944-2022).