The following is a collection of six short stories. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2003. / March 26, 2003. / Short Stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Doug Fowler, Committee Member.

Shimming the Glass House is a collection of poems, many of which address what the title suggests: an attempt to balance what is, by nature, fragile. Whether dealing with personal relationships, or mortality, or the quirky ways we try to shape our lives, these poems, written in both free verse and in formal traditions, suggest that language, reaching out through words, can be a trans formative process—a way to understand and perhaps even support a world continually off kilter. The poems collected here explore what it means to accept our tenuous conditions; to live with the recognition that maybe our desire alone has to be good enough, unquenchable and mysterious though it is. Maybe desire, as expressed through language, is all we really have to balance, what remains essentially, a glass house. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2003. / April 4, 2003. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Brenda Cappuccio, Outside Committee Member; Janet Burroway, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

This text focuses on Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, with special emphasis upon the latter writer. Both Johnston and Wharton were actively writing during the same period, although in different parts of the world. Wharton spent most of her professional career writing from Europe, particularly France, and carried her Old New York heritage with her until she died. With the exception of short periods in New York, Johnston remained close to her childhood home near Warm Springs, Virginia, and considered herself very much a Southerner. While they shared a common goal in most of their writings—that of influencing their audience and generating change—their methodology differed radically. In essence, they operated from opposite ends of the writing spectrum. The majority of Wharton's texts fall under what we today classify as literary fiction, but Johnston's writings crossed a number of genres, including but certainly not limited to historical romance, historical adventure, and historical fiction. A large percentage of her writings fall within the scope of sentimentalism and romance literature, genres Wharton typically made a point of avoiding. This text provides a critical discussion of the two women's war writings, an overview of their work, and an in-depth analysis of Edith Wharton's "Writing a War Story" and Mary Johnston's The Wanderers. It considers the two women as they attempted to influence the world around them via their writing, and how their respective identities are reflected in their texts. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2006. / March 28, 2006. / Virginia Women Writers, The Wanderers, Cease Firing, The Long Roll, The Refugees, French Ways And Their Meaning, A Son At The Front, The Marne, Fighting France, Book Of The Homeless, Edith Wharton, Mary Johnston / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis D. Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; Elna C. Green, Outside Committee Member; Anne E. Rowe, Committee Member; W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Committee Member.

This thesis will show the degree of influence that the philosophies of John Locke had upon three subsequent eighteenth century writers: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I contend that while aspects of Locke's ideology can be found in the major fiction of all three writers, his ideas are modified by each author to mesh with the messages each attempted to drive home in his own writing and in order to accord with their own personal beliefs, despite many critics' claim to the contrary. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 27, 2005. / Empiricism, Eighteenth Century, Tutor / Includes bibliographical references. / Helen Burke, Professor Directing Thesis; James O’Rourke, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

This thesis interrogates the Gothic literary genre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and proposes using place as a lens through which contemporary critics may read social and political resistance in a given piece of Gothic cultural production. The history of the genre is explored and its defining characteristics enumerated through a discussion of how, exactly, individual works cohere across a span of nearly two hundred years. The roots of the Gothic – including the medieval romance and literary Romanticism – are explored in order to shed light on how Gothic comes to be and the ways in which the genre stands in contrast to its antecedents. From there, the discussion turns to the ways in which Gothic uses place as an argument in itself against the institutionalization of power. This project examines the relationship between power and decay of social structures within British Gothic novels by exploring the ways in which the spaces within those novels – often the Gothic buildings themselves – function as both power centers and places of ruin. The paper demonstrates first that this relationship within the genre persists across such borders as the author's time, place, nationality, and gender, marking it as a constitutive if unacknowledged element of the Gothic. Secondly, it is shown that this confluence of power and decay within the spaces of the Gothic exists independent of the activities of characters within the novels, and that this independence from changes in the plot suggests that the role of the space is foundational to understanding the novels. Thirdly, this relationship between decay and power represents an inversion of social power structures – patriarchy, aristocracy, clergy, and so forth – and the characters that typify these structures. Finally, a broader metatextual and historical argument is made that this inversion of the power structure represents an attack on institutionalized and socially ordered power. The significance of this argument lies in that a majority of scholarship about literature in the long nineteenth century seems largely to ignore patterns of place and space; a blind spot in literary criticism that could use more exploration. How narrative gets framed within a culture is intimately tied into authorial choices about setting, and these choices both reflect and influence the broader cultural discourse, shaping ideology by framing stories in a consistent way across over a hundred years. In the case of this argument about the Gothic, beliefs get expressed and shaped by authors framing narrative as being centered about a corrupt power structure: a device that has a range of wider implications about British culture at large and eventually serves as a rhetorical attack on both institutionalized power and Englishness. The interpretation of the Gothic here is primarily historicist and this thesis seeks to frame a discussion of individual Gothic works within their particular historical contexts. Feminist, psychoanalytical, and Marxist discussions of the Gothic are addressed and then largely discarded in order to present the Gothic as a coherent social and political project that interacts meaningfully with history. During the discussion of theoretical methodology, questions are raised and answered about the appropriateness of several comparisons – most especially, the comparison of Gothic to Marxism – that would seem to be counterintuitive. In fact, counterintuitive claims are a hallmark of this piece, which requires a basic re-imagining of how Gothic is discussed and understood. The first chapter focuses on the meaning of what is called the Gothic Place and how this idea of place is constitutive to an understanding of the genre. This chapter discusses how the Gothic Place – the literal stage of gothic events – is almost always presented as a power center of some kind; and yet, even while being a center of power, it is still suffering from decay in many ways. This phenomenon is explored through Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Brontë's Wuthering Heights because these two novels provide good examples for the ways in which space becomes central to a novel in a way distinct from the activities of other characters. Together, both these novels are important because of their historical moments: Otranto founding the Gothic genre and Wuthering Heights doing something similar for the Gothic Revival almost a century later. While the discussing how place is central to an understanding of these two novels and the broader Gothic, the discussion of these two books is used to suggest correlation between the Gothic and a broader cultural dialogue about aesthetics and the nature of beauty and the sublime. The second chapter focuses on the Gothic Place as it represents an inversion of social power structures and also describes the historical roots of Gothic in romance and Romanticism as well as the meaning of the Gothic's departure from these antecedents. The chapter continues the discussion of Wuthering Heights and also incorporates Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Stoker's Dracula – two works at opposite ends of the nineteenth century – in order to give the reader a sense of just how the Gothic is evolving and the ways in which it is growing into a resistance genre as a departure from the mainstreaming ideas of Romanticism. The argument about how Gothic develops as a tool of resistance continues to focus on the Gothic Place, and the discussion explores the way in which power is vested in place for the Gothic: specifically, how power is vested within ownership and legal power of physical property, and the dangers inherent in this system. In the final chapter I make the case that the Gothic relates to Marx through the Gothic's use of place as an argument – that physical places are icons for the oppression and destruction that they perpetuate – and also that they serve a similar subversive function. My argument compares and contrasts how the Gothic and Marxism are subversive in the nineteenth century and postulates that this coincidence exists because the Gothic and Marxism arise from the same cultural context: centralization of power in Europe, the expansion of Eurocentric Empire around the world, and the Industrial Revolution. I argue that Marx's ideas of base and superstructure – the idea that an economic base predetermines how culture and society work – correlate with the idea of the Gothic Place as a predestinating force: manipulating outcomes as much or sometimes more so than characters. The purpose of this comparison is to discuss both Gothic and Marx as trying to fight back against this idea of predestinating forces – or at least trying to expose them in preparation for fighting them – as an extended reaction against the Protestant Reformation and the rise of predestination theology in Protestant Europe as a means of shedding light on the roots of the Gothic. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2009. / April 29, 2009. / Historicism, Monstrosity, Individualism, Binary, Power, Decay, Agency, Place, Space, Literature, Victorian, Nineteenth Century, Eighteen Century, Marx, Gothic / Includes bibliographical references. / Margaret Kennedy Hanson, Professor Directing Thesis; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Cristobal Silva, Committee Member.

The encompassing claim of this study is that Tolkien operated as a social critic through his fictional writing, and that Tolkien's developing social criticism has its roots in his critical interpretations of The Battle of Maldon and SGGK. Tolkien was primarily concerned with the elevation of man-made social systems over a divine and moral law, and he worked to deconstruct such systems as dangerous and flawed ideology that would inevitably lead to the downfall of man. Tolkien's specific interpretations on the corpus of his study reflect directly back upon the heroics and social mechanics he creates for his fictional realm of Middle-earth. This claim is intended to underline the important relationship between Tolkien's scholarly study and creative endeavor in a way which has not yet been fully developed within the literary criticism on Tolkien. What interests this study, then, is how Tolkien's work graduated from fairy-tale based upon Anglo-Saxon poetry, high art in itself, to a more socially relevant medium which helped shaped the attitude of readers since its popular outbreak in the 1960s, yet maintained the Anglo-Saxon social criticism which Tolkien saw in the usage of the term ofermod, as well as a transmuted ofermod to a critique of the threatening power structure Tolkien observed in societies of his day. Within this premise of Tolkien as a developing social critic, this study attempts to show: the background for Tolkien's own heroic aesthetic, the components of his heroic aesthetic, and how that heroic aesthetic is developed and personalized within his writing. Within The Battle of Maldon Tolkien interprets the Old English word ofermod as "overmastering pride," and a negative reflection of the heroic leader, Beorhtnoth, whose actions within the poem lead to the destruction of the troops under him and a victory for the Viking forces at Maldon. Tolkien understood the term of ofermod as criticism of Anglo-Saxon leaders such as Beorhtnoth, and a reflection upon a larger social dilemma plaguing Anglo-Saxon society: that of a heroic code which placed leaders in the centrality of battle, a precarious position which unnecessarily endangered the welfare of the entire society. Consequently, overmastering pride of brash leaders is seen repeatedly in Tolkien's LOTR and The Silmarillion, but where Tolkien begins to come into his own is when he moves beyond mere repetition of his interpretation of ofermod within The Battle of Maldon and relates ofermod to the desire for absolute power observed within the 20th century while giving answer to such power in the form of a reluctant anti-hero embodying Tolkien's heroic ideals, such as Sam Gamgee. In Tolkien's interpretation of SGGK, he saw a distinction of social aesthetic from higher moral ordering by Gawain. Such observation worked to deconstruct the chivalric code of the high Middle-Ages as failed social ideology and placed a divine providence above a social structure. Although the poem is from a later era of English literary history, Tolkien's focus remains specifically on the social implications of the poem and the fallibility of a social leader who accepts flawed social ordering above a higher moral truth. Even more important concerning Tolkien's observations on SGGK is the fact that he focuses upon what he sees as the centrality of the servant figure within the poem, the knight Gawain, and on the fact that Gawain by the conclusion of the poem is able to discern the ordering of a moral truth above the flawed social structuring of a chivalric code. This important observation as well as Tolkien's interpretation of the term ofermod in The Battle of Maldon, directed the social criticism of Tolkien's creative works. Specifically, Tolkien used his observations of earlier and later Anglo-Saxon social dilemmas to develop his criticism of dilemmas he saw with modern society and modern social aesthetics. The focus upon Tolkien's social criticism within this study is an attempt to give immediate validity to Tolkien's sub-created world as both high art and relevant social commentary. Too often the realm of faerie is ignored or discarded by scholars as escapism not relevant to the primary world of literary study. What Tolkien shows, and what is the specific focus of his essay On Fairy-Stories, is that the realm of faerie or fantasy does have immediate relevance to the primary world. Tolkien, endeavoring in two fields of writing, the scholarly and the fictional, provides such a connection: his scholarly work is directly applicable to his sub-created world of Middle-earth. The structure of this study follows the development of Tolkien's social criticism and heroic aesthetic. The study begins by looking at some biographical elements of Tolkien's life and how those elements shaped the creation of Tolkien's anti-hero, the Hobbit. Looking at the development of social criticism in Tolkien's fictional corpus, the study continues by analyzing The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, a short play based on The Battle of Maldon which helps to show Tolkien's interpretation of the Old English term ofermod since within the short play Tolkien is basically reiterating his interpretation of ofermod within the Old English poem. The study continues by defining the origins of Tolkien's own heroic ideals and later shows how Tolkien graduated these in his fictional corpus. The study's observations on SGGK are necessarily placed later on, for they represent an important stage in Tolkien's development of social criticism coming after what might be interpreted as Tolkien's recreation of Anglo-Saxon ofermod in his fictional work. The study concludes with some direct observations of Tolkien's social criticism at work in The Hobbit and several stories within The Silmarillion. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in the Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Masters of English Literature. / Summer Semester, 2003. / March 27, 2003. / Tolkien / Includes bibliographical references. / David Johnson, Professor Directing Thesis; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member; Eugene Crook, Committee Member.

Dear Blackbird, is a collection of lyric-narrative poems that seeks to capture the spirit of the rural southern towns my family grew up in. As such,letters to a blackbird (written from the point of view of a scarecrow) are interspersed like grain in between lamentations directed toward a lost childhood. When writing it I had in mind James Wright's sentiment: I want all of the love in life with all of the pain left in. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2008. / December 7, 2007. / Poetry Narrative Letters Southern poetry, Florida poet, Dear Blackbird, Jane Springer / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ernest Rehder, Outside Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member.

Scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr. writes that "…the blues song erupts creating a veritable playful festival of meaning. Rather than a rigidly personalized form, the blues offer a phylogenetic recapitulation—a nonlinear, freely associative nonsequential mediation—of species experience" (Blues Ideology 5). Blues musicians, and authors of blues narratives alike, illustrate this "playful festival of meaning" as they create a melody that tells a story of heartbreak and despair. This study will explore the topic of the blues and how it is taken from its oral form and converted into written form in the following novels: Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe, Toni Morrison's Jazz, and Gayl Jones's Corregidora. Although critics have already noted the relationship between oral and literary blues, how authors utilize specific linguistic elements to tell a story remains under explored. By examining the linguistic patterns of a blues song, as well as the function of its many players, I will attempt to start a dialogue towards understanding the indebtedness among contemporary black women novelists to the blues. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / July 7, 2003. / Gloria Naylor Bailey, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison / Includes bibliographical references. / Maxine Montgomery, Professor Directing Thesis; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member.

Seeing while Blind: Disability, Theories of Vision, and Milton's Poetry demonstrates that Milton used his blindness as a literary trope to represent blindness and vision in his poetry. It also addresses how blindness affected the way Milton saw the world through his poetry. Milton invested a scientific interest in his blindness, as evidenced by his letters to Philaras. That Blindness had an impact on Milton's poetry is a given that many readers take for granted. Many scholars have addressed the impact Milton's blindness had on his poetry, and a few have even attempted to retroactively diagnose Milton's condition, but some of the best work has situated Milton's blindness in a cultural context. When Milton started to lose his sight, and realized how much he relied on sight as a poet, he likely realized the importance of advances in natural philosophy, and especially in "physick." Therefore Milton pursued all medical avenues available to him in an effort to save his sight. Milton's obsession to stave off blindness split him between the way he saw himself as a poet and the way he saw himself as a Christian. Milton identifies specific developments in natural philosophy and medicine that relate to one's ability to see. This shows the poet's interest in human endeavors to improve the fallen body and seek new ways to acquire the "wisdom at one entrance quite shut" (PL III.50). At the same time, Milton's blind personas and characters often simultaneously lament blindness and rejoice in the divine guidance it solicits. Milton never seems able to reconcile this dichotomy, but it reveals more nuances in meaning as well as the greater influence experimental philosophy had on his poetry. As readers a few hundred years removed from the age of Milton, we cannot experience the world the way he did. Our senses are cut off from his experiences. However, through careful research and analysis, we can reconstruct Milton's world. Though we have a much greater understanding of the way the body functions today, Milton's world viewed the functions of the body through a different criterion. Milton still negotiates his world through other senses, which he uses to create new worlds and which he uses to access a wisdom not shut out by his blindness. Through his efforts, Milton creates a new way to see the world poetically. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2011. / March 3, 2011. / John Milton, Disability, Blindness, Theories Of Vision, Embodiment, Historical Phenomenology / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Boehrer, Professor Directing Dissertation; Martin Kavka, University Representative; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; Elizabeth Spiller, Committee Member.

An examination of three major works by Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999); Writing Machines (2002); and My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). These deal mainly with the materiality of reader/writer/text; formations of identity and subjectivity in the digital age; and with the history of Information theory as it relates to epistemologies of the posthuman. I argue that the key terms: materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology, found in these books, are crucial to understanding the digital revolution, and that Katherine Hayles' work is invaluable to 21st century Composition studies, as we seek to orient ourselves in the landscape of electronically mediated discourse. To illustrate this I apply these terms as a critical lens to different instantiations of a refereed journal: Computers and Composition (print; Volume 23.1: March 2006)) and Computers and Composition Online (Spring 2006) and show where Hayles' ideas appear or do not appear across these platforms. I look at the contrast between in these examples of discourse about, and with computer mediated forms. I conclude that Katherine Hayles gives us new ways of seeing these key terms, and that they can be used to understand and explore the digitally networked territories that Composition studies will inhabit in the 21st century, also called the era of the "posthuman." / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2008. / November 3, 2008. / Digital Materiality, Subjectivity, Post, Epistemology / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Yancey, Professor Directing Thesis; Kristie Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Douglas Fowler, Committee Member.