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...
The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World...
The purpose of the study was to attempt to develop a methodological
approach which would tap the contribution of the literary
artist to the understanding of human behavior. It was assumed that
a content analysis of the social attitudes expressed in fiction would
yield data which was complimentary, if not...
Asynthesis & Act is a significant intervention into the discourse of the sublime. Through a deep investigation of the critical metaphysics of Immanuel Kant, the first chapter of this thesis puts forth the claim that the sublime is a radical experience that occasions a possibility for the individual to commit...
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...
Only within the last few years have literary critics
come to recognize in the short story a definite type,
one having its own individual characteristics and limitations.
It differs from the novel in a brevity not
merely accidental which prohibits the too extensive development of the three elements of the...
This thesis brings together gender and genre criticism to consider Virginia Woolf s memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," as a modern experiment in rewriting the traditions and conventions of Victorian autobiography. This thesis will demonstrate how Woolf specifically disrupts the conventions of linear
representations of time and the assumed...
Walt Whitman looked to the natural world, which he considered an original example of divine creation, for insights into the methods and patterns of the Creative Force; the poet then intuited connections between these divine natural patterns and human existence and spirituality. Convinced of the divinity of the human body,...