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Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780

This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eightee… more

Date: December 2003

Creator: Abunasser, Rima Jamil

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707

This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control … more

Date: December 2009

Creator: Bender, Ashley Brookner

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Samuel Richardson's Revisions to Pamela (1740, 1801)

The edition of Pamela a person reads will affect his or her perception of Pamela's ascent into aristocratic society. Richardson's revisions to the fourteenth edition of Pamela, published posthumously in 1801, change Pamela's character from the 1740 first edition in such a way as to make her social climb more believable to readers outside the novel and to "readers" inside the novel. Pamela alters her language, her actions, and her role in the household by the end of the first edition; in the fo… more

Date: August 2004

Creator: Bender, Ashley Brookner

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Wuthering Heights: A Proto-Darwinian Novel

Wuthering Heights was significantly shaped by the pre-Darwinian scientific debate in ways that look ahead to Darwin's evolutionary theory more than a decade later. Wuthering Heights represents a cultural response to new and disturbing ideas. Darwin's enterprise was scientific; Emily Brontë's poetic. Both, however, were seeking to find ways to express their vision of the nature of human beings. The language and metaphors of Wuthering Heights suggest that Emily Brontë's vision was, in many ways, … more

Date: August 1993

Creator: Bhattacharya, Sumangala

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women

This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in… more

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Date: May 2000

Creator: Collins, Margo

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

Jezebel's Daughters: A Study of Wilkie Collins and His Female Villains

The term "feminist," when applied to Wilkie Collins, implies he was concerned with rectifying the oppression of women in domestic life as well as with promoting equal rights between the sexes. This study explores Collins the "feminist" by analyzing his portrayals of women, particularly his most powerful feminine creations: his villainesses. Although this focus is somewhat limited, it allows for a detailed analysis of the development of Collins's attitudes towards powerful women from the beginni… more

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Date: August 2000

Creator: Colvin, Trey Vincent

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

The Afro-British Slave Narrative: The Rhetoric of Freedom in the Kairos of Abolition

The dissertation argues that the development of the British abolition movement was based on the abolitionists' perception that their actions were kairotic; they attempted to shape their own kairos by taking temporal events and reinterpreting them to construct a kairotic process that led to a perceived fulfillment: abolition. Thus, the dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies used by white abolitionists to construct an abolitionist kairos that was designed to produce salvation for white B… more

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Date: December 1999

Creator: Evans, Dennis F.

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Paradox and Balance in the Anglo-Saxon Mind of Beowulf

This essay argues that the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf presents the reader with a series of paradoxes and attempts to find a balance within these paradoxes. At the forefront is the paradox of past and present, explored through the influence of the past on the characters in the poem as well as the poet. Additionally, the poem offers the paradox of light and dark, which ultimately suggests light and dark as symbols of Christianity and paganism. Finally, the land and the sea offer the third prima… more

Date: May 2008

Creator: Fox, Bonnie L.

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

No Slip-Shod Muse: A Performance Analysis of Some of Susanna Centlivre's Plays

In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground be… more

Date: May 2000

Creator: Herrell, LuAnn R. Venden

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

“True Image Pictur’d”: Metaphor, Epistemology, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

In this dissertation, I examine the influence of Pyrrhonist skepticism over Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unlike academic skepticism, which begins from a position of doubt, Pyrrhonist skepticism encourages an embrace of multiple perspectives that, according to Sextus Empiricus, leads first to a suspension of judgment and ultimately to a state of tranquility. The Pyrrhonian inflection of Shakespeare’s sonnets accounts for the pleasure and uncertainty they cultivate in readers. By offering readers multi… more

Date: May 2014

Creator: Kellogg, Amanda O.

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

The Gender of Time in the Eighteenth-century English Novel

This study takes a structuralist approach to the development of the novel, arguing that eighteenth-century writers build progressive narrative by rendering abstract, then conflating, literary theories of gendered time that originate in the Renaissance with seventeenth-century scientific theories of motion. I argue that writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century generate and regulate progress-as-product in their narratives through gendered constructions of time that corresponded… more

Date: December 1998

Creator: Leissner, Debra Holt

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Monsters Like Us: Reexamining “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” Through the Decades

The purpose of this paper is to examine the multiple versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in concert and determine the reason for their continued presence in the American cultural landscape. To do so I will look at the novel and four films and examine the context in which they were created. In reexamining the novel and films, a central theme begins to emerge: interiority. Fear in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" moves from an external to an internal threat. The bodily locus of the mons… more

Date: May 2016

Creator: Norton, Elizabeth Harmon

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

"How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?": Cognitive Poetics and William Butler Yeats's Poetry

Cognitive poetics, the recently developed field of literary theory which utilizes principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to examine literature, is applied in this study to an exploration of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The theoretical foundation for this approach is embodiment theory, the concept from cognitive linguistics that language is an embodied phenomenon and that meaning and meaning construction are bodily processes grounded in our sensorimotor experiences. A… more

Date: May 2017

Creator: Pagel, Amber Noelle

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

The Politics of Poverty: George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London"

"Down and Out in Paris and London" is typically perceived as non-political. Orwell's first book, it examines his life with the poor in two cities. Although on the surface "Down and Out" seems not to be about politics, Orwell covertly conveys a political message. This is contrary to popular critical opinion. What most critics fail to acknowledge is that Orwell wrote for a middle- and upper-class audience, showing a previously unseen view of the poor. In this he suggests change to the policy make… more

Date: May 1992

Creator: Perkins, Marianne

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

W. B. Yeats's "The Cap and Bells": Its Sources in Occultism

While it may seem that "The Cap and Bells" finds its primary source in Yeats's love for Maud Gonne, the poem is also symbolic of his search for truth in occultism. In the 1880s and 90s Yeats coupled his reading of Shelley with a formal study of magic in the Golden Dawn, and the poem is a blend of Shelleyan and occult influences. The essay explores the Shelleyan/occult motif of death and rebirth through examining the poem's relation to the rituals, teachings, and symbols of the Golden Dawn. The … more

Date: May 1995

Creator: Saylor, Lawrence (Lawrence Emory)

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Libertines Real and Fictional in Rochester, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Boswell

Libertines Real and Fictional in Rochester, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Boswell examines the Restoration and eighteenth-century libertine figure as it appears in John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind, "The Maim'd Debauchee," and "Upon His Drinking a Bowl," Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, and James Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. I argue that the limitations and self-contradictions of standard definitions of libertinism and the wa… more

Date: May 2008

Creator: Smith, Victoria

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Superior Mirth: National Humor and the Victorian Ego

This project traces the wide and varied uses of patriotic (and, at times, jingoistic and xenophobic) humor within the Victorian novel. a culture’s humor, perhaps more than any other cultural markers (food, dress, etc.), provides invaluable insight into that nation’s values and perceptions—not only how they view others, but also how they view themselves. in fact, humor provides such a unique cultural thumbprint as to make most jokes notoriously untranslatable. Victorian humor is certainly not… more

Date: May 2012

Creator: Stober, Katharyn L.

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Sharing the Light: Feminine Power in Tudor and Stuart Comedy

Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-sevent… more

Date: May 1994

Creator: Tanner, Jane Hinkle

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries

open access

Change of Condition: Women's Rhetorical Strategies on Marriage, 1710-1756

This dissertation examines ways in which women constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages. Social historians have argued for the rise of companionacy in the eighteenth century without paying attention to women's accounts of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the prospect of marriage. I argue that having more latitude to choose a husband did not diminish the enormous impact that the choice would have on the rest of a woman's life; if anything, choice mi… more

Date: December 2005

Creator: Wood, Laura Thomason

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation

Partner: UNT Libraries