Browsing Duke Dissertations by Duke Department "English"

Now showing items 21-40 of 46

Imagined Democracy: Material Publishing, War, and the Emergence of Democratic Thinking in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855-1867

Haile, Adam (2010)

This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political ...
"In Propria Persona": Artifice, Politics, and Propriety in John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Irvin, Matthew William (2009)

This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that the Confessio attempts to expose how discourses of ...
The Labor of Writing in the Pastoral Genre: Philip Sidney's Arcadia through John Milton's Paradise Lost

Zlateva, Ioanna (2010)

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 ...
Learning to Love

Deagman, Rachael (2010)

This study examines medieval edification in all of its rich senses: moral improvement, the building up of community, and the construction of a city or edifice. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and ...
Love, Labor, Liturgy: Languages of Service in Late Medieval England

Knowles, James Robert (2009)

This dissertation explores the complex vocabularies of service and servitude in the Age of Chaucer. Working with three major Middle English texts--William Langland's Piers Plowman (chaps. 1 and 3), Julian of ...
Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination

Tost, Tony (2011)

This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated ...
Models of Confession: Penitential Writing in Late Medieval England

Sirko, Jill (2011)

This project examines the medieval practice of the sacrament of penance and the innovative ways in which medieval literature engaged with the pastoral project of the Catholic church to provide the penitent with a way ...
Modernism after Nietzsche: Art, Ethics, and the Forms of the Everyday

Valentyn, Brian (2012)

This dissertation uses Nietzsche's writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction ...
Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection

Jagoda, Patrick (2010)

Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly ...
Novel Addiction: Consuming Popular Novels in Eighteenth-century Britain

Min, Jayoung (2011)

This dissertation explores the ways in which British popular novels of the eighteenth century functioned as commodities. "Novel Addiction", the title of this dissertation has a double meaning: Addiction was a new ...
The Organic Citizen: Reimagining Democratic Participation and Indigeneity in U.S. Late 19Th and 20Th Century Eco-Narratives

DiStefano, Melinda Ann (2008-12-10)

The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and ...
Postmarked Constellations: Historicity and Paraliterary Form in Late American Fictions

Jones, Keith Robert (2012)

"Postmarked Constellations" examines how three late-twentieth century American writers bring long historical processes into view through their use of paraliterary forms. The term paraliterary is used in this study to ...
Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England

Whitaker, Cord J. (2009)

Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ...
Reading Democracy: Anthologies of African American Women's Writing and the Legacy of Black Feminist Criticism, 1970-1990

Peay, Aisha Dolores (2009)

Taking as its pretext the contemporary moment of self-reflexive critique on the part of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and American Studies, <italic>Reading Democracy</italic> historicizes a black ...
Scriblerian Ethics: Encounters in Satiric Metamorphosis

Knight, William (2009)

"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation ...
Seasons and Sovereigns: Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621

Kelley, Shannon Elizabeth (2009)

<bold>Seasons and Sovereigns: Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621 </bold> Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the ...
Senses of Belonging: The Synaesthetics of Citizenship in American Literature, 1862 - 1903

Fretwell, Erica (2011)

In American letters, the Civil War represented a decisive break in literary form, a shift from interiority to exteriority. Sentimentalism harnessed the transformative effects of aesthetic feeling to galvanize political ...
Shackled in the Garden: Ecology and Race in American Plantation Cultures

Rusert, Britt Marie (2009)

Even in our contemporary moment, the word plantation evokes a distinctly Southern and rural image in which slavery is well hidden within an idyllic botanical scene. And yet, from the very beginning of industrialization ...
The Spatial Unconscious of Global America: A Cartography of Contemporary Social Space and Cultural Forms

Kim, Koonyong (2010)

This dissertation examines space as a privileged yet <italic>repressed</italic> site of cultural production in a global America, in response to ongoing attempts to reconfigure American literary and cultural studies ...
Speaking Subjects: Language, Subject Formation, and the Crisis of Identity

Carter, Phillip M. (2009)

From Labov's (1963) finding that the centralization of the /ay/ and /aw/ diphthongs in Martha's Vineyard was emblematic of resistance to local economic and social change, to Mendoza-Denton's (2008) finding that variation ...