Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a celebrated classic, and it is often the first favorite classic among young women who identify with the heroine and indulge in her fairy-tale romance with Edward Rochester. However, as Jane Eyre is the fairy tale of th . . .

This thesis incorporates, and attempts to reconcile, both sides of this debate. In doing so, it seeks to accomplish two purposes. First, it explores the possibility that The Scarlet Letter is a novel about sexual slavery for both men and women—on both . . .

Reading “The Clerk‟s Tale” can be a frustrating experience, for it seems to mean something, but—even barring modern sensibilities from the analysis—it seems confused or even self-contradictory in its conclusions. Is it the ideal marriage or not? A lit . . .

The textual, biographical and historical inquiry into Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre will center on the explicit and implicit Christianity of the novel and how it was possibly influenced by Charlotte Bronte's own unconventional religious perspecti . . .

A study of equivocation will yield that this practice commanded a vast amount of attention during the Renaissance, the time period of 1450-1600, in which Jesuitical equivocation was an ongoing phenomenon. The practice became part of the Renaissance er . . .

In this thesis, I seek to resolve the debate over Tiresias’s ability to unify The Waste Land by offering a new perspective—Tiresias as a Modernist Maypole. I propose that Tiresias’s inability to perfectly coalesce the different voices and themes withi . . .

Originally published in 1898 in serial form, The Turn of the Screw has undergone many incarnations. The short story was published again, complete with a preface, in Henry James’s New York Edition, 1907-1909. The version I have chosen to use, edited by . . .

To approach these concerns, this project seeks to provide an evaluation of the intellectual and personal relationship between authors Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke as viewed through the lens of personal correspondence. A review of selected letters d . . .

toogoodtobetrue is a fiction creative project containing a collection of queer short stories designed to examine the unifying and diverse experiences of a modern queer existence. Thematically, the collection seeks to create and explore the practical a . . .

Statement of Intent: The intent behind Children of Immigrants is to give a voice to people who are Latinx, Chicanx, or Mexican in a country which constantly shapes our narratives to benefit the Anglo-American narrative. By writing about the culture, r . . .

If Shakespeare “invented the human,” a claim made rather spectacularly by the critic Harold Bloom in a 1998 book, then the six British poets who comprised what was to become known as the Romantic Period perfected the mode. Shakespeare, in Bloom’s term . . .

This thesis, entitled “The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” asserts that transgenerational trauma takes place in the aftermath of the 1930-1961 reign of Dominican president Rafael Leonidas . . .

The text offers a barren landscape and desolate setting, governed by a violent zealot. We are presented with characters whose minds we cannot penetrate and an unresolved ending, with our only potential hero dying off just like the rest of them, except . . .

Barnes’s works are steeped in overt grief and rage, and all of her longer works can be directly traced back to traumatic events in her life. Antiphon and Ryder both are vicious retellings of her early family life. Themes of incest, rape and stolen vir . . .

Critics have been known to connect Fitzgerald’s personal life with the characters and events in Gatsby. Once a reader does research on Fitzgerald’s life, obvious connections can be made such as the attitudes and names that some of his characters share . . .

University and college students today are reading and writing more than ever before, but in spite of this they often do not consider themselves successful writers. This is because the material they read and respond to is mostly electronic, is constant . . .

In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” does Chaucer merely retell the story popularly known as “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell?” These two stories are essentially the same, except that Chaucer’s is more humorous. In order to argue against the claim . . .

Podloujny is a creative thesis in the form of a fiction novel. The thesis features the generational dynamics of a family experiencing a series of profound crises. The narrative form of Podloujny shifts perspectives between each family member, explorin . . .

Nobody’s Damn Business is a collection of autobiographical narratives that focus, primarily, on the author’s childhood. As a whole, the essays aim to convey the complicated nature of trauma in relation to familial relationships, while dealing with t . . .

This thesis project examines the role that narrative and memoir play in a writing classroom that is focused on growing and educating an entire student. I begin by examining critical expressivist and postpedagogical approaches to teaching writing; the . . .

My intent with Through the Valley was, in part, to provide representation in a genre I so rarely find for myself and for others who fall into similar identities as myself in terms of gender and sexuality. Historical fiction has always been a genre I h . . .

My thesis begins by interrogating the ways in which two texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe--Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its follow-up, Dred--construct Black supernatural ability as racially innate and divinely specific. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s notion of “Black . . .

Violence is a fundamental truth in the works of Cormac McCarthy. More than just violence for the sake of violence, McCarthy employs violence in a way that is productive within his works: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, No Country . . .

Throughout Toni Morrison’s novels, characters struggle to reclaim their own humanity in the face of domination and trauma. While countless scholars have remarked upon the themes of oppression and language, and several others upon the symbolism of natu . . .

The Hmong people are a group of Southeast Asians who came to America around 45 years ago. Because they are still so new and still such a small group, their stories have only began to come to light. As a group of becoming, the Hmong are now engaging in . . .

The literature and drama of the long eighteenth century is overpopulated with nuns, and they are all transgressors of patriarchal society in one way or another. These nuns are all vow-breakers, fornicators, and fallen women; whether they were ruined a . . .

In the play of Othello, Shakespeare perfectly explores the issue of racial tension that existed in the Elizabethan era. Othello, a loyal soldier and the protagonist of the play, appears as an outsider in Venice because of his dark skin; he is repeated . . .

This paper is dedicated to improving the classroom experience of students enrolled in writing courses one level below university level composition. Everyone's goal is persistence and completion. The question this paper seeks to answer is, what do inst . . .

Melancholy, enigmatic, haunting, spectral. These are words often used to describe W.G. Sebald’s prose style. Critics and lay readers who find themselves enmeshed in Sebald’s enchanting, dark web of words sometimes find his work difficult to categorize . . .

Feminist rhetoric often looks back in history to find instances of women’s voices in writings, but for my thesis, I argue the importance of looking at modern forms of feminist rhetoric in academia. I am specifically looking at what I term as Rouge Fem . . .

One of the biggest problems facing incoming freshmen in American colleges today is lack of preparation in appropriate reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. These abilities are necessary for success not only in college but also in the profess . . .

Shakespeare's poetic dramas mark the height in the evolution of a form that had begun with the dramatizations of the medieval mystery plays, and they have a power that has not been realized in the genre since. We may describe this power as the capacit . . .

In his essay "Technique as Discovery," Mark Schorer observes, "The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique." According to Schorer, "When we speak of technique ... we speak of nearly everything. . . . Techn . . .

Traditionally Shakespeare's Henry V has been seen as a panegyric celebrating King Henry V as the ideal monarch. Some critics acclaim Henry as the poet's finest conception of the statesman-king, a monarch who brought unity and peace to a disturbed Engl . . .

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One difficulty in preparing a lexicon for Finnegans Wake lies in coming to grips with the way Joyce fuses the basic English underlying the book with the seemingly endless number of words, fragments, and phrases from every conceivable language. For tho . . .

Herman Melville will surely be remembered as the author of that epic of whaling, Moby Dick, with its savage harpooneers, loyal mates, and the monomaniac Captain Ahab grimly pursuing the white whale. His accounts of trips to the South Seas (Typee, Omoo . . .

Little is known regarding the reliability of translations of epic poems such as the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. This is partly because of the time period in which the Beowulf manuscript was created, approximately 1000 A.D. For this manuscript, most Ang . . .

Spurred by an exciting thought, a woman rises from the river bank and hurriedly walks across the university lawn, only to be reverted, by the gaze of a man, to the gravel path. Returning to the designated pathway, the woman—the unnamed fictional narra . . .

The purpose of this thesis is two-fold – on the one hand translation and on the other analysis of Sappho’s influences and depictions in English art and literature. I will include own translations of selected fragments of Sappho of Lesbos taking into c . . .

The debate over the correct political interpretation of Dracula has been waged by critics for decades. It is unlikely to achieve a clear resolution in the near future. However, one aspect of the postcolonial question that has been largely ignored is t . . .

Milton was without a doubt the seventeenth century's most intelligent and prolific artist. He was also the most ambitious counting himself among the most learned and talented men of the era. Idealistic and ambitious he appeared to have personified eve . . .

The Introduction to this thesis defines a number of key terms and concepts related to the study of paratexts in historiographic metafiction. The chapters that follow describe how paratextual forms operate within specific historiographic metafictional . . .

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Ever-Becoming Whitman: mythic perceptions cast long showers

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This thesis consists of four short stories by the author.

This thesis consists of a collection of poetry and two works of nonfiction by the author.

This thesis consists chiefly of poems by the author.

This thesis is a collection of six short stories by the author.

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In The Merchant of Venice Shylock comes to understand his place in Christian society. The depth and growth of his consciousness make him more than merely a tragic figure, a comic butt, or a one-dimensional morality character, as many critics have . . .

Individualization in reading instruction has evolved from the realization that children differ widely in interests, learning capacities, and motives for reading. Such differ- ences have aroused the need for teachers to provide more adequately . . .

In the afterword to The Four-Gated City, fifth and final volume of the series, Doris Lessing calls the Children of Violence a Bildungsroman. Traditionally, this genre depicts the intellectual and psychological development of an individual from inn . . .

In the more than three centuries since its writing, Coriolanus, Shakespeare's last tragedy, written at the height of his maturity, has received considerably less recognition than it deserves. Readers, audiences, and critics have turned primarily t . . .

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In this thesis, I explore philosophical influences underlying various portrayals of werewolves in language, religious texts, law, and myth, discussing depictions from the earliest in antiquity—the first in The Epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Mesopotamia . . .

For the bulk of my project, I will be using the Oxford English Dictionary to single out words recorded for the first time in three plays (Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest). The tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear, were chosen for their high levels of em . . .

There seems to be a general resistance to humanizing or analyzing the motivations and inner lives of these “evil” women. In my opinion, if Shakespeare wrote such a fully developed character in Cordelia, who only appears alive in four scenes of the pla . . .

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This thesis examines the ways Nigerian-born British novelist Buchi Emecheta incorporates the strategies of post-colonial and feminist theory. The author explores where and how she satisfies the feminist demands of informing and expanding post-coloni . . .

"The Crystal Cabinet," "The Golden Net," and particu- larly The Mental Traveller" have long intrigued students of Blake, but only in the last few years have scholars begun to explore these poems in depth. The value of studying these shorter poem . . .

Using feminist psychoanalytic and rhetorical theory, this thesis reclaims and reimagines how female relationships and voices are represented in literature by focusing on the ancient myth of Persephone and Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and t . . .

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About Gertrude Stein there has been much controversy, little competent criticism, but many prejudiced utterances. There has been extravagant praise and damaging accusation. Was she a literary fraud? A clinical case of megalomania? Just a rich and garr . . .

Contemporary Young Adult Dystopias and Utopias alike are now a part of our popular culture, and in effect, have begun to lose credibility in the academic setting, especially within the secondary classroom. Yet, I argue, YA dystopian literature is an . . .

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This thesis consists of creative fiction by the author.

On December 30, 2004, my father murdered my mother. The wound left by my mother’s absence has never fully healed. This work is my attempt to describe what it felt like to lose everything in one day, to try and find my place in a new family, and to mov . . .