Sixteenth century Elizabeth I of England has long been a figure of interest to Renaissance scholars, and their work largely focuses on how her gender impacted the power, politics, and culture of her day. Many have perceived her to be a heroine whose ingenuity and determination circumvented the limitations imposed...
This thesis uses both feminist and new historic theories to argue that the women's romance novels The Last September (1929) by Elizabeth Bowen and The Country Girl's Trilogy (1960, 1962, 1964) by Edna O'Brien are tragic bildungsroman that subvert and challenge the Irish patriarchal marriage expectations of their respective time...
"Watchmen: as a Work of Literature" asserts the premise that literature contains complexity and themes, as well as literary devices, and decided that is a graphic novel meets these requirements, it is also considered literature. The graphic novel Watchmen is analyzed like a literary text, and the narrative devices, literary...
This study traces British government policies with regard to Palestine from the time the British Expeditionary Forces under General Allenby invested Jerusalem in December 1917 to the imposition of the Mandate with Britain as the Mandatory power, which came into effect on July 22, 1922. The first chapter provides an...
The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by an enslaved Black woman, borrows heavily from other texts and genres to investigate what freedom looks like in the context of slavery. Crafts rewrites characters, scenes, and plots, adapting them to her setting and placing herself as a heroine within them. Scholars...
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Elizabeth Barstow, Committee Member, representing School of History, Philosophy, and
Religion
I always knew I was interested in the criminal justice system, evident from the hours I spent as a child binge watching Law & Order, Rizzoli and Isles, and Dateline when my parents weren’t home. I very nearly pursued criminal justice as a major, but ended up going a different...
My thesis examines a total of fourteen characters from The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Primarily, I have discovered an overwhelming pattern in these two works by Henry James; when characters make direct entrances--that is when they are not described or discussed in absentia by...
In this project, I explore the use of monomania as a literary and rhetorical device that pathologizes deviance from certain norms—in this case, sexual and political norms— and allows for contradiction, dissonance, and reform. Using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark” and Edmund Clarence Stedman’s poem “How Old Brown Took...
This thesis undertakes an examination of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as a layering of genres. A futuristic dystopia that imagines late twentieth-century America as having fallen into neo-Puritanism and totalitarianism following widespread infertility and violence, The Handmaid’s Tale invites contemplation of various forms of fundamentalism, radicalism, and...
In this thesis, I use modern concepts of feminism, gender performativity, and psychoanalysis as a means to understand female characters and authors of Renaissance England in a new way. In my first article, I analyze various texts and performances of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as texts of Renaissance female...