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Full-Text Articles in Cultural History

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont Sep 2022

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the beginning, people are introduced to many different attempts at engaging with various “cultures”, and of course, are born into their own. The extant literature of various fields in the social sciences have afforded us the realization that no one culture holds neither moral ground nor blueprint for how to be a culture, as our own culture is one of many, all a part of the world. Yet, because of the way our culture specifies how we are to engage and live, we tend towards the assumption that our culture has monopoly on the definition of culture. The following …


Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella Jun 2020

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …


“A Christian World Order:” Protestants, Democracy And Christian Aid To Germany, 1945-1961, Ky N. Woltering May 2018

“A Christian World Order:” Protestants, Democracy And Christian Aid To Germany, 1945-1961, Ky N. Woltering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between the German and American Protestantism from 1945-1961. I argue that in response to the threat of Nazism and communism, mainline ecumenical American Protestants aimed to create a universalist “Christian World Order” based on liberal democracy and Christian ethics. Only this new order, they argued, could supersede nationalist and materialist agendas and restore world peace. By rhetorically depicting Nazi and Communist "totalitarianism" as anti-Christian, a construction I refer to as the Christian-Totalitarian Dichotomy, these Protestants drove German conservatives away from Nazism and toward Western liberal democracy through association with Christianity. They accomplished this through two …


Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green Jun 2017

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …


Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse Jun 2017

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …


Jesuits In The Philippines: Politics And Missionary Work In The Colonial Setting, Francis B. Galasi Jan 2014

Jesuits In The Philippines: Politics And Missionary Work In The Colonial Setting, Francis B. Galasi

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.