Theses and Dissertations - Department of English

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The Influence of Dorothy Wordsworth on the Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge During the Years 1797-1810
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1931) Mayfield, Sara; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
"Say quick,"quoth he, "I bid thee say – What manner of man art thou?"
Robert Loveman: Belated Romanticist
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1932) Friedman, Helen Adele; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The purpose of this thesis, however, is not to "stir a little dust of praise" that would soon settle down again into oblivion. Its purpose is to present an accurate record of the life and work of a gentle and lovable man who, if for no other reason, is significant because he is typical of a vast group of belated romanticists who made the mistake of following the old, well-worn paths rather than cutting new trails of their own.
Idealism in Kant and Coleridge
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1936) Hawse, Doris Hartwell; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Given a vital contact with the daily life of man by his use of it as a constant moral touch-stone, it must yet be out of reach or his logic and his intellectual proving. If it exist in and or and for the soul, it may not be judged by mental or other methods, since they are not of its sphere .and are not valid there as a consequence. Immanuel Kant believed these things, saw them lucidly, and embodied them in a system of beautiful order and completeness. Samuel Coleridge beheld them poetically half-veiled as in a dream, and expressed them sometimes unconsciously and indirectly, sometimes plainly with almost inspired clarity, often ill and obscurely. This thesis represents an effort to amplify the foregoing statement, in the hope that some conclusion may be reached regarding the nature of idealism in philosophy and in literature.
The Myth of the Quest and the Novel: The Vision of Hermann Hesse
(1974) Bradford, Beverly; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in Calw, a town in southern Germany. Though born in Germany he was a Swiss citizen because of his father, a Baltic-Russian with Swiss citizenship. He became a naturalized German citizen at the age of twelve. As his father was a Protestant theologian and his mother the daughter of an Indian missionary, he grew up in a widely-varied but deeply religious environment.
Women in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1977) Whitehouse, Stella Cocoris; Kay, Carol McGinnis; Eddins, Dwight; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Criticism of the drama of the Renaissance has yielded an abundance of Marlovian scholarship, great and varied in scope. Particularly, there has been an immense interest in Marlowe's creation of the superhuman hero--the Tamburlaine or the Faustus who so completely dominates the stage that all other characters are assumed to be mere figureheads, symbols, abstractions, or embodiments. It is partly because of this interest in the overpowering hero that Marlowe's women have been neglected by many critics. Allardyce Nicoll makes a particularly sweeping statement when he claims that the absence of the "feminine element ... mars the dramas of Marlowe" and that "the consistent elimination of women" in his works "proves in him a lack of sympathy with the whole of life. I would maintain that the "feminine element" is not absent in Marlowe, but rather too often slighted by critics.
The Mood of a Long-Seated Woman and Other Stories
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1978) Rousse, Justin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Program of Creative Writing in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama.
Sector Analysis and the Study of Poetry: A Paradigmatic Explication of Syntactic Structures in John Donne's "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward"
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1978) Katz, Elaine S.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
College instruction in poetry systematically treats, prosody, symbolism, imagery, lexicology, the history of ideas, and critical biography--by no means to exhaust the list. Common sense dictates that it should be possible to include a systematic approach to syntax in the synthesis, but common knowledge denies it. Ideally, students of literature should be able to probe the syntax of a poem in their native language with almost as much facility as its diction. The facts of the matter are, however, that few university undergraduates manage to have acquired an understanding of English grammar adequate to serving them as a tool in the study of poetry, while instructors are hampered, perhaps by a lack of special skills in contemporary methods of linguistic analysis, certainly by a lack of the considerable time it would take to teach almost any of the available descriptive methods of syntactic analysis.
Discovering The Color Purple: a Study of Black Women's Surivial [sic] in the Fiction of Alice Walker
(University of Alabama Libraries, 1983) Johnson, Rhonda; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Out of the women's movement has come a body of women's literature that is different in several ways from that produced prior to it. First, there is simply more of it being written, published, and read. Second, it is becoming more honest. One of the most striking features of women's literature in the last twenty years is its directness and honesty in its attempts to dispel those male-perpetuated images of women. The process has been painful and gradual and, of course, did not start with the women's movement. But feminism has been behind the growing strength and truth in women's literary voices.
Bramble
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2008) Hamilton, Richard; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
Ghostwrit(t)er(n)
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Hurst, Aaron J.; Behn, Robin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
N/A
"'[W]ritten with teares in harts close bleeding booke': wounds, skepticism, and the interior of the body in Early Modern romance
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Phelps, Paul Chandler; McElroy, Tricia A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
"Written with Teares" studies two romances--Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" and Sir Philip Sidney's "The New Arcadia"--and begins with a simple hypothesis: that Spenser's and Sidney's elaboration on wounds demonstrate a deep skepticism about the status of the Early Modern body and its relationship to an individual's interiority (as subjectivity). The first chapter treats Book Three of Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," and considers the confusion that surrounds Spenser's representation of physical and metaphorical wounds. This confusion often accompanies a crossing of erotic love with physical violence, and Spenser's characters struggle to differentiate between physical and metaphorical wounds. This exercise in reading wounds, I argue, is necessarily an exercise in demonstrating the problems of interpreting the body as a marker of the self. As such, Spenser's characters, in Book Three, learn to see wounds not necessarily as a marker of the soul, but as the physical space where the body's inside and outside mix and become adulterated, rendering each as indistinguishable from the other. The first chapter argues that this combination of insides and outsides suggests Spenser's uncertainty about the nature and value of inwardness, an uncertainty that translates, with Sidney, over to the Renaissance battlefield, to the aesthetic representation of aristocratic bodies and aristocratic virtues. The second chapter--the key synecdoche of the project--studies Sir Philip Sidney's "The New Arcadia" and contends that Sidney's anxieties about the body manifest when his heroes sustain wounds. Sidney, however, is more sensitive to the political and social implications of wounds than Spenser, and, thus, his treatment of them in "The New Arcadia" links with his testing and transformation of Tudor Humanist assumptions about the heroic body and its aesthetic, moral, and erotic functions. Ultimately, I suggest that "The New Arcadia" sublimates heroic action to heroic suffering, expressed through emotional and physical wounds on and in the body. Sidney's heroes and heroines do not succeed; rather, they languish under the weight of emotional torment and physical pain, learning to appreciate the figurative, spiritual values of pain rather than the practical rewards of martial victory.
The fortune stick
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Grimes, Nancy S. I.; Behn, Robin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Collection of poems and stories.
The efficacy of peer review in a university-level ESL writing class
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Brathwaite, Sara Strickland; Liu, Dilin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Currently, there is a great debate concerning whether peer review is an effective activity in the university-level English-as-a-Second-Language writing classroom. Peer review offers the unique opportunity for second-language writers to share their writing, evaluate others' work, and discuss their observations and opinions about writing in an authentic environment. This study investigated the interactional dynamics of peer review sessions in university-level ESL writing classrooms. The spoken data (transcripts of peer review sessions) were evaluated to determine the types of interactions that occurred and their functions. The written data (rough and final drafts from each participant) were evaluated to determine the quantity and quality of the changes that the participants made. The two data sets were then compared to determine whether (and to what extent) the peer review interactions led to improvements on the drafts. The data indicated that suggestions made during peer review correlated to positive changes if the participants negotiated the suggestion, and if the suggestion pertained to global-level issues in the paper. While the data showed that participants preferred to make changes unilaterally, it also indicated that peer-reviewed suggestions correlated with a higher percentage of positive changes than writer-initiated suggestions. Further, the data indicated that peer review was particularly favored by those participants who had no previous experience with this activity. These results indicated that peer review is an effective activity, especially for students who are new to it. It is best framed as supplementary to the student's existing writing process. Future research should focus on triangulating the data with post-activity student interviews, in order to corroborate the results.
"Shall these bones live?": a textual materialist study of the 1950-1975 Chinua Achebe corpus
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) McCormick, Paige Reece; Rand, Richard; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project fills several substantial lacunae in Achebe letters. First, it provides a chronological bibliography of the 1950-1975 Achebe corpus. This establishes for the first time a comprehensive and accurate illustration of the relationships among all published Achebe texts from 1950 to 1975 and among those texts and related manuscripts, particularly noting text revisions over the life of each text. Second, it creates color-coded variorum text documents for each publication. These text documents, for the first time incorporate all textual evidence for a specific publication, tracking all text mutations, both compositional and publication variations. The formatting of the variorum texts is guided by social text theory that gives equal attention to all composition and publication mutation in order to demonstrate the synchronic and diachronic movement of each text. As such it presumes in advance no link between multiple versions and a progression of authorial intent or authorial teleology in order that the stages of completion might be appraised in relation to all others. Taken together, the chronological bibliography and the variorum text documents provide extensive evidence that text mutation is present across all genres of Achebe letters, including critical essays, poems, short stories, and novels. A survey of past textualist approaches to Achebe's works reveals only minimal attention to text mutations in Achebe fiction and exposes the dearth of textual approaches to Achebe's non-fiction, poetry, and manuscripts. The failure to take Achebe's compositional and publication mutations into consideration ignores important evidence of evolving aesthetic and rhetorical responses to changing historical moments. A sample reading of one non-fiction text illustrates the issues at stake when text mutation is ignored and establishes the study's core claim that a textual materialist approach is the sine qua non for future Achebe critical studies. Finally, the study establishes text mutation as an ongoing element in post-1975 Achebe letters and calls for a comprehensive, chronological bibliography and the creation of variorum text documents for subsequent Achebe publications and manuscripts.
Beyond fig leaves and scarlet letters: women voicing themselves in diaries and blogs
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) McKnight, Elizabeth Simpson; Voss, Ralph F.; Dayton, Amy E.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project explores the reasons that women write in diaries and blogs and the ways that they reckon with audience and identity through private writing in public spaces. It observes that women write to work through difficult experiences, to give substance to the tasks of impermanence that fill their days and lives, to forge connections with other women related to issues of mutual interest and concern, and to assert themselves as subjects of their own making in the face of competing social constructions of who they should be. The importance of this subject matter lies in the ways that writing is a source of strength to individuals who have been silenced or otherwise isolated through the circumstances of their lives. I have chosen to look at the value of writing for women, but the principles that I set forth are applicable to other groups of people, particularly those who have experienced marginalization or loss of some kind. The research traces the history of the diary and its significance for women, the evolution of the diary's function as it has moved online, the relationship between the diary and identity formation for its writer, and finally, the relationships between writers and their audiences, particularly with the diary in its incarnation as the blog. I develop the metaphors of fig leaves and scarlet letters to represent the ways in which women negotiate the dynamics of truth, identity, and audience in textual practice and assert that emerging technologies such as the blog allow for women to move beyond the silences that these images symbolize, create communities, and give voice to their lives.
"It is a privilege to see so much confusion": Marianne Moore and revision
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Whisenhunt, Eloise Arnold; White, Heather Cass; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Marianne Moore's Complete Poems is not complete; it contains sixty-six poems, which is about one-third of her published work. What has not been omitted has, in most cases, been revised. Such acts of expurgation and modification have led some critics to argue that the older Moore revised the works of her younger self. Others view Moore's history of revision as a progression leading to succinct and compact poems. The fundamental claim of this study is that Marianne Moore's revisions are not the acts of an idiosyncratic poet but are manifestations of her aesthetic. In her early poetry, Moore uses revision to "make it new." Revision allowed Moore to reinvigorate her poems after they had been published and interpreted. More importantly, in revising her poetry Moore kept her poetry genuine. "The genuine," for Moore, was that which was in a constant state of flux. Moore's revisions, then, achieve "the genuine." Moore's practice of extensive revision emphasizes the pursuit of latent meaning rather than the quick capture of patent understanding. The poems and their variants, then, serve as a "right good salvo of barks" so that Moore's reader must continue the chase, which she deems more meaningful than the arrival at understanding, and it also keeps the work genuine. In Chapter One, I examine four of Moore's early verse essays that educate her reader as to her aesthetic. These poems emphasize Moore's aesthetic of pursuit and how her revisions defamiliarize the text so that the reader has to re-engage the poem and, likewise, his or her imagination. The focus of Chapter Two is "the genuine," which Moore defines in "In the Days of Prismatic Color" and in "Poetry." Her revisions of "Poetry" display "the genuine," and much of the chapter is spent considering these revisions. Chapter Three discusses the shift that occurred in Moore's poetics between the 1936 The Pangolin and Other Verse and the 1941 What Are Years. Moore's revisions of "Virginia Britannia" and "Half Deity" demonstrate a change in audience and a change in Moore's aesthetic that leads to the simplification of what had been complex.
A re-vision of women: approaching gender equality in Prometheus unbound and Proserpine
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Hopper, Natalie Nicole; Weiss, Deborah R.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Whereas ancient accounts of the Prometheus story cast the Titan's wife in a secondary and easily overlooked role, Percy Shelley portrays Prometheus and Asia as mutually dependent partners, establishing the couple as equals who represent what Percy sees as the two gendered aspects of the revolution that takes place in Prometheus Unbound: intellect and intuition. In contrast to Percy, Mary Shelley revises women in Proserpine by eliminating the male characters and creating females who possess both intuition and the intellect that Percy sees as an inherently masculine trait. Both approaches improve women's status from their roles in the ancient texts but in drastically different ways. Percy views the distance between the genders not as something to be overcome but as something to be undone. Equality, as he sees it, is a natural state to be regained, and Prometheus and Asia, as mutually dependent partners, are free of the gender inequality that they eventually eliminate among humankind. Mary calls not for an undoing but a reaction by focusing on women's bond with one another and their independence from men instead of men and women's dependence upon one another.
Evil men
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Wennermark, Erik; Martone, Michael; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
A collection of short stories interested in the nature of evil as it relates to the formulation of masculine identity. As means of this exploration, the collection engages a multitude of forms and narrative styles, as well as endeavors to build a broad cultural framework for storytelling.
Room where I get what I want
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Holmes, Sarah Whitney; Brouwer, Joel; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Collection of poems.
After Mary Prince: navigating 'authenticity' in 20th-century diasporic women's migration narratives
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Simmons, Kathryn Merinda; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project calls for a renewed consideration of Mary Prince's 1831 Caribbean slave narrative in critical readings of 20th-century women's migration novels. Specifically, I offer readings of how the signs "gender" and "labor" are strategically deployed and manipulated in contexts of migration. Such deployments and manipulations suggest that the notion of "authenticity," often used in feminist and postcolonial readings of women's narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. To lend textual specificity to these elements, After Mary Prince examines the ways in which Prince's History establishes a precedent for 20th-century novels where migration shapes understandings of work and gender, effectively destabilizing labels of "authenticity." Published for the first time only two years before England put its 1833 Emancipation Bill into effect, Prince's narrative was both laden with the Anti-Slavery Society's editorial agenda and subjected to legal scrutiny that questioned the text's veracity as well as Prince's own "feminine" moral character. This series of textual and sociohistorical impediments is central to my consideration of agency and how it is simultaneously created and de-centered in 20th-century women's migration narratives. My focus lies within the Caribbean and the American South, where movement is cast in terms of escape and return, and where geographical context stages complicated formations of cultural expectation, memory, and identity. Specifically, in relation to Prince's History, the chapters focus on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Gloria Naylor's Mama Day; Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; and, as an epilogue, Edwidge Danticat's recent work The Dew Breaker. These texts perpetuate key questions of how gender and labor mutually construct, even as they struggle against, each other. This project contends that these narratives are useful counter-examples to current strands of race and gender theory that, even in the name of empowerment and liberation, maintain problematically singular tropes of "authentic" identity categories.

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