Department of English Language and Literature
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Recent Submissions
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Ordering desires : rhetoric and virtue in Milton's Paradise Lost.
(2018-05-23)Critics have long recognized that the writings of John Milton unite elements of biblical narrative with imaginative construction. However, despite Milton's explicit appreciation for Spenser, less critical attention has ... -
The search for true hospitality in the travel writing of Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain.
(2018-05-22)In their travel books, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain participated in a nineteenth-century debate about American hospitality. Having inherited a Puritan perspective regarding land and ... -
"What was repeated had weight" : ordinary rituals in the poetry of Donald Hall, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Louise Glück.
(2018-06-07)Twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry swells with the ordinary; poets chronicle mundane parts of daily life in their work, often describing these quotidian details with surprising reverence. While this fascination ... -
A regenerate science : paradigms for science and theology in recent American fiction.
(2018-07-27)In this dissertation, I examine four paradigms for integrating science and theology as seen in literary fiction. First, I offer a theoretical approach to integrating science and theology, show some recent anxieties about ... -
"Winter Words" : the poetry of old age in Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin.
(2018-06-20)In this dissertation I examine the poetry of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin in order to explore each poet’s response to later life in his work. Combining the insights of psychology and gerontology with close ... -
Divine and supernatural power in Old English and Old Saxon literature.
(2018-06-22)This project addresses the differences in the way Old English and Old Saxon poets represent the power of Jesus, the Saints, and Satan in their poetic adaptations of biblical and apocryphal materials. I build upon prior ... -
Women in community : the influence of sorority on Eudora Welty and Zelda Fitzgerald.
(2018-04-04)Eudora Welty’s carefully cultivated community of literary mentors and contemporaries has been well documented. Not only do these relationships garner Welty a wide array of literary comparisons, they show that she as a ... -
Stranged marriages : unconventional matrimony in western American fiction.
(2017-06-23)Marriage does more than unite individuals. It affirms existing social structures and promises to perpetuate them. Embedded within marital conventions are traces of a society’s assumptions regarding race, gender, class, ... -
“Still persuade us to rejoice” : witness, place, and gratitude in W.H. Auden and Derek Walcott’s poetry.
(2017-07-07)My dissertation considers W.H. Auden and Derek Walcott’s stereoscopic poetic witness. It focuses on movement, place, and gratitude in the Atlantic world, as both authors recurrently travel beyond national boundaries. Both ... -
Editing and translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the nineteenth century : the work of Sir Frederic Madden, Richard Morris, and Jessie L. Weston.
(2017-05-26)Editorial decisions and translation choices reveal the rhetorical aims of editors and translators. No edition or translation is entirely neutral, as editors and translators emphasize some information and ideas as they ... -
"I se and undirstonde" : vision, reason, and tragedy in Late Middle English literature.
(2017-04-19)When modern readers encounter sensory experiences in medieval literature, we often assume that they look, sound, smell, taste, and feel as they do today. However, while the physiological experience may be similar across ... -
Fall of the House of Atkinson : Gothic resonances between Graham Swift's Waterland and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
(2017-07-18)The voice of William Faulkner haunts the novels of Graham Swift. Following the example of writers like Faulkner, Swift adapts the Gothic tradition for narratological purposes in Waterland. This thesis treats how Tom Crick ... -
Blake’s aesthetic messianism : multimodal art as the rhetoric of transformation.
(2017-07-23)Through the creation of multimodal texts featuring coexisting visual and written art, William Blake embeds his principle of contrariety that dominates his Illuminated prophecies. Contrary forces held in opposition for Blake ... -
The symbol's end : reflections on the Coleridgean symbol's eschatological telos.
(2016-03-18)In his famous definition of the symbol, Coleridge employs three terms that draw the symbol’s ultimate, eschatological telos into relief – representation, participation, and conveyance. Through symbolic representation, ... -
Self-improvement and the American enlightenment in Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
(2016-03-23)The title of my dissertation alludes to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for moral perfection, a project encapsulating the specifically “American” Enlightenment values that shape improvement projects and conceptions of virtue in ... -
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 ... -
Politics in the Renaissance: kingship in the writings of Skelton, Sidney, Sackville, Norton, and Shakespeare.
(2016-05-02)In the first chapter of “Politics in the Renaissance: Kingship in the Writings of Skelton, Sidney, Sackville, Norton, and Shakespeare,” I argue that Skelton’s Speculum Principis shows Skelton’s belief that education was ... -
Coming to terms : spiritual autobiography, constitutive rhetoric, and religious identity in the composition classroom.
(2015-07-07)Building on current scholarship indicating the need for students' spiritual identities to be welcomed in the academy, this argument proposes using the reading and writing of spiritual autobiography to prompt students' ... -
“The darling child of speech” : Gerard Manley Hopkins’s pedagogy of poetic performance.
(2015-07-31)Gerard Manley Hopkins takes pains in his letters, sermons, journals, and notes to facilitate his readers’ experience of his poetry by advocating vocal performance. This study considers Hopkins’s thoughts on poetic performance ... -
“Copies of life, and models of conduct” : realism and female virtue in the novels of Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen.
(2015-07-23)In the field of British literature, it is well established that during the eighteenth century the novel came into being as a genre with distinct characteristics, namely, realism. It is also well established that the ...
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