In this project, I explore the use of monomania as a literary and rhetorical device that pathologizes deviance from certain norms—in this case, sexual and political norms— and allows for contradiction, dissonance, and reform. Using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark” and Edmund Clarence Stedman’s poem “How Old Brown Took...
To the chagrin of his American comrades, Washington Irving would spend much of his life in Europe as a writer and cross-cultural explorer, including a stay in the halls of the Alhambra. This experience led to the completion of Tales of the Alhambra (1832), a collection of sketches, anecdotes, and...
In the beginning of her travelogue, A Motor‐Flight Through France (1908), Edith Wharton declares that “the motor‐car has restored the romance of travel.” Many scholars have taken this statement as an index to the book’s themes. However, my reading closely examines particular moments of travel (specifically Wharton’s visits to Beauvais...
This thesis explores the artistic imperatives and internal struggles of women painters in two novels, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). I identify Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as painters who exhibit Impressionist strains, both in how they paint and how they...
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...
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 --...
At first glance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's wildly popular romantic fantasy novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist science fiction-utopian novel, Herland (1915), with its dystopian companion, With Her in Ourland (1916), may appear to have little in common. Tarzan celebrates the human connection with wild nature...
Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) has traditionally been dismissed
as a failed missive attempting to defend the controversial Salem Witch Trials. What is
missing from this characterization is an analysis of the degree to which the text, written
at a moment of crisis in Puritan culture, actually...
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...
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PeterBetjemann
This thesis is an exploration of literary representation of professors
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...
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PeterBetjemann
This thesis is arranged in three chapters which explore Wharton’s representations