Dissertations / Theses on the topic '200503 British and Irish Literature'

LeJeune, Jeff. Bachelor of Science, McNeese State University, 2001; Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017. Major: English Title of Thesis: ?The Violent Take It by Force?: Heathcliff and the Vitalizing Power of Mayhem in Wuthering Heights Thesis Chair: Dr. Christine DeVine Pages in Thesis: 92; Words in Abstract: 284 ABSTRACT In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte employs the character Heathcliff as both a real and mythic being in order to challenge class conventions in Victorian society. She shares this societal contention with other Victorian novelists, but where her contemporaries are typically realistic in their works, Bronte creates a concurrent mythic realm alongside the real in order to allow Heathcliff the space and license to be a Revenant, a symbol used in the folk tradition of the Scots, which I contend was a likely influence on Bronte?s work. Heathcliff?s real nature clashes with this symbolic one, especially when reality will not allow him to be with Catherine, the woman he loves. Her rejection of him serves two central purposes: 1) for the author to spotlight the arbitrary nature of the class system and the decisions individuals make inside it; and 2) for the author to provide a pivot point in the story at which she transforms Heathcliff from a real character to a mythic one. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the novel exacting redemptive punishment on all who have wronged him (and the marginalized he represents), including Catherine herself, a reality he struggles with because he still loves her despite her class-motivated marriage to the hated Edgar Linton. In the end, Heathcliff transgresses his symbolic purpose by going too far in punishing the innocent Hareton, at which point Bronte has him die as unceremoniously as she did Catherine earlier in the novel. Young Hareton and Cathy?s relationship is the fruit of the Revenant Heathcliff?s redeeming work, an ending that, for Bronte, seems to merge more than just the two houses; it seems to also reconcile divergent and conflicting ways of thinking inside the class system.

In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, arguing that Boy, Snow, Bird’s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while Playing in the Light is a “Third Space” in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi’s and Wicomb’s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society’s modifications of its racial perceptions.

During the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, writers like William Walwyn produced documents contesting the restriction of their liberties. This thesis is a critical edition of Walwyn’s Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie, unedited since its original publication in 1646. In this text Walwyn advocates for man’s right to question religious orthodoxy in his search for Truth and urges Parliament not to pass a proposed Bill for the harsh punishment of religious sectarians.

Prior to a transcription of the text is an introduction to Walwyn and an attempt to situate the reader in the context of his time. Following that is a style and rhetorical analysis, which concludes that despite his rejection of rhetorical practices, Walwyn’s own use of them is effective. Perhaps this skill is one of the reasons that Parliament passed a milder, non-punitive version of the Bill Walwyn argued against.

This dissertation advances Gothic studies by 1) arguing that Gothic is an imperial discourse and tracing back its origins to imperial activity, 2) by establishing a Hinterland Gothics discourse framework within the Gothic Imagination, 3) and by defining three particular discourses of Hinterland Gothics: the Gotach (Irish), Gótico (Mexican-American Mestizx), and the Ethnogothix (African Diaspora), and subsequently, revealing how these Hinterland Gothics undermine, expose, and thwart imperial poltergeists. The primary texts that I analyze and reference were published in the past thirty years and are either of the Young Adult or New Adult persuasion, highlighting imperative moments of identity construction in bildungsroman plots and focusing on the more neglected yet more dynamic hyper-contemporary era of Gothic scholarship, namely: Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008), Celine Kiernan’s Into the Grey (2011), Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006), Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009), Virginia Grise’s blu (2011), Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching (2009), Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) and Binti: Home (2017), and Nicki Minaj’s 54^th Annual Grammy Awards performance of “Roman Holiday” (2012). The cold spots in the white Eurocentric canon where Other presences have been ghosted will be filled, specters will be given flesh, and the repressed will return, indict, and haunt, demanding recognition and justice.

This thesis examines Sherlock Holmes texts (1886–1927) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their recreations in the television series Sherlock (2010) and Elementary (2012) through a postcolonial lens. Through an in-depth textual analysis of Doyle’s mysteries, my thesis will show that his stories were intended to be propaganda discouraging the British Empire from becoming tainted, ill, and dirty through immersing themselves in the “Orient” or the East. The ideal Imperial body, gender roles, and national landscape are feminized, covered in darkness, and infected when in contact for too long with the “Other” people of the East and their cultures. Sherlock Holmes cleanses society of the darkness, becoming a hero for the Empire and an example of the perfect British man created out of logic and British law. And yet, Sherlock Holmes’ very identity relies on the existence of the Other and the mystery he or she creates. The detective’s obsession with solving mysteries, drug addiction, depression, and the art of deduction demonstrate that, without the Other, Holmes has no identity. As the body politic, Holmes craves more mystery to unravel, examine, and know. Without it, he feels useless and dissatisfied with life. The satisfaction with pinpointing every detail, in order to solve a mystery continues today in all media versions. Bringing Sherlock Holmes to life for television and updating him to appeal to today's culture only make sense. Though society has the insight offered by postcolonial theory, evidence of an imperial mindset is still present in the most popular reproductions of Sherlock Holmes Sherlock and Elementary.

Literary study has long been concerned with the construction of meaning and identity through language. In the realm of postcolonialism, for instance, it is necessary to consider the ways that racism and sexism are hegemonic constructs that are transmitted and solidified through language. Furthermore, literary texts such as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih engage themselves with revealing the ways that racism, sexism, and colonial discourse function through determinacy or certainty. Moreover, Conrad and Salih are engaged in undermining these enterprises of authoritative discourse by revealing the underlying indeterminacy of language and meaning-making. In other words, they show that meaning exists as humanity constructs it. Thus, it is necessary to consider the ways that they question racism, sexism, and colonialism as movements of thought, discourse, and action that have no rational foundations; and it is necessary to consider the ways that they seek to frame the resistance of these forces in their characters.

This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them as grotesquely theatrical to underscore the empty performativity associated with contemporaneous wedding rituals that privilege form over substance, and to stress deception and inauthentic play-acting in marriage. In these ways, the key Victorian novelists draw attention to a gap between the empty formalism of marriage as a legal, religious and social institution, and the reality of many Victorian marriages.

Nevertheless, many of the same novelists who show their general distaste for the empty performativity of weddings, acknowledge that theatricality itself plays a more complex role in their marriage plots, raising questions about authenticity, fraud and pious deceptions in marriage. For example, Wilkie Collins complicates the argument about theatrical weddings by stressing that quiet weddings, performed without much pomp and ceremony, may also signify deceptive marriages. Moreover, Thomas Hardy emphasizes the value of festive public weddings, which solidify the spouses’ connection to their community. Additionally, both the realist and sensation novelists discussed here, especially Anne Brontë, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins, condone temporary play-acting and deception, which extend beyond weddings, if such performances allow their characters to circumvent inflexible and unjust marriage laws.

In sum, this dissertation analyzes how key Victorian novelists redefine courtship and marriage by focusing on the performative aspects of marriage as a legal and social institution. Those redefinitions are, at times, non-linear and contradictory. They also relate to the continual enmeshing of two primary modes of Victorian narrative, realism and sensationalism, which complicates the view of performativity in marriages as either artificial or authentic.

This thesis takes a look at three major texts: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). These texts are certainly linked by the gothic motif, past trauma (and thus memory), and also desire. However, I see these texts as a set for several reasons. These texts are representations of how the gothic motif can be used to supply the narrative, not supplement it. This means, for me, that the narratives of these texts are not just staples of “the gothic,” but their very architecture is founded upon the gothic tradition. Each text takes place within a house, in a sort of labyrinthine creation, haunting in nature with supernatural manifestations, and, on top of that, a theme of misery within the family. Although these three texts are connected by their treatment and reliance on the gothic motif, I’m drawn to them as a set because of 1) the characters’ transmutability of the spaces they inhabit and 2) the physicality of the publication themselves. I am concerned with the transformations that occur within and without these texts. By that, I mean I am a concerned with transformations within the minds of the characters (development) and the spaces they occupy, as well how these texts call readers to action. Above all, I am concerned with agency, that of the characters within these texts and of the texts themselves. I argue that these spaces within these texts as well as the texts themselves are posthuman. Though, where does regarding these texts as posthuman leave us as scholars?

I argue that the pastoral genre is a literary response to changes in the agrarian economy as landed property is freed from older notions of obligation and political dependence on the monarch. Thus, the Renaissance English pastoral can be read as a cultural form that corresponds to agrarian capitalism and a moment of release of land and natural resources from their embeddedness within local communal formations before they are incorporated into a larger concept of Englishness. While the genre of the pastoral is ostensibly resisting the pressures of modernity - i.e. the corrupting influence of trade and urban life - what struck me is that it does so in ways that look distinctly modern to us, through affirmation of independent forms of intellectual and agrarian labor.

John Milton argued that customs are antithetical to rational judgment. My dissertation, Freedom Under the Law, investigates the conception of rationality that underlies the divorce of tradition and reason in the writings of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660). In this period, republican authors strive to turn English subjects into citizens whose active virtue and rational judgment is unclouded by tradition and habits. This dissertation argues that these writers build their arguments on a paradoxical depiction of the people as both rationally capable of consenting to political association and irrationally bound by custom. In conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, Freedom Under the Law exposes the tensions that arise in the writings of both canonical and non-canonical seventeenth-century authors as they attempt to re-imagine and represent the individual, the family, and the commonwealth. As this project demonstrates, writers ranging from John Milton to the millenarian John Rogers to the Parliamentarian Henry Parker reveal a residual understanding of political and social community that owes its vocabulary to medieval and classical modes of thinking. However, while Aristotelian models of political association closely link reason, habit, and justice, the authors considered in my project present an understanding of individuals as capable of rational action independent of tradition and custom.

This dissertation traces how this revolutionary account of the individual in political association is expressed through a range of often-conflicting formulations of the English nation. Freedom Under the Law begins with Milton's representation of education in the virtues in his early theatrical piece, Comus (1634). This first chapter establishes the guiding question of the project: how is the relationship between individual and community reconfigured in the literature of the seventeenth-century? In chapters two and three, I situate Milton's domestic and political prose of 1643-49 in the context of Puritan marriage manuals and Parliamentarian and royalist tracts. Through these comparisons, I show that Milton's distrust of customary laws produces a representation of the virtuous individual and the ideal nation as independent of their own history and, ironically, driven to constant iconoclastic self-reformation. Chapter four demonstrates how impoverished accounts of natural law lead to a devaluing of the people's legislative authority in Edward Sexby's call for the killing of Oliver Cromwell in Killing No Murder (1657), apologias of the Cromwellian dissolution of the Parliament in 1653, and the Putney Debates in 1647. Chapter five considers Milton's Readie and Easie Way (1660) alongside Fifth Monarchist pamphlets. This chapter questions J.G.A. Pocock's distinction between a medieval custom-based juristic tradition and a republican understanding of rational political life, a distinction adopted widely in Milton studies. I argue that comparison with Aquinas's Aristotelian account of custom and law brings into relief tensions in Milton's model of rational political participation. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the conception of virtue and reason adopted by Milton and his contemporaries allows them to dismiss historically-bound embodiments of justice and reason as enslaving accretions.