Department of English Language and Literature
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Recent Submissions
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Mythic form and mythic function: Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods
(1992)Lord Dunsany, an Irish peer and prolific author of fantasy who lived from 1878 to 1957, wrote in the midst of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Compared to such contemporaries as Yeats and Synge, however, Dunsany has received ... -
“A beautiful, strong friendship to bless them both” : cross-gender friendship in The Woman in White and Little Women.
(2022-04-19)The marriage plot is intimately connected to the form of the nineteenth century novel, both giving shape to and being shaped by it. Its dominance, however, often precludes the representation of other crucial relationships ... -
"Lat us laughe and pleye” : humor structures in the Canterbury Tales.
(2022-04-12)This dissertation approaches the Canterbury Tales through the lens of humor theory, responding to a much-noted gap in existing scholarship by focusing primarily on the structures and mechanisms of humor in the text. In ... -
Love grows out of the ground : affection and place in Howards End and Hannah Coulter.
(2022-04-25)E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter both demonstrate that individuals who love local places also attend to the needs of their neighbors. In considering how these authors display the importance of ... -
Material guilt : the body as conscience in British fin-de-siécle Gothic novels.
(2022-05-02)This thesis examines two fin-de-siècle Gothic novellas—Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), their depictions of the physical and ... -
“To liberate ourselves and each other” : reading the female community in the fiction of Sylvia Plath, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison.
(2022-04-21)In this project, I analyze the portrayal of female community within the fiction of three American women writers: Sylvia Plath, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. I am specifically concerned with comparing the depiction of ... -
From thaumaturgy to dramaturgy : staging occult modernism.
(2021-11-02)Between 1890 and 1945, at least nine British and Irish dramatists—including W. B. Yeats, Charles Williams, and Aleister Crowley—were initiated into occult secret societies; yet scholarship has failed to acknowledge the ... -
Facilitating the transfer of writing knowledge among university writing center consultants.
(2021-07-29)Based on an IRB-approved qualitative study of 26 graduate and undergraduate writing consultants at the Baylor University Writing Center (UWC), this dissertation addresses the ways in which consultants draw on prior writing ... -
Apocalyptic care : the renewal of creation in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(2021-07-28)My dissertation seeks to correct the widespread misperception in Victorian literary studies and ecocriticism that belief in an embodied renewal of creation necessarily undermines a commitment to alleviating suffering now. ... -
Feeling real in fiction : a study of the phenomenological mimesis of givenness in the novel.
(2021-07-27)In this project, I offer an answer to the deceptively simple-seeming question: how do novels feal real to us? I argue that what makes any novel, whether realistic or fantastic, feel real is the way in which the reader’s ... -
Witness to woundedness in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey, and Derek Walcott.
(2021-07-27)In this dissertation I explore how Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey, and Derek Walcott poetically bear witness to historical wounds expressed on both personal and collective levels. I first focus on how in North (1975) ... -
“Take me by the hand” : affliction and liturgical participation in George Herbert’s The Temple.
(2021-07-09)The overall unity of George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) has been a topic of debate for nearly a century. A popular approach has been to identify series of poems based on shared themes or titles, including the five poems ... -
Vibrant materiality in modernist women's poetry.
(2021-05-21)This project combines thing theory with material culture studies to demonstrate how modernist women poets Elizabeth Bishop, H. D., and Marianne Moore reveal the vibrant materiality of the object world in their poetry and ... -
Authorized readers : scriptural mediation as spiritual formation in Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love.
(2021-05-21)Scholars have long recognized extensive interaction with vernacular biblical material in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. However, Love’s engagement with ... -
The life of Fannie Coddington Browning.
(1983)Fannie Coddington was born in New York on September 6, 1853. Her father, Thomas B. Coddington, was a wealthy metal merchant with locations in both New York and London. In 1868, Fannie moved with her family to London ... -
A stepwise approach to understanding nanomaterial transformations under situationally relevant conditions.
(2021-04-20)Given the increasing use of nanomaterials in various consumer products and industrial processes, it is of the utmost importance to better understand potential mechanisms of adverse effects to ensure human health and safety ... -
Welcome to the Paradise Motel.
(2021-05-06)Welcome to the Paradise Motel is a novelized retelling of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing set in present-day Florida. In the fictional small town of Paradise, Beatrice Bright is poised to become the editor-in-chief ... -
Holy Spirit, Holy Dove : an ecotheology of birds in Victorian poetics.
(2021-04-14)Current criticism is only just beginning to consider the ways that religious commitments shape ecological conscience and how those theologies might be worked out in literary forms. This work examines the problematic ... -
Descant.
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The specter of the American Civil War in British writing of the mid-nineteenth century.
(2020-07-21)In this project, I argue that in the years leading up to the American Civil War, America became Britain’s gothic double, making manifest some of Britain’s most keenly felt anxieties. The increasing tensions in America, ...
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