This thesis is comprised of two articles that examine sympathy, material culture, and ownership in Victorian literature. In the first article, I explore the figure of the heiress in the Victorian literary tradition, focusing on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. George Eliot marked the heiress figure...
In this thesis I argue that Alice Munro’s work takes part in an ongoing feminist discourse that examines alterations in male and female gender relations, as they have been represented in domestic fiction by women writers since the late nineteenth century. I analyze two short stories written by Munro: “Meneseteung,”...
The question of deep time has been widely debated in the field of American Literature, with scholar Wai Chee Dimock arguing that a deep time perspective puts the chronology of different nations against one another. However, this argument has not adequately addressed the issue of how deep time theories would...
This thesis explores the electrified female subject in two novels, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). As cultural touchstones, two literary works that prominently feature electricity -- Henry James' story "In the Cage" and Henry Adams' biography The Education of Henry Adams --...
This study used a multi-method approach to explore factors associated with high and low depression in a sample of rural mothers living in poverty. From a sample of 117 women with very high or very low CES-D depression scores, 40 cases were randomly selected for in-depth qualitative analysis. Qualitative comments...
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...