Browsing Department of English Literature Graduate Theses by Author "English"

Agape and Emancipation: The Common Good in Recent Postcolonial Fiction

McIndoe, Holly (2015-05-26)

In this dissertation, I argue that there is a tendency in postcolonial studies to equate injustice with a lack of knowledge. The political task for postcolonial studies is then framed in pedagogical terms: to provide the ...

Amorous Ex/Incursions: Love in Writings of Badiou, Weil, Fromm, and Barthes

DeChavez, Jeremy (2011-08-09)

My dissertation explores the enabling contributions of love to the practice of ethico-political and cultural critique. Engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Roland Barthes, I examine love ...

Animals, Animality, and Violence: Reading Across Species in J. M. Coetzee's Writing

Denike, Jaime (2013-06-12)

This thesis examines the writings of Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee in order to explore pressing issues that have emerged in literary, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to animal studies. These include animals as ...

Author of Prodigies: Representing the Female Letter-Writer in English Renaissance Literature

Shea, Colleen (2008-12-16)

This dissertation seeks to show that the figure of the female letter-writer in English Renaissance literature, rather than reflecting the culture’s desire to contain, undermine, or destroy the notion of women’s textual ...

The Author's Farce: Satiric Agency, Authority, and the Performance of Eighteenth-Century Satire on Film and the Stage

Oryschak, Breanne (2016-01-18)

This dissertation investigates how dramatic performance affects satire, its forms of authorisation, adaptation, and interpretation. Focusing on Restoration and eighteenth-century dramatic satires and film adaptations of ...

The Beloved and Other Monsters: Biopolitics and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Literature

Blackbourn, A. Veronica (2015-12-16)

This dissertation examines the use of inter-racial relationships as emblems of political reconciliation in South African fiction from and about the transition from apartheid to democracy. Positive representations of the ...

"The Black Imprint of Sandals in White Mosaic Floors": H.D.'s Mythomystical Poetics

Hetram, Adriana C. (2011-09-01)

My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle ...

Breaking New Ground: The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920)

Quirk, Linda Elizabeth (2011-10-15)

In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. ...

British Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity

Tambar, Jaspreet S. (2016-09-28)

This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to ...

Bystander Narratives: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee and the Holocaust

Smith, Craig Mitchell (2011-09-30)

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust ...

"The Camera Cannot Lie": Photography and the Pacific Non-Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (1888-1894)

Manfredi, Carla (2014-04-07)

This archivally-based dissertation re-contextualizes Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Pacific photographic collection (1888-1894), situating it in relation to his incomplete and posthumously published anthropological study ...

Caribbean Immigrants in Relationship: Tracing the Transnational Connections between Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon

Singh, Kris (2016-03-30)

Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon are similarly positioned in the literary field and offer overlapping perspectives in their depictions of Caribbean immigrants, yet for the most part, there has been no in-depth comparison ...

The Characterization of Monstrous Femininity in the Testament of Cresseid and the Awnytrs off Arthure

Hansen, Agatha (2009-09-02)

This dissertation uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the similar portrayals of monstrous femininity in two Middle English poems, Robert Henryson’s the Testament of Cresseid and the Awntyrs off Arthure. In the Testament, ...

Colonial Anxiety and Primitivism in Modernist Fiction: Woolf, Freud, Forster, Stein

Kalkhove, Marieke (2013-03-13)

From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as ...

Compassion and its Contiguities: Witness Poetry and Metonymic Reponse

Tracy, Dale (2013-06-18)

I read witness poetry as a model of response to suffering. Compassion is feeling together with another. Compassion is, then, opposed to empathy’s feeling as another. Compassion can be better understood through the witness ...

Cynicism in the Fin de Siècle

Dearle, Robert (2010-05-17)

Cynicism is one of the most frequently used, but most polysemic, words in the modern lexicon. This dissertation attempts to shed some light on a dark subject by tracing the idea of cynicism from the late eighteenth century ...

Dames of Distress: Female Violence and Revised Socio-Cultural Discourses in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Kapuscinski, Kiley (2009-11-18)

This study examines the figure of the violent woman in Atwood’s fiction as a productive starting point for the re-evaluation of various socio-cultural debates. Emerging from Atwood’s conviction that art, in its various ...

Death Threat Letters: Allegories of American Authorship in the Age of Terrorism

McKay, Jonathan Ross (2016-06-22)

This dissertation examines novels that use terrorism to allegorize the threatened position of the literary author in contemporary culture. Allegory is a term that has been differently understood over time, but which has ...

The Decorative Imagination: American Modernist Poetry and the Art of Adornment

Oliver, Elisabeth

Focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Mina Loy, this thesis argues that late nineteenth-century decorative art had a profound influence on American modernist poetry. Despite the fact that many modernist ...

Defoe, Dissent, and Typology

McKendry, Andrew (2013-08-02)

This dissertation investigates how Dissenting writers, among them Samuel Annesley and Richard Baxter, influenced the religious thought of Daniel Defoe. Though some critics, most notably G. A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter, have ...