My thesis is comprised of two articles, titled "Journeying Through (An)Other World: Examining the Role of Magic and Transformational Otherness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Magic, Muggles, and Mudbloods: Examining Magical Otherness in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series." The introduction frames the thematic, theoretical, and critical connections...
Novelist Toni Morrison is well-known for using the concept she calls rememory, or the process of actively revisiting and reconstructing a cultural past. Many critics agree that Morrison uses rememory in a strategic way, so that it provides
sturdy framework for a larger discussion of issues of race, class, and...
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 development and maintenance of a family achievement
theme was analyzed using two dramas: Long Day's Journey Into Night
by Eugene O'Neill and A Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Three
propositions were tested: 1) The development of a family achievement
theme involves a transaction between individual personality needs...
The present experiment examined children's memory for stereotypic
and non-stereotypic sex role content in their reading material.
Twenty-four male and twenty-four female fifth grade subjects read
two short stories, each depicting a male and female character who
exhibited an equal number of masculine and feminine traits and
behaviors. Results of...
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...
Ms. Miles is Missing—the beginning of a novel—is the story of a woman who, in her early thirties comes to realize that the life she is living is not the life she wants. She yearns for her lost childhood, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s death. Martha...
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...
This essay is an exploration of identity formation and expression. Humanity's identity formations create the orientations and languages with which we use to create our knowledge and understanding of the surrounding external environment (both social and physical) and our internal environment (psychological). This essay traces the sources of identity formation...
Violence and voice seem to be related. In this thesis I detail personal experiences with violence, and then put them into the context of research done about the ways in which violence affects the writing voice, as well as the speaking voice. Helene Cixous' writings about the writing voice and...
This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...
A prevalent belief during the Victorian age was that the world was divided between inferior beings governed by passion and superior reasoning beings. On the political level, this idea separated inferior passion-driven natives from superior reasoning Europeans. This division contributed to the maintenance and expansion of imperialist rule in distant...
Books and literature help children and young adults develop language, cognitive, and social skills. Additionally children's literature enables individuals to develop a deeper appreciation for their own, and others' cultures and histories. This thesis analyzes the young adult historical fiction series Dear America, published by Scholastic press, and examines how...
Representations of "madness" in literature written by women have been the focus of feminist studies in the western world since the Victorian Era. When Charlotte Gilman Perkins wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892, she "met with consternation of disapproving males ...[and] it was virtually ignored for thirty
years" (Kasmer 1)....
This thesis examines Latinx poetry in relation to the September 11th attacks and the reconfigurations of racial structures and the American empire that followed, most notably through the Department of Homeland Security and their agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE politically characterizes immigrants as anti-American to perpetuate stereotypes against...
This study examines the theme of power in Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy (1956/57). Contrasting my analysis with earlier review of the novel that emphasized a hegemonic patriarchal power, I argue that such power was constantly subverted by the dominated: family members of the patriarch. Using James C. Scott's notions...
Zora Neale Hurston was a Black American writer
during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. The
purpose of this study is to show that three of her four
novels form a protracted discussion of a particular
type of freedom which was of especial interest to
Hurston. The study seeks to...
Doris Lessing and Tsitsi Dangarembga write fiction set in Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia. Although Lessing grew up as a white settler and Dangarembga, a generation later, as part of the colonized African population, the women sometimes address similar issues. Both write of young girls trying to find a speaking...