The purpose of this study was to determine how the popular writer Wilkie Collins used dress and appearance to bring to light concerns about mental illness in his 1859-60 sensation novel The Woman in White. The method of narrative analysis was used to complete this study. Data sheets were developed...
This thesis examines the use of religious metaphor as it applies to food in two literary works by Diana Abu-Jaber. First, The Language of Baklava, a culinary memoir published in 2005, reveals aspects of cultural identity and memory through food and metaphor. Second, Abu-Jabers most recent novel, Birds of Paradise,...
In this thesis, I discuss the uses of two different forms of young adult novels for relaying messages about adolescence and femininity to adolescents from adult authors. I explore the traditional and organized quest narrative as written by Anne McCaffrey in her Harper Hall Trilogy with a young female hero....
A number of thinkers are becoming increasingly persuaded
that our anthropocentric view of nature is inadequate, that we
need a "new morality" with regard to the environment. In this
essay, I argue that an alternative to anthropocentricism is
available to us now-and has been since at least 1836. I look...
Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian...
Themes of authorship in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe highlight locations in the stories that expose the author's concerns with their responsibilities and contributions to society. In order to frame a discussion of authorship in Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe, it is essential to position Behn and Crusoe...
Gothic literary works are characterized as such by their ability to represent and evoke terror. The form this representation takes is varied; often terror originates in the atmospheric effects of settings, in the appearance of mysterious, supposedly supernatural phenomena, and, perhaps most significantly, in the behavior of villainous characters. Shakespearean...
Dashiell Hammett's fiction and detective pulps generally, offered the reader a chance to participate in vicarious power, by giving them a sense of the profession of detection, both in and out of the stories. It was the realism of the detective figure that allowed the audience to relate to him....
This paper defends a reading of Hennan Melville's Moby-Dick that elevates Ishmael's status from mere narrator of Ahab's tragedy to that of protagonist of his own story, a novel of epistemological seafaring. As a metaphysical quester, Ishmael provides the novel's only reliable and complex vision of the condition of man...
This thesis is a study of the changes in the cultural definition of the American Dream. I have chosen to use Superman comics, from 1938 to the present day, as litmus tests for how we have societally interpreted our ideas of “success” and the “American Way.” This work is primarily...