W&L Dept. of English
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This collection contains the scholarship of students in the W&L Dept. of English.
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Recent Submissions
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The Author Is Legion: Transformative Work and Fan Fiction as a Literary Meta-Genre (thesis)
Transformative work must be understood first and foremost as a style and meta-genre defined by its relationships. The relationship between texts, with changes and variations from one incarnation to the next. The relationship ... -
Shakespeare and Succession Crisis: Shakespeare's Reimagining of Elizabeth I's Legacy in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and King Lear (thesis)
If Shakespeare's works can tell us anything, it is that the Elizabethan time was one filled with as much uncertainty as our own. There was no surety that we would all remember Elizabeth as the greatest queen in English ... -
"Passing Like Cherry Blossoms:" Silence in Chinese-American Literature (thesis)
This thesis was born out of the desire to see myself, a Chinese-American person, represented in contemporary American fiction. In the publishing industry today, books written by and about people of minority racial or ethnic ... -
Reading Like a Mother: A New Approach to the Griselda Tale (thesis)
I have traced the evolution of the Griselda tale throughout four texts and two images, arguing throughout that motherhood lies at its center, no matter how desperate her translators are to sideline it. . . . In the ... -
"Drawing is an act of empathy": From Poverty to Healing in Nora Krug's Belonging and Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons
If a hybrid were a plant, it would be a grafted tree, where blossoms from old wounds grow together to produce an entirely new fruit (Antonetta xxiv, xxvi, xxxiii). This is a visual representation of the healing process ... -
Gorgeous Healing: Liminality in Memoir and Ocean Vuong's "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" (thesis)
Vuong's book is both a textbook and a roadmap to this project. In the text, Vuong's protagonist, Little Dog, similarly strives to understand how to live and love in a world that has been historically violent toward him and ... -
"THE LAST PLACE THEY THOUGHT OF": Spatial Reconfigurations in 19th Century African American Literature (thesis)
A holistic understanding of the United States' cultural and political identities -- before, after, but especially during the 19th century -- is largely a function of how the nation relates to its spatial landscape. Not ... -
Finding the Female Detective: How Interwar Female Authors Created & Sustained the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (thesis)
The novel, apart from telling a story, has many responsibilities. One of these responsibilities, and the one most relevant to this project, is that of conveying a particular worldview. Regardless of whether the worldview ... -
"To muddy death": The Link Between Sexual Deviancy and Suicide in Hamlet, The Waves, and Looking for Alaska
At first glance, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Virginia Woolf's The Waves do not seem texts ripe for a new, deep examination of their themes. Both stories, penned by two geniuses from two different eras, have been poked and ... -
"Wound That Can't Be Bandaged": The Imperfect Translation of Women's Suffering in The Tale of Kieu and The Sorrow of War
In my thesis, I compare and contrast the two figures of Kieu and Phong to divulge the unchanging patriarchal oppression experienced by women in Vietnam in the course of one and a half centuries despite a radical change of ... -
On the Essay: A Gendered Evolution of Narrative Presence in the Personal Essay
The unassuming power behind the essay is what makes modern attempts so crucial. Overt forms, obvious attempts lend themselves to criticism and censorship. These are the violences that are often silenced by the oppressor, ... -
Recovering Women's Canonical Voices: Sixteenth-Century Women Psalmists' Shaping of English Literature (thesis)
Through an analysis of the Biblical Psalter, the poetry of Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Vaughan Locke, and Elizabeth Melville as well as sixteenth-century perception of these poets and the Psalms, this thesis explores the ... -
Queer(y)ing Colonialism: Decolonization and Queer Interventions in the Novels of Caribbean Women (thesis)
What follows, then, is the analysis of queer positionalities and decolonized yearning in the novels of three Caribbean women: Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, and Shani Mootoo. . . . The conclusion, "Embracing the Strange" ... -
I Don't Know How to Tell You (thesis)
My own project is multimedia, making use of prose, poetry, prose poetry, handwriting, images, and more. As it developed, I pushed myself to experiment, to discover the many ways a story can be told. It begins with general ... -
The Deeper Magic: Christ-like Figures and Faith in the Fantasy of J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien (thesis)
Ultimately, my intention in exploring the Christ-like figures and nostalgically idyllic communities of faith in both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings can be distilled into three parts. My first objective is to suggest ... -
"Where Only Machine-Gun Fire Brings Us Together": Exploring Camaraderie and Human Connection in War Poetry (thesis)
Camaraderie helps redeem and blunt the horrors of war for some soldiers in some wars. While noting the value of camaraderie, this thesis examines in which wars camaraderie and connection characterize the war experience and ... -
'A Transitory Possession': Economics of A Streetcar Named Desire (thesis)
My most specific goal with this research is to offer a new angle for analyzing one of America's greatest plays. I also have a more general goal: to introduce readers to the methodology and benefits of economic criticism. ... -
"Men have power": A Feminist Reclamation of Marianne Moore's "Marriage" (thesis)
I began and ended my research with "Marriage" itself in the same way that this thesis begins and ends with the poem itself. From here I naturally moved to understand Marianne Moore, hoping that through knowing Moore's ... -
Raising the Woman Question: Duras's Trans*gender Child
In Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old white girl pursues a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese man. . . . Like most scholars, both Schuster and Hewitt presuppose that the ... -
A Tale of Three Butterflies: Etymology and Entomology in Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" (thesis)
To locate the butterfly's importance in Coriolanus, I will trace the butterfly's heritage from two perspectives - first as a word in English, and secondly as a literary symbol in the cultural tradition spanning Hebrew, ...