Department of English Language and Literature
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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 ... -
Descant.
(1983-05) -
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, ... -
More than metaphor : Felding, Sterne, Austen, Browning and the rising novel as drama.
(2020-07-29)In his 1749 novel, Tom Jones, Henry Fielding quips that “Every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ” (Fielding 83). It is the contention of this dissertation that though we have ... -
'al hero iwilla' : violence and identity in Laȝamon’s Brut.
(2020-07-28)All scholarship on Laȝamon’s Brut recognizes that the poem is extremely violent, but most of the studies that interrogate violence or peace in the poem limit themselves to wartime violence. This project attempts to widen ... -
Mis(s)representation : female communities in mid-nineteenth century novels.
(2020-07-15)In the beginning of the 19th century in England, we can observe the emergence of more women into the public sphere: as workers, social activists, and artists. However, in novels written during the period, the majority of ... -
Reimagining the conte de fées : female fairy tales in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and their exploration of the world in-between.
(2020-07-14)Although the fairy tales by Charles Perrault and the Grimms are widely recognized today, hundreds of fairy tales written by women have been largely forgotten. This dissertation examines the impact of the contes de fées ... -
Milton's cryptic figures.
(2020-05-28)While many have examined Paradise Lost in terms of Milton’s use of rhetorical figures, and while several have considered how Milton’s Ramist logic text Artis Logicae may inform readings of his poetry and prose, no one yet ... -
Mandorla variations : poems.
(2020-05-21)This collection of poems is comprised of three thematically interrelated sections. The first section brings together poems that deal with a child’s first encounters with violence and evil, then transitions to grief, trauma ... -
Protection of the self, compassion toward the other : Thomas Hardy examined through folk theory of mind.
(2020-03-06)In this dissertation I am using a conceptual framework known as Folk Theory of Mind to shed new insights on Thomas Hardy’s five most well‐known novels: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of ...