Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote in an age of reform efforts, and the progressive movement with which he was most familiar was Transcendentalism. However, he was not sympathetic with Emerson's idealism, a sentiment which comes out in his fiction in way of critique. Throughout Hawthorne's work there is an emphasis...
This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...
The purpose of this project is to draw a more explicit connection between Eudora Welty and the literary influence Emily Brönte had on her, revealing Welty as a writer who is more integrated into literary tradition and history than many readers and critics have acknowledged. Both writers rely heavily on...
Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers
implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities
involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both...
In 1965 Malcolm X said that we are living in a time of extremism. People in power have misused it now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods. And I,...
In This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and several of his short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald questions the importance of wealth as a factor in supporting happiness and fostering the American Dream on an individual basis. With these texts, Fitzgerald acknowledges that wealth is a factor and, simultaneously, a...
In their respective novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and
Passing (1929), both Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen utilize racial
passing, the process of a mixed-race individual living as "white," to
explore the relations between black and white people during early-twentieth century America. This thesis specifically argues that
Chesnutt...
Ralph Ellison died without ever completing his second novel. After his death, the executor of his literary estate, John F. Callahan, edited Ellison's work into a novel published under the title Juneteenth. This thesis examines the problems posed by Ellison's posthumously released text, especially the issues of authorial intent and...
Curricular models and teaching techniques that support college students as the primary authors of their writing-across-the-curriculum experiences remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses that research gap by investigating the use of a start-of-term writing self-assessment and goal-setting questionnaire (STQ) for upper-division undergraduates taking writing-intensive (WI) college courses in their majors....
This thesis compares and contrasts Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to explore how Mexican and American cultures perceive death. By examining the thoughts and actions of the young protagonists through the lens of the uncanny, it becomes obvious that they are searching for a history that has...