Department of English Language and Literature
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Philosophical inheritances: Nietzsche and the twentieth century American novel.
(2019-04-23)In this dissertation, I argue for the influence of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy on four significant writers of twentieth century American literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Richard ... -
Lamentation in the late plays of Shakespeare.
(2019-04-16)This thesis will consider portrayals of lamentation and weeping in The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Cymbeline. These late plays of Shakespeare identify and assess various motivations behind affective response. In The ... -
A holy stream and a strange marriage : environmental and sacramental healing in Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow.
(2019-04-11)Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, dramatizes both ecological and theological realities, and is invested in the fields of blue-ecocriticism, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and ecotheology. I consider the images ... -
"Someone's soul is at stake" : navigating difficult belief in writing center conferences.
(2019-04-04)This study investigates the responses of writing center consultants to tutorials in which client writing expresses difficult or offensive belief. The primary aim of this interpretive case study is gaining an understanding ... -
“Everything’s a story” : orphanhood, trauma, and narrative in twentieth-century fiction.
(2019-03-29)Orphaned characters abound in twentieth-century fiction, but critical studies of the significance of orphanhood are few and far between. Moreover, those that do exist fail to recognize the traumatic import of the orphaned ... -
Writers of wrongs : discovering social ills through the gothic fiction of Toni Morrison and Stephen King.
(2019-03-20)Toni Morrison and Stephen King are both prolific writers, though scholars do not often favor King’s work with critical study. Perhaps this is a mistake. Both Morrison and King write in the tradition of the American gothic, ... -
Your own personal Jesus : individualized religious sectarianism in the mid-victorian novel.
(2018-11-16)This Dissertation explores four novels from the mid-nineteenth century, two of which are by canonical authors, Charles Dickens and George Eliot; two not as well known, Charles Kingsley and Charlotte Yonge. The nineteenth ... -
"I can't go on, I'll go on" : narrative consolation in the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
(2018-11-13)This dissertation examines the role of narrative consolation in the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Specifically, I argue that narrative holds immense consolatory power for Joyce and Beckett. Despite the clear ... -
If I see, let me see double.
(2018-11-27)If I See, Let Me See Double is comprised of four essays, including one critical introduction and three creative nonfiction pieces, which consider the concept of negative space. The introduction places the theme of negative ... -
Towards a midwestern gothic.
(2018-11-12)The Midwest has been an absent center of literary studies for as long as people have passed it over on their way to somewhere else. While the region has produced a litany of writers and stories central to the canon of ... -
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 ...
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