Clothing reinforces gender roles culturally assigned to men and women by emphasizing individuals? biological sex and encouraging them to behave in specific ways based on their sex. However, individuals can manipulate their clothing to challenge the gender roles assigned to them. The primary characters in Wilkie Collins?s The Woman in White and Virginia Woolf?s Orlando wear gender-deviant clothing to point out the constructed nature of gender and to assert their own identities independent of specific gender roles.

When the writers of the American Romantic period were eschewing the Enlightenment values of reason and objectivity in favor of subjective, individual human experience, Edgar Allan Poe clung to rationality and claimed that it is a vital tool in the creation of art and in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Critics, however, have long disputed whether Poe sincerely valued science and rationality or if he treated those concepts with irony and destabilized any knowledge that his characters acquire through rational, empirical truth seeking. This thesis seeks to explain how Enlightenment values figure in Poe?s vision of art and the cosmos and to dispute the postmodern interpretations that claim that Poe?s valorization of rationality and its products (namely science and technology) is ironic. To that end, I investigate, specifically, the connection of Poe?s positivistic (rather than phenomenological) philosophy to his theological vision. The successful application of rational principles by Poe?s narrators is consistently rendered in language and imagery suggestive of the divine, and it results in the spiritual enlightenment of the characters. Chapter one of this thesis examines Poe?s science fiction against the philosophical backdrop established by Eureka and ?Sonnet ? To Science? and argues that as the narrators apply rationality successfully, they come to resemble the God with whom they seek to commune. Chapter two reads Poe?s detective tales as allegories assigning cosmic significance to the concepts of reason, embodied by the God-like C. Auguste Dupin, and unreason, embodied by Dupin?s adversaries.

Scholars have traditionally regarded John Donne?s three Hymns as independent works of devotional or meditative verse. This study proposes that Donne?s Hymns are read properly as a tripartite sequence, one which addresses the poet?s desire for a spiritual union with Christ. Before that union may occur, Donne must ?tune the Instrument? of his soul by submitting his fallen will to the will of Christ. The Hymns are that ?tuning,? that labor of submission. As they unfold, the Hymns present the drama of Donne?s piety wrestling with his aggressive will, and his transformation from a self-serving rake dedicated to his ?Iland? of ?false mistresses? into a Christ-serving religious. Until the last line of the Hymns, Donne seems to have won spiritual security: he has prayed for release from his ?Iland,? he has ?embrace[d]? the body and blood of Christ, and he has confessed his ?sinne of feare,? despair. However, the final line of the Hymns, ?I have no more,? seems to unravel Donne?s spiritual work. His final perplexing, ambiguous line could indicate (among many other meanings) that he has fully transformed, or that he has abandoned the enterprise altogether. ?I have no more,? an enunciation of Donne?s fallen will, proves if anything that the work of the soul is never complete.

Close reading and syntactical analysis are used as the foundation of a method that, through the language of music, seeks to describe a means by which Stein?s and Loy?s poetry creates meaning. Passages are broken down into parts that function in much the same way as the musical elements rhythm, melody, and harmony. While the sound of the poetry is discussed to some degree, the primary focus of the thesis is to describe the ways in which components of the poetic language interact to create possibilities of meaning in which the effect is dependent upon musical relationship.

The conflict between essentialist and constructionist standpoints constitute the primary division between proponents of lesbian literary theory and queer theorists. While essentialists view identity as fixed and innate, constructionists consider identity to be the unstable effect of social conditioning. Lesbian theorists argue that the destabilization of all identity categories, accomplished by queer theory, serves to undermine the importance of ?lesbian? as a political identity. However, the success of queer theorists, such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in challenging the hegemonic power structures that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality should not be underestimated. For the purpose of this thesis, I intend to bridge lesbian studies and queer theory by focusing on what I perceive as their similar aims, primarily the act of reading between the lines of heterosexual narratives. In order to do so, I have chosen to explore Villette by Charlotte Brontë and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier from these two competing perspectives. I first examine Villette through the lens of lesbian theory in order to rethink binary oppositions, such as private/public and secrecy/disclosure, as they appear in the text to reveal the forbidden and thus transgressive expression of female same-sex desire or lesbianism and its subsequent repression to the metaphorical realm of the closet. I then use queer theory to deconstruct gender and sexuality in Rebecca in the hopes of demonstrating how representations of lesbian desire may serve to subvert naturalized, hegemonic definitions of both.

The research in this project examines the motives attributed in different cultural perspectives for the September 11th attack on the United States using Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory of Dramatism to examine speeches and articles that were published immediately following the attack. The dramatistic, or pentadic, analysis focuses on four different cultural perspectives: France as represented by Le Monde Diplomatique, Iran as represented by the Tehran Times, Israel as represented by the speeches of Ariel Sharon, and the United States as represented by the speeches of George W. Bush. In each perspective, five elements are defined and analyzed: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. The analysis is in hypertext. By doing the analysis in hypertext, one cultural perspective is not privileged over another. Thus the reader is able to see how one perspective describes the event, and can link either to another screen in that perspective or to a corresponding screen in another perspective. The analysis is preceded by a Critical Framework that explains key terms used in the analysis. A conclusion is also included to summarize findings in the analysis and to discuss implications arising from the analysis. The Conclusion shows how each perspective has a way of seeing and not seeing the event, and how we can learn from our observations.

The purpose of this essay is to indicate the Brechtian elements of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. Copenhagen, thus far, has been considered in relation to an emerging genre of the science play. This essay departs from other scholarship in that it shows the ways that Copenhagen works in the Brechtian mode, which is far from new. This essay offers an examination of Frayn's methodology in relation to Brecht's. Frayn's play is both episodic and non-cathartic. It also uses stage design and acting techniques to further the themes of the play. It uses the technique of integrating form and content. Furthermore, it employs the alienation technique. This essay also shows the ways in which the goals of Brechtian theatre were accomplished through Copenhagen. Frayn's play is didactic. It offers a moral and intends to create an actively engaged and critically aware audience. It teaches in the way that Brecht would have the theatre instruct. In addition, this essay offers evidence of accomplishing results. It notes the reactions from literary scholars, scientists, historians, and others.

Humanity has long been enamored by the notion of our own demise. Recent events, however, have altered our end-of-the-world imaginings. Suddenly we have the ability to split an atom and destroy whole cities, whole countries - making us gods capable of bringing about our own end. With this knowledge, a new breed of apocalyptic tale has emerged, the post-apocalyptic novel. This study aims to look at three such works and examine the ways in which various authors have, in the past sixty years, envisioned humanity's fate after the end of the world - focusing specifically on the concepts of social fluidity and change as they play out in these landscapes that are both sterile and living at the same time. Chapter one of this thesis deals with Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and examines the deterministic techno-primitive social cycle that Miller, a mere decade removed from the dropping of the A-bomb, saw playing out in a post-apocalyptic world. Chapter two looks at Cormac McCarthy's The Road and shows the "society of two", a father and son, who manage to maintain notions of family and society by carefully incorporating fragments of the old, rotting society into their schema of feral domesticity. Chapter three examines a short story, "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler, and discusses the paradoxically moving but stunted social landscape of Butler's silent, post-apocalyptic realm.

The purpose of this paper has been to explain the process by which I established the text of John Donne?s ?The Good Morrow.? In order to construct the text I examined the forty manuscripts and seven seventeenth-century editions that contain part or all of the poem, and I transcribed the poem from each source. Then I collated the transcriptions using a computer software program called the Donne Variorum Collation Program. I filiated the manuscripts based on verbal variants and, through investigation and comparison, created a schema of the poem?s transmissional history. I deduced that Donne made minor revisions to the original ?The Good Morrow,? and I conservatively emended the version of ?The Good Morrow? in the Dolau Cothi manuscript, the closest manuscript to Donne?s Lost Revised Holograph, and presented that copy-text for ?The Good Morrow.? I presented a modernized version of the text also. In addition to a detailed explanation of this process, I also included a complete listing of variants, the transmissional schema of the poem, and an explanation of how this work fits into the context of contemporary Donne studies and modern editorial practices.

This thesis examines how the history and development of capitalism affect the characters in Herman Melville?s Moby-Dick (1851), J.D. Salinger?s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Harry Crews?s Car (1972). In particular, it examines the ways in which the individual copes with the alienating economic pressures of the mid-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Relying on historical and sociological perspectives, this project reveals the degree to which these novels elucidate a marked tension between capitalism and democracy ? between private interests and the public trust. The introduction contextualizes the novels and provides a historical account of corporate capitalism?s development from the Civil War to the present. The subsequent chapters present analyses of the novels that are informed by history. They demonstrate that the alienation and existential dread experienced by Melville?s, Salinger?s, and Crews?s characters are exacerbated by the dominance of capitalism over social life. Finally, this project examines the ways in which these novels scrutinize systems of social organization and it finds that these novels encourage readers to evaluate systems of social organization for points of revision, reform, or potential improvement.