Browsing Department of English Language and Literature by Title
Now showing items 32-51 of 83
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“If to speak meant to repeat myself” : repetition in the later poetry of Louise Glück.
(, 2014-01-28)Louise Glück’s poetry is known for its affinity for change; each of Glück’s eleven poetic collections intentionally departs from her previous work, and Glück herself has written of her desire not to “repeat” herself. I ... -
Imagining membership and its obligations : the voice of John Ruskin in Wendell Berry's fiction.
(, 2012-11-29)This study explores the ways in which John Ruskin’s artistic and social criticism illuminate persuasive elements in Wendell Berry’s fiction, primarily his three major novels: A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber ... -
Inventing Dixie : literary adaptation and the Hollywood Southern.
(2010-10-08)Many people have never visited the American South, but everyone has "seen the movie." For nearly a century, American films have been the chief cultural arbiters of southern regional identity in the popular imagination. ... -
Jack Clemo's vocation to evangelical poetry and erotic marriage : an examination of his poems of personal tribute and critique.
(2011-01-05)Jack Clemo, whose dates are 1916-1994, calls to us from the margins: a working-class voice from deep within in the china clayworks of Cornwall, having been educated outside the conventional system, contending with deafness ... -
Journeying toward the beatific vision: the uses and abuses of Dante in Robert Elsmere.
(2007-12-04)In Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry Ward addresses the Christological concerns of Victorian England. Robert’s crisis of faith and resulting inability to maintain a belief in the divinity of Christ is juxtaposed against his ... -
Liturgy, ritual, and community in four plays by Brian Friel.
(, 2012-08-08)This thesis considers the function of ritual and liturgy within four plays by Irish playwright Brian Friel—Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964); Faith Healer (1979); Dancing at Lughnasa (1990); and Molly Sweeney (1994)—while ... -
MacDonald’s Antiphon : literary traditions and the "lost church" of English worship.
(, 2012-08-08)This dissertation examines the ways in which Victorian novelist and fantasist George MacDonald re-imagines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ideas about the religious function of literary traditions. Each chapter of this project ... -
"Man is made a mystery" : the evolution of Arthur Machen's religious thought.
(2010-10-08)Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh author now known almost exclusively for his late nineteenth-century weird horror tales such as The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895). The few Machen critics who have ... -
"A man may have wit, and yet put off his hat" censorship in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew fair and A tale of a tub.
(, 2013-09-24)Ben Jonson’s career gives us an interesting window into English Renaissance censorship, since a number of his plays were scrutinized, altered, or suppressed by the authorities. In response to the critical consensus that ... -
Manifestations of transcendence in twentieth-century American fiction : F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy.
(, 2014-01-28)At the beginning of the twentieth century, the secularization of American society poses a unique problem for fiction writers. As a number of scholars in various fields have established, humans desire and are oriented ... -
Manuduction and the Passion : the grammar of participation in selected seventeenth-century Good Friday lyric poems.
(2016-01-27)Drawing on the distinction between a “grammar of participation” and a “grammar of representation,” this study focuses on the Good Friday lyric poetry of George Herbert, Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Aemilia Lanyer. The ... -
Mark Twain's art of grotesque exaggeration.
(2010-10-08)This thesis uncovers truths and lies in the works of Mark Twain. It examines the way in which Twain's lies of exaggeration bring about truth. In his early newspaper writings, Twain developed a technique of exaggeration ... -
Medicine and medical authority in three nineteenth-century novels.
(, 2013-05-15)Three popular novels that span the nineteenth century—Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie—join then-contemporary conversations about medical reform. The novels ... -
Melville's unfolding selves : identity formation in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre.
(, 2013-05-15)Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre share striking parallels in form and content: each is narrated by an introspective yet adventurous narrator who encounters various triggers for his development, including authorities, mysterious ... -
Metanarrative suspense in four sensation novels.
(2011-01-05)This thesis explains how sensation novelists Ellen Wood, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, and M.E. Braddon use secondary narratives, or metanarratives, as defined by critic Gerard Genette, to create textual suspense. These ... -
Mimetic removal in early national American poetry.
(, 2012-11-29)Utilizing René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire, and looking at the historical removal of Native Americans, provides insight into a concept called mimetic removal. Poetry by Josias Lyndon Arnold, Philip Freneau, and ... -
The morality and marriage of taste and imagination in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction.
(, 2011-12-19)Throughout his writing, Nathaniel Hawthorne is interested in the power of art to bring about positive ethical change. In his tales, he questions the ability of aesthetic taste (as it was understood by Scottish Common Sense ... -
"More attachment to life & larger" : Orlando and Woolf’s theories of fiction.
(2009-04-01)While Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) is often considered a light, autobiographical fantasy, it in fact is the summation and execution of Woolf’s theories of fiction as expressed in her critical and non-fiction essays. ... -
"Mysterious wisdom won by toil" : the problem of labor in the poetry of W.B. Yeats.
(, 2013-09-16)In poems spanning his career, William Butler Yeats wrestled with the problem of human labor, which he saw as a source of suffering and despair. Though some poems depict the satisfaction of ideal labor, many others portray ... -
Navigating between two worlds : how portrayals of the Americas in eighteenth-century novels influenced the British identity.
(, 2011-09-14)In the early English novel British emigrants to the Americas occupied an ambivalent position within the empire; changed by the transatlantic ocean voyage and daily life in the colonies, colonists were distanced spatially ...