English Language and Literature, Department of
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Aging Ungracefully: Transgressive Femininity on the Eighteenth-Century Stage
This dissertation analyzes how negative conceptions of aging are weaponized against the bodies of female players in the eighteenth century, particularly when players are engaging in behaviour that society deems transgressive ... -
Spectral Objecthood: Biology, Assembly, and the Ghostly Body in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction
This dissertation examines two intersecting historical influences on Victorian supernatural fiction: commodity-driven cultures of object production and exchange, and discourses of nineteenth-century biological sciences. I ... -
The Hybrid Child Soldier Life Narrative: Testimony, Witnessing, and the Limits of Humanitarian Sentiment in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Testimonial literature bears witness to collective experiences of injustice and human rights violations, and it emphasizes the relationship between context and collective suffering. The trauma memoir, in contrast, focuses ... -
To Transport and Ravish: Material Manifestations of the Tropes of Transcendental Sublimity in Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Radcliffe, and Austen
Tropes that romanticize loss of control and violent violation, most frequently of a feminized soul or mind, are pervasive in the discourse arising from the Longinian tradition of transcendental sublime theory. The fundamental ... -
Writing the Other, Writing the Self: British Travelogues and Iranian Women’s Life Writing, 1890s-1920s
This dissertation examines the ways that Iranian women’s writing deployed and reshaped the life narrative form to suit the social milieu of early twentieth-century Iran. In terms of scope, this project examines British ... -
Reading Beyond Irony: Exploring the Post-secular “End” of Postmodernism in David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace’s self-described attempt to move past the “ends” of postmodernism has made for much scholarly fodder, but the criticism that has resulted focuses on Wallace’s supposed attempts to eschew irony while ... -
“Evolution Takes Love:” Tracing Some Themes of the Solarpunk Genre
This project aims at examining some of the core themes and concerns of Solarpunk, a newly emerging genre. Placing Solarpunk in contrast to one of its nearest literary predecessors, Cyberpunk, I work to unify the disparate ... -
Neo-Victorian Women: The Other Side(s) of Jane Eyre
With Charlotte Brontë’s bicentennial in 2016, neo-Victorian texts that seek to retell the narratives of Jane Eyre’s marginalized characters have emerged. These texts engage with Brontë’s most famous novel in ways that ... -
No Man is an Island: Interdependent Conceptions of Selfhood in Wyatt, Donne, and Milton
This doctoral dissertation examines interdependent conceptions of selfhood in the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), John Donne (1572-1631), and John Milton (1608-1674). While previous studies of selfhood in the ... -
Marginal Voices: Conflicted Dialogism and the Responsive Readers of Utopia, Beware the Cat, and Arcadia
This dissertation analyzes the construction of discursive communities amongst authors, editors, and readers of early modern prose fiction through language, material texts, and reader response. It analyzes Thomas More’s ... -
Page or Stage: Reading Shakespeare Comics as Performance
While previous scholarship concerning Shakespeare comics has considered their pedagogical function as teaching tools to make Shakespeare more accessible or their role in preserving Shakespeare’s place within the popular ... -
Robert Lowth's Hebraic Sublime and the "Ample Field of Poetry"
This dissertation is a study of Robert Lowth’s theorizing of the Hebraic sublime and its posterity in the second half of the eighteenth century. I begin with an exploration of Lowth’s description of the sublime across ... -
De Quincey and the Christian Experience: The Feeling of Struggle, Depravity, and Doubt
Abstract The essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) produced texts that span the literary periods the Romantic and Victorian and a major shift in the Church of England: he was an Evangelically educated youth and an ... -
Aspects of Intimacy: Authority and Integrity in the Modernist Novel
In the following thesis I strive to offer renewed ways of construing “one’s own,” authority, integrity, and intimacy as literary themes, and appropriate form, provisional tonality, and approximate, inexhaustible address ... -
.Compostmodernism: A Theory for the Infiltration of Digital and Internet Technologies in Twenty-First Century American Fiction
This dissertation introduces and defines .compostmodernism as a successor to postmodernism in the particular context of twenty-first century literature. Having roots in the postmodern literary era when the anxiety about ... -
The Romantic Insomnia of John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This dissertation seeks to reestablish insomnia as an essential category of consciousness in the Romantic period on both local and universal scales. First, I establish the medical and cultural history of the disorder in ... -
Adult Readers and the Growing "New Girl" in Major American Girls' Fiction, 1900-1920
The early twentieth century was a time of high-profile commentary in the U.S. regarding new roles for women, the convention-defying “New Woman,” and adolescence in the context of girls’ lives. Girls’ fiction included ... -
“A (Re)turn to the Archive: Reading the Lives and Works of Yvonne Vera and Dambudzo Marechera”
In this dissertation, I read the life and work of the Zimbabwean authors, Yvonne Vera (1964 – 2005) and Dambudzo Marechera (1952 – 1987), against a set of assumptions about the work of African life storytelling in late ... -
Authority, Communication and Discrimination in Agency Models
This thesis develops three theoretical frameworks to investigate questions relating to authority within both firms and governments as well as discrimination in the labor market. The first chapter develops a theoretical ... -
Richardson Among the Philosophers: Interiority, Perspective, and Formal Irony In the Fiction of Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson developed a narrative technique that recreates the epistemological and ontological conditions of selfhood theorized by empiricist philosophy; these conditions are the complex interplay between interior ...
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