On the heels of an older generation of Romantic poets concerned with the individual’s role in creating reality, Percy Shelley defines perception as a mandatory building block for countering an external physical world that is hostile to the individual. Consequently, the question of perception, both how it is defined and how it can be influenced, plays an important role in Shelley’s works that focus on political and social change. The question of perception, as it relates to the individual and as it relates to social change, is brought to the forefront in Prometheus Unbound and his drama, The Cenci.

This thesis analyzes Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons through the framework of the cult of domesticity. In understanding the ways in which Stein mocks and transgresses gender constrictions, while simultaneously adopting the language of domesticity, I understand the ways in which Stein breaks with the antebellum notion of separate spheres.

This essay explores modern queer readings of The Awakening and Ruth Hall, with an emphasis on feeling, time, femininity, and maternity.

This thesis endeavors to engage in contemporary Thoreauvian scholarship by providing an original reading of Thoreau’s works using a critical framework based on Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time.” As such, it argues that Thoreau’s infamous embrace of political and rhetorical dissent takes shape in his writings most strongly in his construction of time-frames that break with or stand against his contemporaries’ own use, sense, and measuring of time in antebellum New England. Focusing on two aspects of Henry David Thoreau’s work, the thesis argues firstly that Walden’s resistance to familiar, sequential understandings of time manifests in myth, wherein time and history are shaped holistically rather than sequentially. Secondly, it posits that Thoreau’s excursion narratives resist the dominant recordings of history of his time by forming alternative historiographies within their structures, accommodating otherwise silent or ignored historical elements, at the expense of otherwise smooth, uninterrupted narratives. Having thus established Thoreau’s temporal structures, the thesis goes on to look at Annie Dillard and Susan Howe in order to trace out Thoreau’s previously unacknowledged formation of temporal structures in his texts as a genealogy that emerges in late twentieth-century American literature. Consequently, the thesis provides an alternative reading of Thoreau that moves toward a rethinking of his location in nineteenth-century America and its twentieth-century literature.

This thesis traces the relation between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics, in light of the campaign for, and introduction, of devolution. Focusing primarily on the period 1970 – 2011, the thesis analyses a range of novels, short stories and journal articles produced in this period. The Introduction begins with an analysis of the history of devolution in Wales and considers theories of nationalism proposed by theorists including Benedict Anderson and Raymond Williams, both of whom suggest that heightened awareness of a wider national community is integral to the development of a cohesive nationalist impulse. Chapter I commences with an analysis of the relation between literature and politics in the years prior to the 1979 referendum on Welsh devolution. Taking as its starting point Fredric Jameson’s theory of political allegory in literature, this chapter considers the way in which the presentation of politics in Anglophone Welsh fiction becomes gradually more overt by the close of the 1970s. Chapter II examines the way in which Anglophone Welsh fiction writers responded to the outcome of the 1979 referendum, alongside other political events of the 1980s such as the Falklands War and widespread industrial decline. Chapter III charts the development of the relation between fiction and politics in 1990s Wales, suggesting that the years preceding the 1997 referendum on devolution witnessed a more overt engagement between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics than had been evident in the 1970s. The final chapter argues that in the wake of devolution fiction from Wales has responded by presenting an increasingly diverse and multi-faceted image of Wales, characterised by a more overt engagement with politics and nationalism. The Conclusion considers how the changes outlined in this thesis relate to wider cultural developments in Wales and suggests how this research may be expanded to incorporate broader areas of the arts in Wales.

We are forever shaped by the worlds we live in. The following stories are musings on the importance of time and place and on the conflicts that arise for characters who are born into and who live with or rail against those forces. The stories are set in and around Laurel County, Georgia over a period of decades. They look at the people who are made there and the lessons they learn or fail to learn as they work to make their way there.

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage can be applied to The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer’s writing is highly visual and often unconventional. This study analyzes several portraits and tales to demonstrate Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique. The opening lines of the General Prologue present the juxtaposition of the tripartite plant and humans to suggest commoners’ social immobility. The interruption of the Miller’s Tale clashes with the Knight’s to suggest the possibility of social mobility and to challenge traditional patriarchy. The latter half of the narrator’s description in the Wife of Bath’s portrait indicates a sexualized subtext through the juxtaposition of neutral images that undercuts her wealthy appearance. Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique is used to suggest the possibility of social mobility, and to reflect the disruption of the social hierarchy in late fourteenth-century England.

This thesis investigates the ways in which literary and artistic modernism interpreted the Spanish institution of the corrida, or the bullfight. The sheer volume of modernist intellectuals who engaged with the corrida is startling. From Joyce to Picasso, Stein to Hemingway, Leiris to Lawrence, the bullfight provided inspiration to so many of the writers and artists of canonical modernism. Indeed, the relevance of the corrida to modernist intellectuals is perhaps captured best by Michel Leiris’s lucid metaphor of the bullfight as a mirror revealing ‘certain dark parts of ourselves’. In other words, in addition to providing the content of literature of the early twentieth century, many of the writers we identify as modernist used the corrida in a metaphorical capacity too. In light of this, it seems significant that the peak of modern interest in the corrida occurred in the context of a cultural crisis in western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus the key questions that this thesis seeks to address are as follows: why did the modernist gaze rest so intently upon the corrida? Why did so many European intellectuals cling to bullfighting and insist upon its enduring relevance given the apparent paradox between its own lack of adaptation to modern conditions and the very ‘newness’ that modernism championed? To what extent did the corrida act as a mirror to many of the cultural tensions problems addressed by modernism? How did modernism’s engagement with bullfighting, and the easy manner in which Hemingway’s body of work came to stand alone for that rich engagement, affect subsequent works that focussed on the bullring? These phenomena are examined in the context of the anomic cultural landscape of the era, taking into consideration the artistic, sexual and archaeological revolutions that informed and affected writers of the time.

This thesis explores gendered embodiment in early-modern England as a 'semiotic field' onto which were transcribed anxieties about the contingent nature of individual and national 'masculine' identity in an era of social and religious change and flux. I examine how the construction of an emergent 'Englishness' is articulated through the employment of eroticised metaphors of religious and national opposition. Anxieties about the threat to English national stability are feminised in order to contain and distance them, where the trope of the 'worrying feminine', in the Biblical archetype of the ambitious and sexually promiscuous Whore of Babylon, becomes an 'over-coded' entity representing a spectrum of anxieties surrounding internal and external religious threats to the self-constituted identity of English Protestant masculinity. In contrast to this, chaste female virtue in the form of the Bride of Christ is used, frequently in conjunction with the trope of the 'motherland', to privilege the righteousness of the Protestant masculine agenda against a perceived lack of proper monarchical rule. Together with the insights of literary criticism and history, I draw on models from gender and identity theory and cultural theory of the body, to engage with a series of six 'moments' from 1530 to 1640. Plays by Bale, Sackville and Norton, Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Davenport, Brome, Richards and Quarles are analysed in conjunction with Spenser's poetry and polemical works by Knox, Aylmer and Stubbes. I explore the ways in which the antithetical tropes are employed and how this reflects, interacts with and works against shifting social and cultural preoccupations. I conclude that the elaborate and over-insistent emphasis upon individual and national masculine supremacy is undermined by the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in its gendered construction. I argue that these disjunctures are nonetheless revealing, since the disentangling and examination of their complexities enables new and productive insights into the cultural climate of the period.

Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1100/thumbnail.jpg