This thesis examines a range of generic influences in William Shakespeare's Richard II. By exploring the play's references to conflicting interpretations of history from different generic perspectives, I hope to advance a more nuanced reading of the play's dynamic staging of history. In Chapter One, I suggest that Richard II...
Over the past fourteen years since the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Americans of varied political persuasions have continually identified the day as a defining moment in the history of the nation, which caused a rupture in the cultural rhythm and psyche. This sensibility is...
Creative nonfiction is a genre replete with contradictions--the name itself shows that: nonfiction writing is true and factual, but creative writing is imaginative and inventive. Because of fundamental contradictions like this, there is no standardized or even most common definition of the genre. This creates confusion for both critics and...
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 his works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses
(1922), James Joyce demonstrates what he perceives to be the paralyzing effects of
those institutionalized religions that sit at the center of cultures. Drawing on Michel
Foucault's analysis of institutional dressage as well as his...
This thesis argues for significant correlations in the politics of representation of Chinatown and mother-daughter relationships in two literary texts by Maxine Hong Kingston and Fae Myenne Ng. The two novels do not follow traditional representations of Chinatown and provide critical representations of Chinatown and mother-daughter relationships. First, Kingston's The...
This thesis is an exploration of literary representation of professors, specificially in Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. I explicate the political unconscious of these texts by teasing out the tensions and ironies stemming from the conflict between the radical political consequences of the titular characters' scholarship...
This thesis is arranged in three chapters which explore Wharton’s representations of nature in three novels: The House of Mirth (1905), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and The Custom of the County (1913). This thesis contends that Wharton’s novels reveal changes in the interplay between representations of nature and...