thesis sample of english literature

Literary Criticism

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SAMPLE THESIS STATEMENTS

These sample thesis statements are provided as guides, not as required forms or prescriptions.

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The thesis may focus on an analysis of one of the elements of fiction, drama, poetry or nonfiction as expressed in the work: character, plot, structure, idea, theme, symbol, style, imagery, tone, etc.

In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty creates a fictional character in Phoenix Jackson whose determination, faith, and cunning illustrate the indomitable human spirit.

Note that the work, author, and character to be analyzed are identified in this thesis statement. The thesis relies on a strong verb (creates). It also identifies the element of fiction that the writer will explore (character) and the characteristics the writer will analyze and discuss (determination, faith, cunning).

Further Examples:

The character of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet serves as a foil to young Juliet, delights us with her warmth and earthy wit, and helps realize the tragic catastrophe.

The works of ecstatic love poets Rumi, Hafiz, and Kabir use symbols such as a lover’s longing and the Tavern of Ruin to illustrate the human soul’s desire to connect with God.

The thesis may focus on illustrating how a work reflects the particular genre’s forms, the characteristics of a philosophy of literature, or the ideas of a particular school of thought.

“The Third and Final Continent” exhibits characteristics recurrent in writings by immigrants: tradition, adaptation, and identity.

Note how the thesis statement classifies the form of the work (writings by immigrants) and identifies the characteristics of that form of writing (tradition, adaptation, and identity) that the essay will discuss.

Further examples:

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame reflects characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd in its minimalist stage setting, its seemingly meaningless dialogue, and its apocalyptic or nihilist vision.

A close look at many details in “The Story of an Hour” reveals how language, institutions, and expected demeanor suppress the natural desires and aspirations of women.

The thesis may draw parallels between some element in the work and real-life situations or subject matter: historical events, the author’s life, medical diagnoses, etc.

In Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case,” Paul exhibits suicidal behavior that a caring adult might have recognized and remedied had that adult had the scientific knowledge we have today.

This thesis suggests that the essay will identify characteristics of suicide that Paul exhibits in the story. The writer will have to research medical and psychology texts to determine the typical characteristics of suicidal behavior and to illustrate how Paul’s behavior mirrors those characteristics.

Through the experience of one man, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, accurately depicts the historical record of slave life in its descriptions of the often brutal and quixotic relationship between master and slave and of the fragmentation of slave families.

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” one can draw parallels between the narrator’s situation and the author’s life experiences as a mother, writer, and feminist.

SAMPLE PATTERNS FOR THESES ON LITERARY WORKS

1. In (title of work), (author) (illustrates, shows) (aspect) (adjective). 

Example: In “Barn Burning,” William Faulkner shows the characters Sardie and Abner Snopes struggling for their identity.

2. In (title of work), (author) uses (one aspect) to (define, strengthen, illustrate) the (element of work).

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses foreshadowing to strengthen the plot.

3. In (title of work), (author) uses (an important part of work) as a unifying device for (one element), (another element), and (another element). The number of elements can vary from one to four.

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses the sea as a unifying device for setting, structure and theme.

4. (Author) develops the character of (character’s name) in (literary work) through what he/she does, what he/she says, what other people say to or about him/her.

Example: Langston Hughes develops the character of Semple in “Ways and Means”…

5. In (title of work), (author) uses (literary device) to (accomplish, develop, illustrate, strengthen) (element of work).

Example: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe uses the symbolism of the stranger, the clock, and the seventh room to develop the theme of death.

6. (Author) (shows, develops, illustrates) the theme of __________ in the (play, poem, story).

Example: Flannery O’Connor illustrates the theme of the effect of the selfishness of the grandmother upon the family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

7. (Author) develops his character(s) in (title of work) through his/her use of language.

Example: John Updike develops his characters in “A & P” through his use of figurative language.

Perimeter College, Georgia State University,  http://depts.gpc.edu/~gpcltc/handouts/communications/literarythesis.pdf

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > English > Theses and Dissertations

English Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

Of Mētis and Cuttlefish: Employing Collective Mētis as a Theoretical Framework for Marginalized Communities , Justiss Wilder Burry

What on earth are we doing (?): A Field-Wide Exploration of Design Courses in TPC , Jessica L. Griffith

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study of Cortez, Florida , Karla Ariel Maddox

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Using Movie Clips to Understand Vivid-Phrasal Idioms’ Meanings , Rasha Salem S. Alghamdi

An Exercise in Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, and Ableism in the STAR TREK Franchise , Jessica A. Blackman

Vulnerable Resistance in Victorian Women’s Writing , Stephanie A. Harper

Curricular Assemblages: Understanding Student Writing Knowledge (Re)circulation Across Genres , Adam Phillips

PAD Beyond the Classroom: Integrating PAD in the Scrum Workplace , Jade S. Weiss

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Social Cues in Animated Pedagogical Agents for Second Language Learners: the Application of The Embodiment Principle in Video Design , Sahar M. Alyahya

A Field-Wide Examination of Cross-Listed Courses in Technical Professional Communication , Carolyn M. Gubala

Labor-Based Grading Contracts in the Multilingual FYC Classroom: Unpacking the Variables , Kara Kristina Larson

Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth Century Irish and American Literature , Elizabeth Ricketts

Oppression, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Power Dynamics of Naming and Un-naming in African American Literature, 1794 to 2019 , Melissa "Maggie" Romigh

Generic Expectations in First Year Writing: Teaching Metadiscoursal Reflection and Revision Strategies for Increased Generic Uptake of Academic Writing , Kaelah Rose Scheff

Reframing the Gothic: Race, Gender, & Disability in Multiethnic Literature , Ashely B. Tisdale

Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres , Adrienne D. Vivian

Mental Illness Diagnosis and the Construction of Stigma , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Rhetorical Roundhouse Kicks: Tae Kwon Do Pumsae Practice and Non-Western Embodied Topoi , Spencer Todd Bennington

9/11 Then and Now: How the Performance of Memorial Rhetoric by Presidents Changes to Construct Heroes , Kristen M. Grafton

Kinesthetically Speaking: Human and Animal Communication in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century , Dana Jolene Laitinen

Exploring Refugee Students’ Second Language (L2) Motivational Selves through Digital Visual Representations , Nhu Le

Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema , Shauna A. Maragh

Instrumentalization Theory: An Analytical Heuristic for a Heightened Social Awareness of Machine Learning Algorithms in Social Media , Andrew R. Miller

Intercessory Power: A Literary Analysis of Ethics and Care in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon , Alice Walker’s Meridian , and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child , Kelly Mills

The Power of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach to Comic Studies , Stephanie N. Phillips

Female Identity and Sexuality in Contemporary Indonesian Novels , Zita Rarastesa

"The Fiery Furnaces of Hell": Rhetorical Dynamism in Youngstown, OH , Joshua M. Rea

“We developed solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, and Space-Time in Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction , Kimber L. Wiggs

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Remembrance of a Wound: Ethical Mourning in the Works of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Junot Díaz , José Aparicio

Taking an “Ecological Turn” in the Evaluation of Rhetorical Interventions , Peter Cannon

New GTA’s and the Pre-Semester Orientation: The Need for Informed Refinement , Jessica L. Griffith

Reading Rape and Answering with Empathy: A New Approach to Sexual Assault Education for College Students , Brianna Jerman

The Karoo , The Veld , and the Co-Op: The Farm as Microcosm and Place for Change in Schreiner, Lessing, and Head , Elana D. Karshmer

"The weak are meat, and the strong do eat"; Representations of the Slaughterhouse in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature , Stephanie Lance

Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony , Yulia O. Nekrashevich

Queer Authority in Old and Middle English Literature , Elan J. Pavlinich

Because My Garmin Told Me To: A New Materialist Study of Agency and Wearable Technology , Michael Repici

No One Wants to Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis of Service Course Assignments , Tanya P. Zarlengo

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida , Haili A. Alcorn

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature , Timothy M. Curran

Seeing Trauma: The Known and the Hidden in Nineteenth-Century Literature , Alisa M. DeBorde

Analysis of User Interfaces in the Sharing Economy , Taylor B. Johnson

Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization , Scott Neumeister

The Spectacle of The Bomb: Rhetorical Analysis of Risk of The Nevada Test Site in Technical Communication, Popular Press, and Pop Culture , Tiffany Wilgar

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals , Cassie Patricia Childs

“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , J. Kevin Jordan

Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature , Sucheta Kanjilal

Science in the Sun: How Science is Performed as a Spatial Practice , Natalie Kass

Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage , Curtis Le Van

Tensions Between Democracy and Expertise in the Florida Keys , Elizabeth A. Loyer

Institutional Review Boards and Writing Studies Research: A Justice-Oriented Study , Johanna Phelps-Hillen

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature , Tangela La'Chelle Serls

Aphra Behn on the Contemporary Stage: Behn's Feminist Legacy and Woman-Directed Revivals of The Rover , Nicole Elizabeth Stodard

(Age)ncy in Composition Studies , Alaina Tackitt

Constructing Health Narratives: Patient Feedback in Online Communities , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Rupturing the World of Elite Athletics: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Suspension of the 2011 IAAF Regulations on Hyperandrogenism , Ella Browning

Shaping Climate Citizenship: The Ethics of Inclusion in Climate Change Communication and Policy , Lauren E. Cagle

Drop, Cover, and Hold On: Analyzing FEMA's Risk Communication through Visual Rhetoric , Samantha Jo Cosgrove

Material Expertise: Applying Object-oriented Rhetoric in Marine Policy , Zachary Parke Dixon

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman : From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic , Jarad Heath Fennell

Instattack: Instagram and Visual Ad Hominem Political Arguments , Sophia Evangeline Gourgiotis

Hospitable Climates: Representations of the West Indies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , Marisa Carmen Iglesias

Chosen Champions: Medieval and Early Modern Heroes as Postcolonial Reactions to Tensions between England and Europe , Jessica Trant Labossiere

Science, Policy, and Decision Making: A Case Study of Deliberative Rhetoric and Policymaking for Coastal Adaptation in Southeast Florida , Karen Patricia Langbehn

A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetoric in PhotoShopBattles , Jonathan Paul Ray

Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels , Mary Allison Wise

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Representations of Gatsby: Ninety Years of Retrospective , Christine Anne Auger

Robust, Low Power, Discrete Gate Sizing , Anthony Joseph Casagrande

Wrestling with Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry , Paul T. Corrigan

#networkedglobe: Making the Connection between Social Media and Intercultural Technical Communication , Laura Anne Ewing

Evidence of Things Not Seen: A Semi-Automated Descriptive Phrase and Frame Analysis of Texts about the Herbicide Agent Orange , Sarah Beth Hopton

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home , Rondrea Danielle Mathis

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, and the Social Media Aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing , Megan M. Mcintyre

Now, We Hear Through a Voice Darkly: New Media and Narratology in Cinematic Art , James Anthony Ricci

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry , Katherine Jesse Royce

Women's Narratives of Confinement: Domestic Chores as Threads of Resistance and Healing , Jacqueline Marie Smith

Domestic Spaces in Transition: Modern Representations of Dwelling in the Texts of Elizabeth Bowen , Shannon Tivnan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Paradise Always Already Lost: Myth, Memory, and Matter in English Literature , Elizabeth Stuart Angello

Overcoming the 5th-Century BCE Epistemological Tragedy: A Productive Reading of Protagoras of Abdera , Ryan Alan Blank

Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema , Adam Breckenridge

Material and Textual Spaces in the Poetry of Montagu, Leapor, Barbauld, and Robinson , Jessica Lauren Cook

Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of Three Plays by William Shakespeare , Angela Eward-Mangione

Risk of Compliance: Tracing Safety and Efficacy in Mef-Lariam's Licensure , Julie Marie Gerdes

Beyond Performance: Rhetoric, Collective Memory, and the Motive of Imprinting Identity , Brenda M. Grau

Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression , Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes

Integrating Reading and Writing For Florida's ESOL Program , George Douglas Mcarthur

Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley , Katherine Marie McGee

Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni Morrison's Fiction , Jessica Mckee

The "Defective" Generation: Disability in Modernist Literature , Deborah Susan Mcleod

Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity , Joy Ann Sanchez-Taylor

Hermes, Technical Communicator of the Gods: The Theory, Design, and Creation of a Persuasive Game for Technical Communication , Eric Walsh

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Rhetorical Spirits: Spirituality as Rhetorical Device in New Age Womanist of Color Texts , Ronisha Witlee Browdy

Disciplinarity, Crisis, and Opportunity in Technical Communication , Jason Robert Carabelli

The Terror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic , Kurt Fawver

Unbearable Weight, Unbearable Witness: The (Im)possibility of Witnessing Eating Disorders in Cyberspace , Kristen Nicole Gay

the post- 9/11 aesthetic: repositioning the zombie film in the horror genre , Alan Edward Green, Jr.

An(other) Rhetoric: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Rhetorical Tradition , Kathleen Sandell Hardesty

Mapping Dissertation Genre Ecology , Kate Lisbeth Pantelides

Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age , Daniel Patrick Richards

"Of That Transfigured World" : Realism and Fantasy in Victorian Literature , Benjamin Jude Wright

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Home > ARTSSCI > English > dissertations

English Dissertations and Theses

The English Department Dissertations and Theses Series is comprised of dissertations and thesis authored by Marquette University's English Department doctoral and master's students.

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect , Liamog Seamus Drislane

Disillusionment and Domesticity in Mid-20th-Century British Catholic Literature , Catherine Simmerer

A LIBERATED WEST?: FEMALE AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF THE "REAL AND THE FANTASIZED" ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER , Amanda Diane Zastrow

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Lifting the Postmodern Veil: Cosmopolitanism, Humanism, and Decolonization in Global Fictions of the 21st Century , Matthew Burchanoski

Gothic Transformations and Remediations in Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Wendy Fall

Milton’s Learning: Complementarity and Difference in Paradise Lost , Peter Spaulding

“The Development of the Conceptive Plot Through Early 19th-Century English Novels” , Jannea R. Thomason

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Gonzo Eternal , John Francis Brick

Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing , Jackielee Derks

Innovation, Genre, and Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel , David Aiden Kenney II

Reluctant Sons: The Irish Matrilineal Tradition of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien , Jessie Wirkus Haynes

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, and Ambivalence in Early Modern Literature , Mark Edward Wisniewski

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse , Hailey Whetten

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century , Danielle Kristene Clapham

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Social Problem Novels , Hunter Nicole Duncan

Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction , Kathryn Hendrickson

A Productive Failure: Existentialism in Fin de Siècle England , Maxwell Patchet

Inquiry and Provocation: The Use of Ambiguity in Sixteenth-Century English Political Satire , Jason James Zirbel

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

No Home but the World: Forced Migration and Transnational Identity , Justice Hagan

The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility , Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

The Fantastic and the First World War , Brian Kenna

Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender-Specific Manifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature , Anna P. Scanlon

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief and Grievance in the Joy Luck Club, Beloved, and Anil's Ghost , Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature , Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Literary Cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy , Sunil Samuel Macwan

The View from Here: Toward a Sissy Critique , Tyler Monson

The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity and Anglophone Women War Writers of the Great War , Sareene Proodian

Theatrical Weddings and Pious Frauds: Performance and Law in Victorian Marriage Plots , Adrianne A. Wojcik

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Changing the Victorian Habit Loop: The Body in the Poetry and Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris , Bryan Gast

Gendering Scientific Discourse from 1790-1830: Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Marcet , Bridget E. Kapler

Discarding Dreams and Legends: The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty , Katy L. Leedy

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Saving the Grotesque: The Grotesque System of Liberation in British Modernism (1922-1932) , Matthew Henningsen

The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance , Michael William Keller

A Single Man of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities and Consumerism in the New Novel of Manners , Bonnie McLean

Julian of Norwich: Voicing the Vernacular , Therese Elaine Novotny

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Homecomings: Victorian British Women Travel Writers And Revisions Of Domesticity , Emily Paige Blaser

From Pastorals to Paterson: Ecology in the Poetry and Poetics of William Carlos WIlliams , Daniel Edmund Burke

Argument in Poetry: (Re)Defining the Middle English Debate in Academic, Popular, and Physical Contexts , Kathleen R. Burt

Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England , Steven A. Hackbarth

The Creation of Heaven in the Middle Ages , William Storm

(re)making The Gentleman: Genteel Masculinities And The Country Estate In The Novels Of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, And Elizabeth Gaskell , Shaunna Kay Wilkinson

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Brides, Department Stores, Westerns, and Scrapbooks--The Everyday Lives of Teenage Girls in the 1940s , Carly Anger

Placed People: Rootedness in G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry , David Harden

Rhetorics Of Girlhood Trauma In Writing By Holly Goddard Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, And Jamaica Kincaid , Stephanie Marie Stella

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital , Brandon Chitwood

"Be-Holde the First Acte of this Tragedy" : Generic Symbiosis and Cross-Pollination in Jacobean Drama and the Early Modern Prose Novella , Karen Ann Zyck Galbraith

Pamela: Or, Virtue Reworded: The Texts, Paratexts, and Revisions that Redefine Samuel Richardson's Pamela , Jarrod Hurlbert

Violence and Masculinity in American Fiction, 1950-1975 , Magdalen McKinley

Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood , Susan Muse

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, and Postnational Identity in Four Novels by Irish Women, 1960-2000 , Sarah Nestor

Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell , Rebecca Parker Fedewa

Spirit of the Psyche: Carl Jung's and Victor White's Influence on Flannery O'Connor's Fiction , Paul Wakeman

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Performing the Audience: Constructing Playgoing in Early Modern Drama , Eric Dunnum

Paule Marshall's Critique of Contemporary Neo-Imperialisms Through the Trope of Travel , Michelle Miesen Felix

Hermeneutics, Poetry, and Spenser: Augustinian Exegesis and the Renaissance Epic , Denna Iammarino-Falhamer

Encompassing the Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, and Inscription in the Fiction of John McGahern , John Keegan Malloy

Regional Consciousness in American Literature, 1860-1930 , Kelsey Louise Squire

The Ethics of Ekphrasis: The Turn to Responsible Rhetoric in Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry , Joshua Scott Steffey

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Cognitive Architectures: Structures of Passion in Joanna Baillie's Dramas , Daniel James Bergen

On Trial: Restorative Justice in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family Fictions , Colleen M. Fenno

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

What's the point to eschatology : multiple religions and terminality in James Joyce's Finnegans wake , Martin R. Brick

Economizing Characters: Harriet Martineau and the Problems of Poverty in Victorian Literature, Culture and Law , Mary Colleen Willenbring

Submissions from 2008 2008

"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad , Marcia Eppich-Harris

Bearing the Mark of the Social: Notes Towards a Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman , Megan M. Muthupandiyan

The Gothic Novel and the Invention of the Middle-Class Reader: Northanger Abbey As Case Study , Tenille Nowak

Not Just a Novel of Epic Proportions: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man As Modern American Epic , Dana Edwards Prodoehl

Recovering the Radicals: Women Writers, Reform, and Nationalist Modes of Revolutionary Discourse , Mark J. Zunac

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

"The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , Amy M. Amendt-Raduege

The Games Men Play: Madness and Masculinity in Post-World War II American Fiction, 1946-1964 , Thomas P. Durkin

Denise Levertov: Through An Ecofeminist Lens , Katherine A. Hanson

The Wit of Wrestling: Devotional-Aesthetic Tradition in Christina Rossetti's Poetry , Maria M.E. Keaton

Genderless Bodies: Stigma and the Myth of Womanhood , Ellen M. Letizia

Envy and Jealousy in the Novels of the Brontës: A Synoptic Discernment , Margaret Ann McCann

Technologies of the Late Medieval Self: Ineffability, Distance, and Subjectivity in the Book of Margery Kempe , Crystal L. Mueller

"Finding-- a Map-- to That Place Called Home": The Journey from Silence to Recovery in Patrick McCabe's Carn and Breakfast on Pluto , Valerie A. Murrenus Pilmaier

Emily Dickinson's Ecocentric Pastoralism , Moon-ju Shin

The American Jeremiad in Civil War Literature , Jacob Hadley Stratman

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

Literary Art in Times of Crisis: The Proto-Totalitarian Anxiety of Melville, James, and Twain , Matthew J. Darling

(Re) Writing Genre: Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison , Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert

"Amsolookly Kersse": Clothing in Finnegan's Wake , Catherine Simpson Kalish

"Do Your Will": Shakespeare's Use of the Rhetoric of Seduction in Four Plays , Jason James Nado

Woman in Emblem: Locating Authority in the Work and Identity of Katherine Philips (1632-1664) , Susan L. Stafinbil

When the Bough Breaks: Poetry on Abortion , Wendy A. Weaver

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

Heroic Destruction: Shame and Guilt Cultures in Medieval Heroic Poetry , Karl E. Boehler

Poe and Early (Un)American Drama , Amy C. Branam

Grammars of Assent: Constructing Poetic Authority in An Age of Science , William Myles Carroll III

This Place is Not a Place: The Constructed Scene in the Works of Sir Walter Scott , Colin J. Marlaire

Cognitive Narratology: A Practical Approach to the Reader-Writer Relationship , Debra Ann Ripley

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

Defoe and the Pirates: Function of Genre Conventions in Raiding Narratives , William J. Dezoma

Creative Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novel , Michelle Ruggaber Dougherty

Exclusionary Politics: Mourning and Modernism in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew , Donna Decker Schuster

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Toward a Re-Formed Confession: Johann Gerhard's Sacred Meditations and "Repining Restlessnesse" in the Poetry of George Herbert , Erik P. Ankerberg

Idiographic Spaces: Representation, Ideology and Realism in the Postmodern British Novel , Gordon B. McConnell

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Reading into It: Wallace Stegner's Novelistic Sense of Time and Place , Colin C. Irvine

Brisbane and Beyond: Revising Social Capitalism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America , Michael C. Mattek

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Christians and Mimics in W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems , Patrick Mulrooney

Renaissance Roles and the Process of Social Change , John Wieland

'Straunge Disguize': Allegory and Its Discontents in Spenser's Faerie Queene , Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Reading American Women's Autobiography: Spheres of Identity, Spheres of Influence , Amy C. Getty

"Making Strange": The Art and Science of Selfhood in the Works of John Banville , Heather Maureen Moran

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Home > College of Arts and Sciences > English Language and Literature > Master's Theses

Master's Theses - English Language and Literature

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

“Hideous things have happened here”: Rape myths, rape culture, and healing in adolescent literature , Holly J. Greca

Moments of excess: Type 1 diabetes and the myth of control in adolescent fiction for girls , Michelle E. LeGault

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

A sociophonetic analysis of female-sounding virtual assistants , Alyssa Allen

Vampire narratives: Looking at queer-centric experiences in comparison to hetero-centric norms in order to model a new queer vampiric experience , Marah Heikkila

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Overhearers’ perceptions of familiarity between interlocutors in computer-mediated communication based on GIF usage , Alexa F. Druckmiller

Feminism by proxy: Jane Austen’s critique of patriarchal society in Pride and Prejudice and Emma , Alexis Miller

The memory of mythmaking: Transgenerational trauma and disability as a collective experience in Afrofuturist storytelling , Jessica Tapley

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Body image/imagining bodies: Trauma, control, and healing in graphic memoirs about anorexia , Kristine M. Gatchel

Word-final /t/-release and linguistic style: An investigation of the speech of two Jewish women from metro Detroit , Janet Leppala

Hermione syndrome: Reexamining feminist sidekicks and power in 2000-2010 children’s and young adult fantasy literature , Josiah Pankiewicz

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Fear and (non) fiction: Agrarian anxiety in “The Colour Out of Space” , Antonio Barroso

Sculpted from clay, shaped by power: Feminine narrative and agency in Wonder Woman , Mikala Carpenter

Players in a storm: Climate and political migrants in The Tempest and Othello , Darcie Rees

Reclaiming racial/ethnic identity vs. reconstructing Asian American masculinity in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese , Hyun-Joo Yoo

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

The organization of turn-taking in fieldwork settings: A case study , Amy Brunett

Exploring the political impact of literature and literary studies in American government , Taylor Dereadt

"We met in a bar by happenstance": Master narratives in couples stories , Brent A. Miller

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

What is the negro woman's story?: Negro Story Magazine and the dialogue of feminist voices , Maureen Convery

Illustrating adolescent awareness: Teaching historical injustices and promoting agency through picture books in secondary classrooms , Melissa Hoak

Phonemic inventory of the Shor language , Uliana Kazagasheva

Cannibalism in contact narratives and the evolution of the wendigo , Michelle Lietz

Parody and the pen: Pippi Longstocking, Harriet M. Welsch, and Flavia de Luce as disrupters of space, language, and the male gaze , Kelsey McLendon

Haec fortis sequitur illam indocti possident: A linguistic analysis of demonstratives in genres of early Latin fragments , Erica L. Meszaros

Tricking for change: Establishing the literary trickster in the western tradition , Christopher Michael Stuart

Because, x: A new construction of because in popular culture , Stephanie Walla

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Home > ACADEMIC-UNITS > College of Arts and Sciences > Department of English Language and Literature > ENGLISH_ETD

MA in English Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2018 2018.

Implementing Critical Analysis in the Classroom to Negate Southern Stereotypes in Multi-Media , Julie Broyhill

Fan Fiction in the English Language Arts Classroom , Kristen Finucan

Transferring the Mantle: The Voice of the Poet Prophet in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson , Heidi Brown Hyde

The Effects of Social Media as Low-Stakes Writing Tasks , Roxanne Loving

Student and Teacher Perceptions of Multiliterate Assignments Utilizing 21st Century Skills , Jessica Kennedy Miller

The Storytellers’ Trauma: A Place to Call Home in Caribbean Literature , Ilari Pass

Post Title IX Representations of Professional Female Athletes , Emily Shaw

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

“Not as She is” but as She is Expected to Be: Representations, Limitations, and Implications of the “Woman” and Womanhood in Selected Victorian Literature and Contemporary Chick Lit. , Amanda Ellen Bridgers

The Intrinsic Factors that Influence Successful College Writing , Kenneth Dean Carlstrom

"Where nature was most plain and pure": The Sacred Locus Amoenus and its Profane Threat in Andrew Marvell's Pastoral Poetry , James Brent King

Colorblind: How Cable News and the “Cult of Objectivity” Normalized Racism in Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign , Amanda Leeann Shoaf

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences , Joseph Austin Thurmond

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Nature, Function, and Value of Emojis as Contemporary Tools of Digital Interpersonal Communication , Nicole L. Bliss-Carroll

Exile and Identity: Chaim Potok's Contribution to Jewish-American Literature , Sarah Anne Hamner

A Woman's Voice and Identity: Narrative Métissage as a Solution to Voicelessness in American Literature , Kali Lauren Oldacre

Pop, Hip Hop, and Empire, Study of a New Pedagogical Approach in a Developmental Reading and English Class , Karen Denise Taylor

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Abandoning the Shadows and Seizing the Stage: A Perspective on a Feminine Discourse of Resistance Theatre as Informed by the Work of Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, and the Sistren Theatre Collective , Brianna A. Bleymaier

Mexican Immigrants as "Other": An Interdisciplinary Analysis of U.S. Immigration Legislation and Political Cartoons , Olivia Teague Morgan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

"I Am a Living Enigma - And You Want To Know the Right Reading of Me": Gender Anxiety in Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel and The Guilty River , Hannah Allford

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Gender Performance and the Reclamation of Masculinity in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns , John William Salyers Jr.

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

"That's a Lotta Faith We're Putting in a Word": Language, Religion, and Heteroglossia as Oppression and Resistance in Comtemporary British Dystopian Fiction , Haley Cassandra Gambrell

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Mirroring the Madness: Caribbean Female Development in the Works of Elizabeth Nunez , Lauren Delli Santi

"Atlas Shrugged" and third-wave feminism: An unlikely alliance , Paul McMahan

"Sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on": The use of cross-dressing in order to achieve female agency in Shakespeare's transvestite comedies , Heather Lynn Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Between the Way to the Cross and Emmaus: Deconstructing Identity in the 325 CE Council of Nicaea and "The Shack" , Trevar Simmons

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Department of English

Recent PhD Dissertations

Terekhov, Jessica (September 2022) -- "On Wit in Relation to Self-Division"

Selinger, Liora (September 2022) -- "Romanticism, Childhood, and the Poetics of Explanation"

Lockhart, Isabel (September 2022) -- "Storytelling and the Subsurface: Indigenous Fiction, Extraction, and the Energetic Present"

Ashe, Nathan (April 2022) – "Narrative Energy: Physics and the Scientific Real in Victorian Literature”

Bartley, Scott H. (April 2022) – “Watch it closely: The Poetry and Poetics of Aesthetic Focus in The New Criticism and Middle Generation”

Mctar, Ali (November 2021) – “Fallen Father: John Milton, Antinomianism, and the Case Against Adam”

Chow, Janet (September 2021) – “Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk”

Thorpe, Katherine (September 2021) – “Protean Figures: Personified Abstractions from Milton’s Allegory to Wordsworth’s Psychology of the Poet”

Minnen, Jennifer (September 2021) – “The Second Science: Feminist Natural Inquiry in Nineteenth-Century British Literature”

Starkowski, Kristen (September 2021) – “Doorstep Moments: Close Encounters with Minor Characters in the Victorian Novel”

Rickard, Matthew (September 2021) – “Probability: A Literary History, 1479-1700”

Crandell, Catie (September 2021) – “Inkblot Mirrors: On the Metareferential Mode and 19th Century British Literature”

Clayton, J.Thomas (September 2021) – “The Reformation of Indifference: Adiaphora, Toleration, and English Literature in the Seventeenth Century”

Goldberg, Reuven L. (May 2021) – “I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and the Trans Narrative”

Soong, Jennifer (May 2021) – “Poetic Forgetting”

Edmonds, Brittney M. (April 2021) – “Who’s Laughing Now? Black Affective Play and Formalist Innovation in Twenty-First Century black Literary Satire”

Azariah-Kribbs, Colin (April 2021) – “Mere Curiosity: Knowledge, Desire, and Peril in the British and Irish Gothic Novel, 1796-1820”

Pope, Stephanie (January 2021) – “Rethinking Renaissance Symbolism: Material Culture, Visual Signs, and Failure in Early Modern Literature, 1587-1644”

Kumar, Matthew (September 2020) – “The Poetics of Space and Sensation in Scotland and Kenya”

Bain, Kimberly (September 2020) – “On Black Breath”

Eisenberg, Mollie (September 2020) – “The Case of the Self-Conscious Detective Novel: Modernism, Metafiction, and the Terms of Literary Value”

Hori, Julia M. (September 2020) – “Restoring Empire: British Imperial Nostalgia, Colonial Space, and Violence since WWII”

Reade, Orlando (June 2020) – “Being a Lover of the World: Lyric Poetry and Political Disaffection after the English Civil War”

Mahoney, Cate (June 2020) – “Go on Your Nerve: Confidence in American Poetry, 1860-1960”

Ritger, Matthew (April 2020) – “Objects of Correction:  Literature and the Birth of Modern Punishment”

VanSant, Cameron (April 2020) – “Novel Subjects:  Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Transformation of British Subjecthood”

Lennington, David (November 2019) – “Anglo-Saxon and Arabic Identity in the Early Middle Ages”

Marraccini, Miranda (September 2019) – “Feminist Types: Reading the Victoria Press”

Harlow, Lucy (June 2019) – “The Discomposed Mind”

Williamson, Andrew (June 2019) – “Nothing to Say:  Silence in Modernist American Poetry”

Adair, Carl (April 2019) – “Faithful Readings: Religion, Hermeneutics, and the Habits of Criticism”

Rogers, Hope (April 2019) – “Good Girls: Female Agency and Convention in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”

Green, Elspeth (January 2019) – “Popular Science and Modernist Poetry”

Braun, Daniel (January 2019) – Kinds of Wrong: The Liberalization of Modern Poetry 1910-1960”

Rosen, Rebecca (November 2018) – “Making the body Speak: Anatomy, Autopsy and Testimony in Early America, 1639-1790”

Blank, Daniel (November 2018) – Shakespeare and the Spectacle of University Drama”

Case, Sarah (September 2018) – Increase of Issue: Poetry and Succession in Elizabethan England”

Kucik, Emanuela  (June 2018) – “Black Genocides and the Visibility Paradox in Post-Holocaust African American and African Literature”

Quinn, Megan  (June 2018) – “The Sensation of Language: Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley”

McCarthy, Jesse D.  (June 2018) – “The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, 1945-1965

Johnson, Colette E.  (June 2018) – “The Foibles of Play: Three Case Studies on Play in the Interwar Years”

Gingrich, Brian P.  (June 2018) – “The Pace of Modern Fiction: A History of Narrative Movement in Modernity”

Marcus, Sara R.  (June 2018) – “Political Disappointment: A Partial History of a Feeling”

Parry, Rosalind A.  (April 2018) – “Remaking Nineteenth-Century Novels for the Twentieth Century”

Gibbons, Zoe  (January 2018) – “From Time to Time:  Narratives of Temporality in Early Modern England, 1610-1670”

Padilla, Javier  (September 2017) – “Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Temporality:  Between Modernity and Coloniality”

Alvarado, Carolina (June 2017) – "Pouring Eastward: Editing American Regionalism, 1890-1940"

Gunaratne, Anjuli (May 2017) – "Tragic Resistance: Decolonization and Disappearance in Postcolonial Literature"

Glover, Eric (May 2017) – "By and About:  An Antiracist History of the Musicals and the Antimusicals of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston"

Tuckman, Melissa (April 2017) – "Unnatural Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Poetry"

Eggan, Taylor (April 2017) – "The Ecological Uncanny: Estranging Literary Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Narrative Fiction"

Calver, Harriet (March 2017) – "Modern Fiction and Its Phantoms"

Gaubinger, Rachel (December 2016) – "Between Siblings: Form and Family in the Modern Novel"

Swartz, Kelly (December 2016) – "Maxims and the Mind: Sententiousness from Seventeenth-Century Science to the Eighteenth-Century Novel"

Robles, Francisco (June 2016) – “Migrant Modalities: Radical Democracy and Intersectional Praxis in American Literatures, 1923-1976”

Johnson, Daniel (June 2016) – “Visible Plots, Invisible Realms”

Bennett, Joshua (June 2016) – “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of the Animal in 20th Century African American Literature”

Scranton, Roy (January 2016) – “The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the Politics of Trauma, 1945-1975

Jacob, Priyanka (November 2015) – “Things That Linger: Secrets, Containers and Hoards in the Victorian Novel”

Evans, William (November 2015) – “The Fiction of Law in Shakespeare and Spenser”

Vasiliauskas, Emily (November 2015) – “Dead Letters: The Afterlife Before Religion”

Walker, Daniel (June 2015) – “Sociable Uncertainties: Literature and the Ethics of Indeterminacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain”

Reilly, Ariana (June 2015) – “Leave-Takings: Anti-Self-Consciousness and the Escapist Ends of the Victorian Marriage Plot”

Lerner, Ross (June 2015) – "Framing Fanaticism: Religion, Violence, and the Reformation Literature of Self-Annihilation”

Harrison, Matthew (June 2015) – "Tear Him for His Bad Verses: Poetic Value and Literary History in Early Modern England”

Krumholtz, Matthew (June 2015) – “Talking Points: American Dialogue in the Twentieth Century”

Dauber, Maayan (March 2015) – "The Pathos of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein (with a coda on J.M. Coetzee)”

Hostetter, Lyra (March 2015) – “Novel Errantry: An Annotated Edition of Horatio, of Holstein (1800)”

Sanford, Beatrice (January 2015) – “Love’s Perception: Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Attachment”

Chong, Kenneth (January 2015) – “Potential Theologies: Scholasticism and Middle English Literature”

Worsley, Amelia (September 2014) – “The Poetry of Loneliness from Romance to Romanticism”

Hurtado, Jules (June 2014) – “The Pornographer at the Crossroads: Sex, Realism and Experiment in the Contemporary English Novel”

Rutherford, James (June 2014) – "Irrational Actors: Literature and Logic in Early Modern England”

Wilde, Lisa (June 2014) – “English Numeracy and the Writing of New Worlds, 1543-1622”

Hyde, Emily (November 2013) – “A Way of Seeing: Modernism, Illustration, and Postcolonial Literature”

Ortiz, Ivan (September 2013) – “Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport”

Aronowicz, Yaron (September 2013) – “Fascinated Moderns: The Attentions of Modern Fiction”

Wythoff, Grant (September 2013) – “Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination”

Ramachandran, Anitha (September 2013) – "Recovering Global Women’s Travel Writings from the Modern Period: An Inquiry Into Genre and Narrative Agency”

Reuland, John (April 2013) – “The Self Unenclosed: A New Literary History of Pragmatism, 1890-1940”

Wasserman, Sarah (January 2013) – “Material Losses: Urban Ephemera in Contemporary American Literature and Culture”

Kastner, Tal (November 2012) – "The Boilerplate of Everything and the Ideal of Agreement in American Law and Literature"

Labella, John (October 2012) – "Lyric Hemisphere: Latin America in United States Poetry, 1927-1981"

Kindley, Evan (September 2012) – "Critics and Connoisseurs: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Modernism"

Smith, Ellen (September 2012) – "Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927-1945"

Werlin, Julianne (September 2012) – "The Impossible Probable: Modeling Utopia in Early Modern England"

Posmentier, Sonya (May 2012) – "Cultivation and Catastrophe:  Forms of Nature in Twentieth-Century Poetry of the Black Diaspora"

Alfano, Veronica (September 2011) – “The Lyric in Victorian Memory”

Foltz, Jonathan (September 2011) – “Modernism and the Narrative Cultures of Film”

Coghlan, J. Michelle (September 2011) – “Revolution’s Afterlife; The Paris Commune in American Cultural Memory, 1871-1933”

Christoff, Alicia (September 2011) – “Novel Feeling”

Shin, Jacqueline (August 2011) – “Picturing Repose: Between the Acts of British Modernism”

Ebrahim, Parween (August 2011) – “Outcasts and Inheritors: The Ishmael Ethos in American Culture, 1776-1917”

Reckson, Lindsay (August 2011) – “Realist Ecstasy: Enthusiasm in American Literature 1886 - 1938"

Londe, Gregory (June 2011) – “Enduring Modernism: Forms of Surviving Location in the 20th Century Long Poem”

Brown, Adrienne (June 2011) – “Reading Between the Skylines: The Skyscraper in American Modernism”

Russell, David (June 2011) – “A Literary History of Tact: Sociability, Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain”

Hostetter, Aaron (December 2010) – "The Politics of Eating and Cooking in Medieval English Romance"

Moshenska, Joseph (November 2010) – " 'Feeling Pleasures': The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England"

Walker, Casey (September 2010) – "The City Inside: Intimacy and Urbanity in Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf"

Rackin, Ethel (August 2010) – "Ornamentation and Essence in Modernist Poetry"

Noble, Mary (August 2010) – "Primitive Marriage: Anthropology and Nineteenth-Century Fiction"

Fox, Renee (August 2010) – "Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation, History and the Politics of Literary Innovation, 1868-1903"

Hopper, Briallen (June 2010) – “Feeling Right in American Reform Culture”

Lee, Wendy (June 2010) -- "Failures of Feeling in the British Novel from Richardson to Eliot"

Moyer, James (March 2010) – "The Passion of Abolitionism: How Slave Martyrdom Obscures Slave Labor”

Forbes, Erin (September 2009) – “Genius of Deep Crime:  Literature, Enslavement and the American Criminal”

Crawforth, Hannah (September 2009) – “The Politics and Poetics of Etymology in Early Modern Literature”

Elliott, Danielle (April 2009) – "Sea of Bones: The Middle Passage in Contemporary Poetry of the Black Atlantic”

Yu, Wesley (April 2009) – “Romance Logic: The Argument of Vernacular Verse in the Scholastic Middle Ages”

Cervantes, Gabriel (April 2009) – "Genres of Correction: Anglophone Literature and the Colonial Turn in Penal Law 1722-1804”

Rosinberg, Erwin (January 2009) – "A Further Conjunction: The Couple and Its Worlds in Modern British Fiction”

Walsh, Keri (January 2009) – "Antigone in Modernism: Classicism, Feminism, and Theatres of Protest”

Heald, Abigail (January 2009) – “Tears for Dido: A Renaissance Poetics of Feeling”

Bellin, Roger (January 2009) – "Argument: The American Transcendentalists and Disputatious Reason”

Ellis, Nadia (November 2008) – "Colonial Affections: Formulations of Intimacy Between England and the Caribbean, 1930-1963”

Baskin, Jason (November 2008) – “Embodying Experience: Romanticism and Social Life in the Twentieth Century”

Barrett, Jennifer-Kate (September 2008) – “ ‘So Written to Aftertimes’: Renaissance England’s Poetics of Futurity”

Moss, Daniel (September 2008) – “Renaissance Ovids: The Metamorphosis of Allusion in Late Elizabethan England”

Rainof, Rebecca (September 2008) – “Purgatory and Fictions of Maturity: From Newman to Woolf”

Darznik, Jasmin (November 2007) – “Writing Outside the Veil: Literature by Women of the Iranian Diaspora”

Bugg, John (September 2007) – “Gagging Acts: The Trials of British Romanticism”

Matson, John (September 2007) – “Marking Twain: Mechanized Composition and Medial Subjectivity in the Twain Era”

Neel, Alexandra (September 2007) – “The Writing of Ice: The Literature and Photography of Polar Regions”

Smith-Browne, Stephanie (September 2007) – “Gothic and the Pacific Voyage: Patriotism, Romance and Savagery in South Seas Travels and the Utopia of the Terra Australis”

Bystrom, Kerry (June 2007) – “Orphans and Origins: Family, Memory, and Nation in Argentina and South Africa”

Ards, Angela (June 2007) – “Affirmative Acts: Political Piety in African American Women’s Contemporary Autobiography”

Cragwall, Jasper (June 2007) – “Lake Methodism”

Ball, David (June 2007) – “False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism, 1850-1950”

Ramdass, Harold (June 2007) – “Miswriting Tragedy: Genealogy, History and Orthography in the Canterbury Tales, Fragment I”

Lilley, James (June 2007) – “Common Things: Transatlantic Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging, 1764-1840”

Noble, Mary (March 2007) – “Primitive Marriage: Anthropology and Nineteenth-Century Fiction”

Passannante, Gerard (January 2007) – “The Lucretian Renaissance: Ancient Poetry and Humanism in an Age of Science”

Tessone, Natasha (November 2006) – “The Fiction of Inheritance: Familial, Cultural, and National Legacies in the Irish and Scottish Novel”

Horrocks, Ingrid (September 2006) – “Reluctant Wanderers, Mobile Feelings: Moving Figures in Eighteenth-Century Literature”

Bender, Abby (June 2006) – “Out of Egypt and into bondage: Exodus in the Irish National Imagination”

Johnson, Hannah (June 2006) – “The Medieval Limit: Historiography, Ethics, Culture”

Horowitz, Evan (January 2006) – “The Writing of Modern Life”

White, Gillian (November 2005) – “ ‘We Do Not Say Ourselves Like That in Poems’: The Poetics of Contingency in Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop

Baudot, Laura (September 2005) – “Looking at Nothing: Literary Vacuity in the Long Eighteenth Century”

Hicks, Kevin (September 2005) – “Acts of Recovery: American Antebellum Fictions”

Stern, Kimberly (September 2005) – “The Victorian Sibyl: Women Reviewers and the Reinvention of Critical Tradition”

Nardi, Steven (May 2005) – “Automatic Aesthetics: Race, Technology, and Poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and American New Poetry”

Sayeau, Michael (May 2005) – “Everyday: Literature, Modernity, and Time”

Cooper, Lawrence (April 2005) – “Gothic Realities: The Emergence of Cultural Forms Through Representations of the Unreal”

Betjemann, Peter (November 2004) – “Talking Shop: Craft and Design in Hawthorne, James, and Wharton”

Forbes, Aileen (November 2004) – “Passion Play: Theaters of Romantic Emotion”

Keeley, Howard (November 2004) – “Beyond Big House and Cabin: Dwelling Politically in Modern Irish Literature”

Machlan, Elizabeth (November 2004) – “Panic Rooms: Architecture and Anxiety in New York Stories from 1900 to 9/11”

McDowell, Demetrius (November 2004) – “Hawthorne, James, and the Pressures of the Literary Marketplace”

Waldron, Jennifer (November 2004) – “Eloquence of the Body: Aesthetics, Theology, and English Renaissance Theater”

Department of English

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Graduate Thesis Examples

The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. View our more recent titles below.

Our Recent Titles:

• “The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in  Sula  and  Recitatif ” (2024 Anyabwile)
• “The Great (Genre) Escape” (2024 Perrin)
• “Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Cranford ” (2024 Perry)
• “‘Don’t Question the Experts’: Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice” (2024 Thompson)
• “Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins’s  The Hunger Games  Trilogy and Prequel  The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ” (2024 Wooten)
• “Parts of the Story: An Illustrated Short Story Collection” (2023 Beal)
• “‘What lady wouldn’t wish to join causes with women who stood up for other women?’: Heroines’ Rivalries and Friendships in Popular Romance Novels” (2023 Bradford)
• “Breaking Away: Some Essays on Influence” (2023 Ferrer)
• “Posting to Engage: A Study of the Effects of Recovery-Oriented Rhetoric on Community Building for Individuals with Eating Disorders and Associated Symptoms on Instagram” (2023 Horton)
• “Being Born: A Memoir of Self-Making in Four Parts” (2023 Langford)
• “‘Widen the Lens and See’: Poetry, Photography, and the Act of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (2023 Marlow)
• “Engaging Secondary Students Through Secondary Worlds: An Approach to Teaching Tolkien at the High School Level” (2022 Casey)
• “The Religious and the Secular Mythology in  Idylls of the King ” (2022 Kirkendall)
• “‘…A Hideous Monster’: Social Repression and Rebellion in Gregory Corso’s ‘The American Way’” (2022 LeBey)
• “Individualism, Materialism, and Sacrifice in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’” (2022 Nalbandian)
• “Burying the Carnival” (2022 Overdurf)
• “Attending to Time in Narratives of Enslavement: Temporal Alterities and Lived Experiences of Time in Toni Morrison’s  Beloved ” (2021 Bischoff)
• “‘Beasts who walk alone’: Narrating Queer Abjection in Djuna Barnes’s  Nightwood  and Jordy Rosenberg’s  Confessions of the Fox ” (2021 McGuirk)
• “Reach Out and Touch Faith: Haptic Reciprocity in Milton’s  Paradise Lost ” (2021 Ricks)
• “Gender Matters: Amante’s Gender Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’” (2021 Willis)
• “Braddon’s Body of Bigamy: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis” (2021 Waxman)
• “‘Memory is all that Matters;’ Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process” (2020 Caicedo)
• “Old Wives’ Tales: Mothers & Daughters, Wives & Witches (Stories)” (2020 Champagne)
• “‘Numbed and Mortified’: Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in  King Lear  and  Titus Andronicus : (2020 Harrington)
• “‘More Forms and Stranger’: Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp (2020 Kennedy)
• “A Discourse and Statistical Approach to Intersections of Gender and Race in Melville’s  Typee ” (2020 Post)
• “Prophetic Un-speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in  Paradise Lost  and S alve Deus Rex Judaeorum ” (2019 Darrow)
• “‘The Frame of her Eternal Dream’: From  Thel  to Dreamscapes of Influence” (2019 Gallo)
• “‘The Murmure and the Cherles Rebellying’: Poetic and Economic Interpretations of the Great Revolt of 1381” (2019 Noell)
• “Dialogic Convergences of Spatiality, Racial Identity, and the American Cultural Imagination” (2019 Humphrey)
• “Troubling Vice: Stigma and Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Ambitious Villains” (2019 Simonson)
• “Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction” (2018 Huggins)
• “‘Harmonized by the earth’: Land, Landscape, and Place in Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights ” (2018 Bevin)
• “(Re)membering the Subject: Nomadic Becoming in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature” (2018 Voelkner)
• “Werewolves: The Outsider on the Inside in Icelandic and French Medieval Literature” (2018 Modugno)
• “Towards Self-Defined Expressions of Black Anger in Claudia Rankine’s  Citizen  and Percival Everett’s  Erasure ” (2018 Razak)
• “Echoes Inhabit the Garden: The Music of Poetry and Place in T.S. Eliot” (2018 Goldsmith)
• “‘Is this what motherhood is?’: Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in Black Women’s Novels, 1953-2011” (2018 Gotfredson)
• “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in  Moby-Dick ,  The Confidence Man , and  Clarel ” (2018 Marcy)
• “Speaking of the Body: The Maternal Body, Race, and Language in the Plays of Cherrie Moraga, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner” (2018 King)
• “Passing as Jewish: The Material Consequences of Race and the Property of Whiteness in Late Twentieth-Century Passing Novels” (2017 Mullis)
• “Eliot through Tolkien: Estrangement, Verse Drama, and the Christian Path in the Modern Era” (2017 Reynolds)
• “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Urban Space in Postcolonial British Literature” (2017 Rahmat)
• “Models of Claim, Resistance, and Activism in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Frances Burney” (2017 Smith)
• “English Literature’s Father of Authorial Androgyny: The Innovative Perspective of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath” (2017 Ingold)
•  “’Verbal Hygiene’ on the Radio: An Exploration into Perceptions of Female Voices on Public Radio and How They Reflect Language and Gender Ideologies within American Culture” (2017 Barrett)
• “Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie’s  Shame  and Bapsi Sidhwa’s  Cracking India”  (2016 Mellon)
• “Metaformal Trends in Contemporary American Poetry” (2016 Muller)
• “Power Through Privilege: Surveying Perspectives on the Humanities in Higher Education in the Contemporary American Campus Novel” (2016 Klein)
• “‘I always cure you when I come’: The Caregiver Figure in the Novels of Jane Austen” (2016 McKenzie)
• “English Imperial Selfhood and Semiperipheral Witchcraft in  The Faerie Queene, Daemonologie,  and  The Tempest”  (2016 Davis)
• “With Slabs, Bones, and Poles: De/Constructing Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward’s  Salvage the Bones , Natasha Trethewey’s  Beyond Katrina , and Selah Saterstrom’s  Slab”  (2016 Lang)
• “The Ghost of That Ineluctable Past”: Trauma and Memory in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy” (2016 Berry)
• “Breaking Through Walls and Pages: Female Reading and Education in the 18th Century British Novel” (2015 Majewski)
• “The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy” (2015 Weisse)
• “Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels” (2015 Porter)
• “Placing the Body: A Study of Postcolonialism and Environment in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid” (2015 Hutcherson)
• “Wandering Bodies: The Disruption of Identities in Jamaica Kincaid’s  Lucy  and Edwidge Danticat’s  The Farming of Bones ” (2015 Martin)
• “Mythogenesis as a Reconfiguration of Space in an ‘Alternate World’: The Legacy of Origin and Diaspora in Experimental Writing” (2015 Pittenger)
• “Cunning Authors and Bad Readers: Gendered Authorship in ‘Love in Excess’” (2015 Bruening)
• “‘The Thing Became Real’: New Materialisms and Race in the Fiction of Nella Larsen” (2015 Parkinson)
• “‘Projections of the Not-Me’: Redemptive Possibilities of the Gothic within Wuthering Heights and Beloved” (2015 Glasser)
• “Distortions, Collections, and Mobility: South Asian Poets and the Space for Female Subjectivity” (2015 Wilkey)
• “From Text to Tech: Theorizing Changing Experimental Narrative Structures” (2015 Ortega)
• “A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut” (2015 Hubbard)

Home > ARTSCI > ENG > ENG_ETD

English Department Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

Muscadine: Poems , Albert Hosia Jerriod Avant

MIDDLE CHILDREN OF HISTORY: MALE-AUTHORED POST-1960s FICTION & THE NIHILISM OF WHITE MALE PROTAGONISTS , Emma C. Baughman

THE (MIS)FORMATION OF IDENTITY IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOVELS: IDEOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND THE SELF , Youngji Cho

COMPUTATIONAL CLOSE READING: A CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL LITERARY METHODOLOGY , Damiano Consilvio

DIAGNOSTIC BRAINS, EXPERIENTIAL MINDS AND METAMODERNISM: MCEWAN, SELF, AND MCCARTHY AS CASE STUDIES , Mohamed Anis Ferchichi

RESISTING ARREST: AN (AUTO-THEORETICAL) ESSAY ON PRISON LITERATURE , James A. Ferry

WAITING TOO LONG TO MOVE AT GREEN LIGHTS , Michael Landreth

IS IT FREEDOM YOU WANT?: FEMINIST MORMON HOUSEWIVES “DEAR FMH” COLUMN AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE ETHICS OF CARE IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ADVICE COLUMNS , Julia Unger

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

THE TEXT(TILES) OF ADINKRA SYMBOLS: WEST AFRICAN ART, GENDER, & POETIC TRANSLATIONS , Rachel A. Ansong

BLACK FEMINIST AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: HOW IDENTITY CAN AFFECT PEER REVIEW PRACTICES IN THE COLLEGE WRITING CLASSROOM , Eileen M. James

TO SCALE DRAGONS: COMPRISING THINGS LOST AND TWO ESSAYS ON FANTASY , André V. Katkov

THE ALICE ATOM COMPENDIUM , Nick Mendillo

BROKEN DOZER, HAUNTED VALE: THE ECOPOETICS OF AMBIENT LANGUAGE , Andrew Merecicky

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

TRUE CRIME, WOMEN, AND SENSATIONALIZED REPRESENTATIONS IN THE ITALIAN AMERICAN IMAGINARY , Francesca Borrione

FANTASIZING REPRODUCTION: THE BIOLOGIZATION OF THE DESIRE FOR PROGRESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE , Xinqiang Chang

GENDERED & GENREFIED BODIES: HEROISM AS PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE IN SWORD & SORCERY FANTASY , Anthony Conrad Chieffalo

INTIMATE DISTANCES: AN ARCHIPELAGO , Elizabeth Foulke

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

PREPARING FOR DEATH: CANNIBALISM, CONSUMPTION AND INCORPORATION IN WOMEN’S SHIPWRECK NARRATIVES , Danielle Cofer

FEMALE COMIC GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN VICTORIAN NOVELS: INVESTIGATING THE POSSIBILITIES OF LIMINALITY , Barbara A. Farnworth

READING THE READER: ANALYZING DEPICTIONS OF MALE READERS IN SERIAL VICTORIAN FICTION , Ashton Foley-Schramm

REORIENTING THE FEMALE GOTHIC: CURIOSITY AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE , Jenna Guitar

ECOLOGIES OF MATERIALITY AND AESTHETICS IN BRITISH MODERNIST WAR-TIME LITERATURE, 1890-1939 , Molly Volanth Hall

FICTIONS OF CAPTIVITY: RACIALIZING RELIGION IN EARLY U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE , Serap Hidir

BETWEEN SIBLINGS: HOW THE SIBLING METAPHOR REIMAGINES AFFECTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL , Beth Leonardo Silva

OPENING CEREMONY: A WRITING PRACTICE TOWARDS QUEER FUTURITY , Laura Marie Marciano

“THE SKIPPING KING”: MASCULINITY AND EFFEMINACY IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA , Danielle Johanna Sanfilippo

THE MARK OF THE VANISHING READER: INTRADIEGETIC INTERACTION IN MULTIMODAL NARRATIVE , Catherine Ann Winters

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

PRACTICING TRANSLINGUALISM: FACULTY CONCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES , Adrienne Jones Daly

TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA , Ryan Engley

CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE , Charles Kell

WELCOME TO THE CLUB: AN ARCHIVAL INQUIRY INTO THE DEWEY LABORATORY SCHOOL AS RHETORICAL EDUCATION , Krysten Manke

“THERE IS NO RACISM IN CUBA”: A FIELD STUDY OF THE “POST-RACE” RHETORIC OF MODERN CUBA , Clarissa J. Walker

CHARMED MODERNISMS: FANTASIES OF SOCIALITY AND DIFFERENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE , Kara Watts

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

THE NEW SINCERITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE , Matthew J. Balliro

Understanding Reading Sponsorship Through Analysis of First-Year Composition Students’ Literacy Narratives , Nancy A. Benson

Widening the Sphere: Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity , Anna J. Brecke

Demonstrating Feminist Metic Intelligence Through the Embodied Rhetorical Practices of Julia Child , Lindy E. Briggette

The Men That Sleep Built , Samuel Simas

Questing Feminism: Narrative Tensions and Magical Women in Modern Fantasy , Kimberly Wickham

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora , Beth O'Leary Anish

Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals and Activists , Jillian Belanger

Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America , Rachel Boccio

Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Art , William R. Bowden

Undergraduate Student Perspectives on Electronic Portfolio Assessment in College Composition Courses , Bridget Fullerton

Metadata and Relational Architecture: Advancing Arrangement, Agency, and Access with New Methodology , Jenna Morton-Aiken

Agency in Eating Disorders: American Literary and Visual Memoirs of Anorexia and Bulimia , Jenny Platz

To Start, Continue, and Conclude: Foregrounding Narrative Production in Serial Fiction Publishing , Gabriel E. Romaguera

"You Will Hold This Book in Your Hands": The Novel and Corporeality in the New Media Ecology , Jason Shrontz

Exploring the Use of NoRedInk as a Tool for Composition Instruction , Alyson Snowe

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

You Are What You Eat: Investigating Food Discourse and Digitally-Mediated Identities , Katelyn Leigh Burton

Exquisite Clutter: Material Culture and the Scottish Reinvention of the Adventure Narrative , Rebekah C. Greene

“A Peculiar Power of Perception”: Scottish Enlightenment Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic of Language , Rosaleen Greene-Smith Keefe

Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature , Brittany B. Hirth

The Color of Grammar and the Surface of Language: 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars , Sarah E. Kruse

Consent Puzzles: Narrative Ambiguities of Girls' Sexual Agency in Literature and Film from the 1990s , Michele Meek

John Dewey's Letters from Asia: Implications for Redefining "Openness" in Rhetoric and Composition , Karen Pierce Shea

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Automated Essay Evaluation and the Computational Paradigm: Machine Scoring Enters the Classroom , Catherine M. Barrett

Bringing the World Inside: British Modernism and Taste – Gustatory, Social, and Aesthetic , Michael David Becker

Permeable Boundaries: Globalizing Form in Contemporary American and British Literature , Nancy Caronia

AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION , Kim Caroline Evelyn

AN EXAMINATION OF ARGUMENTATION IN UNDERGRADUATE COMPOSITION TEXTBOOKS , Wendy Lee Grosskopf

Stories That Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration , Marcy Isabella

OFF THE HIP: A THERMODYNAMICS OF THE COOL , Rebecca Kanost

INSOMNIA AND IDENTITY: THE DISCURSIVE FUNCTION OF SLEEPLESSNESS IN MODERNIST LITERATURE , Sarah Kingston

TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY , Sarah Hattie Maitland

UNCONSCIOUS STATES: A NOVEL , Rachel May

Life vs. Unlife: Interspecies Solidarity and Companionism in Contemporary American Literature , Barnaby McLaughlin

TOWARD A PSYCHOSOCIAL UNDERSTANDING OF SUICIDE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF THE 1990’S , Sara E. Murphy

THE SENTINELLE AFFAIR: A STUDY IN MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES , Jason Peters

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Firefighters’ Multimodal Literacy Practices , Timothy R. Amidon

ARGUMENT, RHETORIC, AND TRANSCENDENCE: “THE ADHERENCE OF MINDS” WITHIN THE DISCOURSE OF SPIRITUALITY , Gavin Forrest Hurley

OPTING-IN ONLINE: PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC FORUM COMMUNITIES , Jennifer C. Lee

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

LIGHTNING-ROD MEN, MAGNETIC LIVES, BODIES ELECTRIC: ELECTROMAGNETIC CORPOREALITY IN EMERSON, MELVILLE, & WHITMAN , James Patrick Gorham

Women's Historiography in Late Medieval European Literature: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan , Eva M. Jones

SAVING PRINCE PEACH: A STUDY OF “GAYMERS” AND DIGITAL LGBT/GAMING RHETORICS , M. William MacKnight

Affective Reconfigurations: A New Politics of Difference , Laurie Rodrigues

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Manifestoes: A Study in Genre , Stevens Russell Amidon

Making the Grade: Academic Literacies and First-Generation College Students in a Highly Selective Liberal Arts College , Theresa Perri Ammirati

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

The Colors and Shadows of My Word(s) , Lydia A. Saravia

Theses/Dissertations from 1999 1999

Toni Morrison: Rethinking the Past in a Postcolonial Context , Hanan Abdullatif

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

(Re)Envisioned (Pre)History: Feminism, Goddess Politics, and Readership Analysis of The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses , Glenna M. Andrade

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Indicated Silences in American Novels , Catherine Adamowicz

Cynics, Spaces, and Subjects: Toward a Tactical Ethics of Rhetoric , Kristen Francis Kennedy

Theses/Dissertations from 1995 1995

Our Beloved Lizzie; Constructing an American Legend , Gabriela Schalow Adler

My Cambodian Son: Another Race: Another Culture , Patricia Russell

Theses/Dissertations from 1994 1994

An NEH Fellowship Examined: Social Networks and Composition History , Stephanie A. Almagno

The "Fine Line" of Otto Rank , Philip J. Hecht

Theses/Dissertations from 1993 1993

REWRITING THE BODY POLITIC: THE ART OF ILLNESS AND THE PRODUCTION OF DESIRE IN THE DIARIES AND JOURNALS OF ALICE JAMES AND ACHSA SPRAGUE , Susan Grant

Theses/Dissertations from 1992 1992

*Baby Shoe Tattoo*: A Film Script and Critical Preface , Anthony R. Amore Jr.

Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft , James A. Anderson

Lilacs in November , Marjorie L. Briody

The Jeovah Imperative: Images of Incest and Blood Sacrifice in Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" and Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" , Penelope Hope Goff

Theses/Dissertations from 1988 1988

Sub-Versions of History in Three Twentieth-Century Novels , Gabriella Schalow Adler

Joyce and the Dialogical: Literary Carnivalization in Ulysses , Stephanie A. Almagno

Home Before Morning: A Teleplay , Susan E. Apshaga

"Dear Uncle George" Ezra Pound's Letters to Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts , Philip J. Burns

Theses/Dissertations from 1984 1984

Style in Children's Literature: A Comparison of Passages from Books for Adults and for Children , Celia Catlett Anderson

Theses/Dissertations from 1978 1978

Robert Frost: A Twentieth Century Poet of Man and Nature , Pauline Elaine Allen

Theses/Dissertations from 1977 1977

CHAUCER AND THE GAME OF LOVE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, THE HOUSE OF FAME AND THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLES , Stephen Hyginus Murphy

Theses/Dissertations from 1972 1972

Man's Relationship to Nature and Society in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Sherry E. Adams

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• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write a Thesis

I. What is a Thesis?

The thesis (pronounced thee -seez), also known as a thesis statement, is the sentence that introduces the main argument or point of view of a composition (formal essay, nonfiction piece, or narrative). It is the main claim that the author is making about that topic and serves to summarize and introduce that writing that will be discussed throughout the entire piece. For this reason, the thesis is typically found within the first introduction paragraph.

II. Examples of Theses

Here are a few examples of theses which may be found in the introductions of a variety of essays :

In “The Mending Wall,” Robert Frost uses imagery, metaphor, and dialogue to argue against the use of fences between neighbors.

In this example, the thesis introduces the main subject (Frost’s poem “The Mending Wall”), aspects of the subject which will be examined (imagery, metaphor, and dialogue) and the writer’s argument (fences should not be used).

While Facebook connects some, overall, the social networking site is negative in that it isolates users, causes jealousy, and becomes an addiction.

This thesis introduces an argumentative essay which argues against the use of Facebook due to three of its negative effects.

During the college application process, I discovered my willingness to work hard to achieve my dreams and just what those dreams were.

In this more personal example, the thesis statement introduces a narrative essay which will focus on personal development in realizing one’s goals and how to achieve them.

III. The Importance of Using a Thesis

Theses are absolutely necessary components in essays because they introduce what an essay will be about. Without a thesis, the essay lacks clear organization and direction. Theses allow writers to organize their ideas by clearly stating them, and they allow readers to be aware from the beginning of a composition’s subject, argument, and course. Thesis statements must precisely express an argument within the introductory paragraph of the piece in order to guide the reader from the very beginning.

IV. Examples of Theses in Literature

For examples of theses in literature, consider these thesis statements from essays about topics in literature:

In William Shakespeare’s “ Sonnet 46,” both physicality and emotion together form powerful romantic love.

This thesis statement clearly states the work and its author as well as the main argument: physicality and emotion create romantic love.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne symbolically shows Hester Prynne’s developing identity through the use of the letter A: she moves from adulteress to able community member to angel.

In this example, the work and author are introduced as well as the main argument and supporting points: Prynne’s identity is shown through the letter A in three ways: adulteress, able community member, and angel.

John Keats’ poem “To Autumn” utilizes rhythm, rhyme, and imagery to examine autumn’s simultaneous birth and decay.

This thesis statement introduces the poem and its author along with an argument about the nature of autumn. This argument will be supported by an examination of rhythm, rhyme, and imagery.

V. Examples of Theses in Pop Culture

Sometimes, pop culture attempts to make arguments similar to those of research papers and essays. Here are a few examples of theses in pop culture:

America’s food industry is making a killing and it’s making us sick, but you have the power to turn the tables.

The documentary Food Inc. examines this thesis with evidence throughout the film including video evidence, interviews with experts, and scientific research.

Orca whales should not be kept in captivity, as it is psychologically traumatizing and has caused them to kill their own trainers.

Blackfish uses footage, interviews, and history to argue for the thesis that orca whales should not be held in captivity.

VI. Related Terms

Just as a thesis is introduced in the beginning of a composition, the hypothesis is considered a starting point as well. Whereas a thesis introduces the main point of an essay, the hypothesis introduces a proposed explanation which is being investigated through scientific or mathematical research. Thesis statements present arguments based on evidence which is presented throughout the paper, whereas hypotheses are being tested by scientists and mathematicians who may disprove or prove them through experimentation. Here is an example of a hypothesis versus a thesis:

Hypothesis:

Students skip school more often as summer vacation approaches.

This hypothesis could be tested by examining attendance records and interviewing students. It may or may not be true.

Students skip school due to sickness, boredom with classes, and the urge to rebel.

This thesis presents an argument which will be examined and supported in the paper with detailed evidence and research.

Introduction

A paper’s introduction is its first paragraph which is used to introduce the paper’s main aim and points used to support that aim throughout the paper. The thesis statement is the most important part of the introduction which states all of this information in one concise statement. Typically, introduction paragraphs require a thesis statement which ties together the entire introduction and introduces the rest of the paper.

VII. Conclusion

Theses are necessary components of well-organized and convincing essays, nonfiction pieces, narratives , and documentaries. They allow writers to organize and support arguments to be developed throughout a composition, and they allow readers to understand from the beginning what the aim of the composition is.

List of Terms

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• Doppelganger
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• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
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• Figures of Speech
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• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
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• Malapropism
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Thesis Statements for a Literature Assignment

A thesis prepares the reader for what you are about to say. As such, your paper needs to be interesting in order for your thesis to be interesting. Your thesis needs to be interesting because it needs to capture a reader's attention. If a reader looks at your thesis and says "so what?", your thesis has failed to do its job, and chances are your paper has as well. Thus, make your thesis provocative and open to reasonable disagreement, but then write persuasively enough to sway those who might be disagree.

Keep in mind the following when formulating a thesis:

• A Thesis Should Not State the Obvious
• Use Literary Terms in Thesis With Care
• A Thesis Should be Balanced
• A Thesis Can be a Blueprint

Avoid the Obvious

Bland: Dorothy Parker's "Résumé" uses images of suicide to make her point about living.

This is bland because it's obvious and incontestable. A reader looks at it and says, "so what?"

However, consider this alternative:

Dorothy Parker's "Résumé" doesn't celebrate life, but rather scorns those who would fake or attempt suicide just to get attention.

The first thesis merely describes something about the poem; the second tells the reader what the writer thinks the poem is about--it offers a reading or interpretation. The paper would need to support that reading and would very likely examine the way Parker uses images of suicide to make the point the writer claims.

Use Literary Terms in Thesis Only to Make Larger Points

Poems and novels generally use rhyme, meter, imagery, simile, metaphor, stanzas, characters, themes, settings and so on. While these terms are important for you to use in your analysis and your arguments, that they exist in the work you are writing about should not be the main point of your thesis. Unless the poet or novelist uses these elements in some unexpected way to shape the work's meaning, it's generally a good idea not to draw attention to the use of literary devices in thesis statements because an intelligent reader expects a poem or novel to use literary of these elements. Therefore, a thesis that only says a work uses literary devices isn't a good thesis because all it is doing is stating the obvious, leading the reader to say, "so what?"

However, you can use literary terms in a thesis if the purpose is to explain how the terms contribute to the work's meaning or understanding. Here's an example of thesis statement that does call attention to literary devices because they are central to the paper's argument. Literary terms are placed in italics.

Don Marquis introduced Archy and Mehitabel in his Sun Dial column by combining the conventions of free verse poetry with newspaper prose so intimately that in "the coming of Archy," the entire column represents a complete poem and not a free verse poem preceded by a prose introduction .

Note the difference between this thesis and the first bland thesis on the Parker poem. This thesis does more than say certain literary devices exist in the poem; it argues that they exist in a specific relationship to one another and makes a fairly startling claim, one that many would disagree with and one that the writer will need to persuade her readers on.

Keep Your Thesis Balanced

Keep the thesis balanced. If it's too general, it becomes vague; if it's too specific, it cannot be developed. If it's merely descriptive (like the bland example above), it gives the reader no compelling reason to go on. The thesis should be dramatic, have some tension in it, and should need to be proved (another reason for avoiding the obvious).

Too general: Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote many poems with love as the theme. Too specific: Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink" in <insert date> after <insert event from her life>. Too descriptive: Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink" is a sonnet with two parts; the first six lines propose a view of love and the next eight complicate that view. With tension and which will need proving: Despite her avowal on the importance of love, and despite her belief that she would not sell her love, the speaker in Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink" remains unconvinced and bitter, as if she is trying to trick herself into believing that love really does matter for more than the one night she is in some lover's arms.

Your Thesis Can Be A Blueprint

A thesis can be used as roadmap or blueprint for your paper:

In "Résumé," Dorothy Parker subverts the idea of what a résumé is--accomplishments and experiences--with an ironic tone, silly images of suicide, and witty rhymes to point out the banality of life for those who remain too disengaged from it.

Note that while this thesis refers to particular poetic devices, it does so in a way that gets beyond merely saying there are poetic devices in the poem and then merely describing them. It makes a claim as to how and why the poet uses tone, imagery and rhyme.

Readers would expect you to argue that Parker subverts the idea of the résumé to critique bored (and boring) people; they would expect your argument to do so by analyzing her use of tone, imagery and rhyme in that order.

Citation Information

Nick Carbone. (1994-2024). Thesis Statements for a Literature Assignment. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/writing/guides/.

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Copyright © 1994-2024 Colorado State University and/or this site's authors, developers, and contributors . Some material displayed on this site is used with permission.

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5.2: Thesis Examples

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SAMPLE THESIS STATEMENTS

These sample thesis statements are provided as guides, not as required forms or prescriptions.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The thesis may focus on an analysis of one of the elements of fiction, drama, poetry or nonfiction as expressed in the work: character, plot, structure, idea, theme, symbol, style, imagery, tone, etc.

In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty creates a fictional character in Phoenix Jackson whose determination, faith, and cunning illustrate the indomitable human spirit.

Note that the work, author, and character to be analyzed are identified in this thesis statement. The thesis relies on a strong verb (creates). It also identifies the element of fiction that the writer will explore (character) and the characteristics the writer will analyze and discuss (determination, faith, cunning).

Further Examples:

The character of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet serves as a foil to young Juliet, delights us with her warmth and earthy wit, and helps realize the tragic catastrophe.

The works of ecstatic love poets Rumi, Hafiz, and Kabir use symbols such as a lover’s longing and the Tavern of Ruin to illustrate the human soul’s desire to connect with God.

The thesis may focus on illustrating how a work reflects the particular genre’s forms, the characteristics of a philosophy of literature, or the ideas of a particular school of thought.

“The Third and Final Continent” exhibits characteristics recurrent in writings by immigrants: tradition, adaptation, and identity.

Note how the thesis statement classifies the form of the work (writings by immigrants) and identifies the characteristics of that form of writing (tradition, adaptation, and identity) that the essay will discuss.

Further examples:

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame reflects characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd in its minimalist stage setting, its seemingly meaningless dialogue, and its apocalyptic or nihilist vision.

A close look at many details in “The Story of an Hour” reveals how language, institutions, and expected demeanor suppress the natural desires and aspirations of women.

The thesis may draw parallels between some element in the work and real-life situations or subject matter: historical events, the author’s life, medical diagnoses, etc.

In Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case,” Paul exhibits suicidal behavior that a caring adult might have recognized and remedied had that adult had the scientific knowledge we have today.

This thesis suggests that the essay will identify characteristics of suicide that Paul exhibits in the story. The writer will have to research medical and psychology texts to determine the typical characteristics of suicidal behavior and to illustrate how Paul’s behavior mirrors those characteristics.

Through the experience of one man, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, accurately depicts the historical record of slave life in its descriptions of the often brutal and quixotic relationship between master and slave and of the fragmentation of slave families.

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” one can draw parallels between the narrator’s situation and the author’s life experiences as a mother, writer, and feminist.

SAMPLE PATTERNS FOR THESES ON LITERARY WORKS

1. In (title of work), (author) (illustrates, shows) (aspect) (adjective). 

Example: In “Barn Burning,” William Faulkner shows the characters Sardie and Abner Snopes struggling for their identity.

2. In (title of work), (author) uses (one aspect) to (define, strengthen, illustrate) the (element of work).

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses foreshadowing to strengthen the plot.

3. In (title of work), (author) uses (an important part of work) as a unifying device for (one element), (another element), and (another element).  The number of elements can vary from one to four.

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses the sea as a unifying device for setting, structure and theme.

4. (Author) develops the character of (character’s name) in (literary work) through what he/she does, what he/she says, what other people say to or about him/her.

Example: Langston Hughes develops the character of Semple in “Ways and Means”…

5. In (title of work), (author) uses (literary device) to (accomplish, develop, illustrate, strengthen) (element of work).

Example: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe uses the symbolism of the stranger, the clock, and the seventh room to develop the theme of death.

6. (Author) (shows, develops, illustrates) the theme of __________ in the (play, poem, story).

Example: Flannery O’Connor illustrates the theme of the effect of the selfishness of the grandmother upon the family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

7. (Author) develops his character(s) in (title of work) through his/her use of language.

Example: John Updike develops his characters in “A & P” through his use of figurative language.

• Thesis Examples. Authored by : University of Arlington Texas. Located at : http://libguides.uta.edu/c.php?g=517839&p=3592550 . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial

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The Library

Browse by phd thesis by university of warwick department.

Addyman, Mary (2016) 'All bundled together in endless confusion’ : museums, collecting and material practices in late Victorian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Adjei, Cassie (2015) Duality, genre and the "Modern Mulatto" : bresponse and representation in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Alhathlool, Khalid (2013) "Attachment to the soil and aspiration toward departure" : tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation & identity in Amin Maalouf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Angelov, Dimitar (2008) Language, selfhood and otherness in the works of D. H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Akel, Regina (2007) The journals of Maria Graham (1785-1842). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ashby, Kevin John (1998) Disciplines of the king : Arthurianism, historiography, poetics and surveillance in Tennyson's Idylls of the king (1859). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Attridge, Steve (1993) The soldier in late Victorian society : images and ambiguities. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Andermahr, Sonya (1993) Difference, identification and desire : contemporary lesbian genre fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Armitt, Lucie (1992) Pushing back the limits: the fantastic as transgression in contemporary women's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Al-Issa, Ahmad (1989) Polyphony and the anxiety of influence in the fiction of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Aston, Elaine (1987) Outside the doll's house : a study in images of women in English and French theatre, 1848-1914. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Audette, Florestine (1979) Religious elements in Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bondré, Natasha (2020) Reading ‘Emperor Oil’ in the expanded Caribbean : petroleum, ecology and Caribbean literature in the twentieth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bailey, Thomasin Mary (2020) Authority and influence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bibizadeh, Roxanne Ellen (2019) Freedom and unfreedom in the literature of the Iranian and Arab diaspora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Borg Cardona, Karen (2018) The failed quest in contemporary world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breidenbach, Birgit (2017) Stimmung and modernity: the aesthetic philosophy of mood in Dostoevsky, Beckett and Bernhard. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bhattacharya, Sourit (2017) The crisis of modernity : realism and the postcolonial Indian novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brljak, Vladmir (2015) Allegory and modernity in English literature c. 1575-1675. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bumrungsalee, Intira (2013) Translating culture in films : subtitling in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bahrawi, Nazry (2013) Sacred impulses, sacrilegious worlds : postsecular intimations in Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barnard, Donald Edwin (2012) A critical edition of Derek Walcott's Omeros. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brown, La Tasha Amelia (2011) The diasporic black Caribbean experience : nostalgia, memory and identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bugeja, Norbert (2010) Rethinking the liminal : threshold conciousness in four Mashriqi memoirs. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Beer, Lewis (2010) Fortune and desire in Guillaume de Machaut. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Byatt, Jim (2009) Taboo and transgression : reconfiguring the monstrous in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brigley, Zoë (2007) Exile and ecology: the poetic practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Biswell, Andrew (2002) Conflict and confluence: Anthony Burgess as novelist and journalist. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brock, Claire (2002) The feminization of fame from Rousseau to de Staël. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breen, Peter Thomas (1993) Place and displacement in the works of Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bakshi, Parminder Kaur (1992) Distant desire : the theme of friendship in E.M. Forster's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Becket, Fiona (1992) Metaphor and "metaphysic" : the sense of language in D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barker, Jill (1992) Characterizations of otherness in the sixteenth century moral plays and their morality actecedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bendjeddou, Mohamed Yazid (1985) Two literary responses to American society in the early modern era : a comparison of selected novels by Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair in relation to their portrayal of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the problem of labour, 1900-1929. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Belsey, Catherine (1973) Patterns of conflict in the English morality plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Buckley, Brian R. (1972) Lawrence's novels : themes and precedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Castle, Nora (2022) Food futures : food, foodways, and environmental crisis in contemporary science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cao, Siyu (2020) Performing post-Britishness : a quest for independence in the contemporary literature of England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Champion, Giulia (2020) The empire bites back : literary cannibalism in the extractiono(s)cene. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campion, Louise G. E. (2019) Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the chamber: the language and imagery of domestic space in late medieval religious literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cohut, Maria-Silvia (2018) Before and beyond the glass: women and their mirrors in the literature and art of nineteenth-century Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Choksey, Lara (2017) 'Life itself' in Doris Lessing's space fiction : evolution, epigenetics and culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Charlwood, Catherine (2017) Models of memory : cognition and cultural memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Chen, Chi-Fang (2016) A study of political humour in British literature in the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Collins, Nicholas J. (2015) Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Christie, James, (Researcher in English) (2013) Fredric Jameson and the art of Modernism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cowaloosur, Vedita (2013) "The home and the world" : representations of English and bhashas in contemporary Indian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cornford, Thomas (2012) The English theatre studios of Michael Chekhov and Michel Saint-Denis, 1935-1965. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carta, Giorgia (2012) The other half of the story : the interaction between indigenous and translated literature for children in Italy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cirstea, Arina-Nicoleta (2010) Urban imaginaries : mapping space and self in the writing of Doris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carlin, Gerald (1994) Art and authority : a comparative study of the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Concepción, Díez-Medrano (1993) Women's condition in D.H. Lawrence's shorter fiction : a study of representative narrative processes in selected texts. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campbell, Irene (1992) Frank Swinnerton : the life and works of a bookman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Coe, Jonathan (1986) Satire and sympathy : some consequences of intrusive narration in Tom Jones and other comic novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Curtis, Francis Brett (1979) Shelley and the idea of epic : a study, with particular reference to three pre-1818 narratives. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Clews, David (1972) The Dickens - Thackeray debate. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daroy, Alys (2022) Biophilic Shakespeare : towards an ecology of form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dakkak, Nadeen (2020) “An immense cargo of wanderers seeking their own destruction” : migration to the Arab Gulf states in Arabic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dashwood, Rita J. (2018) Women in residence: Forms of belonging in Jane Austen. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daniel, Robert W. (2018) The manuscript poetry of Thomas St Nicholas and the writing of ‘scripturalism’ in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dean, Dominic (2016) The child and authority in contemporary literature and critical culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Davis, Christopher P. (Researcher in literature) (2016) Reading, writing and understanding the postcolonial. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Degirmencioglu, Nesrin (2013) Uneven cities : the dialectic of urban modernity and literary form in Dos Passos, Tanpınar, Auster and Pamuk. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

DiMeo, Michelle Marie (2009) Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Deckard, Sharae Grace (2007) Exploited Edens: paradise discourse in colonial and postcolonial literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dauncey, Sarah (2003) The uses of silence : a twentieth-century preoccupation in the light of fictional examples, 1900-1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dent, Shirley (2000) Iniquitous symmetries: aestheticism and secularism in the reception of William Blake's works in books and periodicals during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dixon, John Spencer (1991) Representations of the East in English and French travel writing 1798-1882 : with particular reference to Egypt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dusinberre, Juliet (1969) Attitudes to women in Jacobean drama. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Emmett, Christine (2020) Inequality, moralism and legitimacy in South African literature : re-reading apartheid from Millin to Wicomb. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

El-Masry, Heba Fawzy (2017) A comparative study of Arthur John Arberry’s and Desmond O’Grady’s translations of the seven Mu‘allaqāt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Eardley, Alice (2008) An edition of Lady Hester Pulter's Book of 'Emblemes'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Erdogan, Armagan (2002) Encountering the foreign : the educative effect of the foreign in George Eliot's novels of English life. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Efstratiou, Dimitris (2001) Disintegration of essence and subjectivity : the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Earnshaw, Brian (1982) Translations from the German and their reception in Britain, 1760-1800. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Farnsworth, Fiona Emily (2020) Contemporary literary foodways between Sub-Saharan Africa and the USA. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fletcher, Andrew (2019) Shakespeare and the fiction of theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza (2015) Howard Barker's drama of aporias : from a phenomenology of the body to an ontology of the flesh. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fowler, Benjamin Brynmor (2015) (Re)directing the text : politics & perception in the work Katie Mitchell & Thomas Ostermeier. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frank, Lucy Elizabeth (2003) Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fernández de Pinedo, Eva (2002) From the Virgin of Guadalupe to El Santo : new motifs and directions in contemporary Chicano/a writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frith, Gill (1988) The intimacy which is knowledge : female friendship in the novels of women writers. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Funk, Gisela (1988) The sealed room : Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin : a study in the genesis of fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Flower, Celeste (1985) A study of aspects of the 'Romances amorosos' of Luis de Góngora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fairclough, Peter (1976) Humour in the novel 1800-1850 : the moral vision and the autonomous imagination. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gyawali, Amulya (2023) The invention of nature: state-building and environment-making in the extended Himalaya. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gill, Jagvinder (2010) Re-oriented Britain : how British Asian travellers and settlers have utilised and reversed Orientalist discourse 1770-2010. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gott, Henry Michael (2010) Ascetic modernism in Eliot and Flaubert. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Goodman, Gemma (2010) Cornwall : an alternative construction of place. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gunne, Sorcha (2010) ‘A mirror with two sides’ : liminal narratives and spaces of gender violence and communitas in South African writing, 1960–present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Graham, James (James John George) (2006) Writing the land : representations of 'the land' and nationalism in Anglophone literature from South Africa and Zimbabwe 1969-2002. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ganobcsik-Williams, Gruffudd Aled (2001) The sweat of the brain: representations of intellectual labour in the writings of Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gallagher, Ron (1986) Science fiction and language : language and the imagination in post-war science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Greenslade, William (1982) The concept of degeneration, 1880-1910, with particular reference to the work of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and H. G. Wells. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Garnett, George Rhys (1977) The search for the self in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Green, Robert (1977) The novels of Ford Madox Ford. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Heath, Thomas (2022) Actor training in the flow state : towards a rhetoric for play in contemporary actor training. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hugo, Esthie Esmaré (2022) Gothic ecologies : world-literature and commodity frontiers from the plantation to the present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hillion, Marianne (2021) Between the epic and the ordinary : locating the politics of contemporary Indian urban writing in English (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hatfull, Ronan (2018) ‘The other RSC’: the history and legacy of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hudson, Julie Patricia (2017) The environment on stage: scenery or shapeshifter? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Huang, Bo-Yuan (2014) China on the periphery : transitions of Chinese "Orientalism" from Oliver Goldsmith to Thomas De Quincey. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hassen, Rim (2012) English translations of the Quran by women : different or derived? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hentea, Marius (2010) Social reality and narrative form in the fiction of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hartwig, David W. (2010) The place of Shakespeare : performing King Lear and The tempest in an endangered world. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Holroyd, Sophia Jane (2002) Embroidered rhetoric: the social, religious and political functions of elite women's needlework, c.1560-1630. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hampton-Reeves, Stuart (1997) Henry VI in performance : history, culture and Shakespeare reproduced. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hapgood, Lynne (1990) "Circe among cities" : images of London and the languages of social concern, 1880-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Higgins, Ian (1989) The sentiments of a Church-of-England man : a study of Swift's politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Head, Dominic (1989) The modernist short story : theory and practice in five authors. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hadfield, Duncan John (1982) Real and imaginary golf-courses : systems of order in Malcolm Lowry's Under the volcano. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hancock, Ann (1981) The life of Henry Yorke and the writing of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hunter, Shelagh (1981) Transformations of pastoral : studies in the idyllic fiction of Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hermans, Theo (1977) Aspects of the structure of Modernist poetry, 1908-1918 : a structural and comparative study of the poetic writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Georg Heym, T.E. Hulme, Max Jacob, Ezra Pound, Pierre Reverdy, and Georg Trakl. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Intepe, Demet (2020) Environmental justice and writers as activists in multi-ethnic U.S. literatures, film, and theater. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ivanova, Rossitza Pentcheva (2006) Cross-cultural and tribal-centred politics in American Indian studies: assessing a current split in American Indian literary scholarship and re-interpreting Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Inan, Dilek (2000) The city and landscapes beyond Harold Pinter's rooms. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Imoru, Nike M. (1994) A theatre of black women : constructions of black female subjectivity in the dramatic texts of African-American women playwrights in the 1920s and 1970s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ibrahim, Hasnah binti Haji (1992) Oh Babel! : the problems of translating Malay verse into English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Iliopoulos, Spyridon (1985) 'Out of a medium's mouth' : Yeats's art in relation to mediumship, spiritualism and psychical research. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Janssen, Catharina Gertruda Maria (2021) ‘Future scholars, future poets’ : the contemporary reception of Sir William Jones’s translations of oriental literature, 1770-1835. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jackson, Joseph Horgan (2011) Devolving black British theory : race and contemporary Scottish literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, Jonathan D. (2003) Orphans : childhood alienation and the idea of the self in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, David Francis (1987) Swift's use of the literature of travel in the composition of "Gulliver's travels". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khattak, Aiman (2022) The bio-political empire sovereignty, race and war in Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaur, Gurpreet (2017) Beyond the binary : postcolonial ecofeminism in Indian women's writing in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Gohar Karim (2013) Narrating Pakistan transnationally : identity, politics and terrorism in Anglophone Pakistani literature after "9/11". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Paul Chi Hun (2013) The notion of nature in Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of ecotheology. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kritsis, Konstantinos (2013) Exploring theatre translation : the translator of the stage in the case of a Stanislavskian actor. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirwan, Peter (2011) Shakespeare and the idea of apocrypha : negotiating the boundaries of the dramatic canon. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kenward, Claire (2011) 'Memory wrapped round a corpse' : a cultural history of English Hecubas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kurata, Kenichi (2010) Vicissitudes of desire in George Eliot’s fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kahn, Kristian Thomas (2009) The boy figure and male same-sex desire in Britain from Walter Pater to E.M. Forster. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaisary, Philip James (2008) The literary impact of the Haitian Revolution. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kamali, Leila Francesca (2007) Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Rina (2007) Beyond mourning and melancholia : women and Ireland as Beckett's lost others. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kawanami, Ayako (2006) The art of dissembling in three Elizabethan writers: John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Shakespeare. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Komporaly, Jozefina (2001) Configurations of mothering in post-war British women's playwriting. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Key, Jonathan Benjamin (1999) Paranoia and irony in the Anglophone dectective narrative and the novels of Umberto Eco. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kavanagh, Kevin Sean (1997) Raymond Williams and the limits of cultural materialism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kastelein, Barbara (1994) Popular/post-feminism and popular literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Nosheen (1986) Women's poetry of the First World War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirk, Peter Nigel (1983) The voice of authority : Evelyn Waugh's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kerr, Douglas (1978) A comparison of some French and English literary responses to the 1914-1918 War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liu, Li (2023) ‘What do texts want?’: the want and liminality of working-class females in mid-victorian bourgeois paternalistic literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Love, Angus (2020) Alain Badiou’s twisted contemporaneity : inaesthetics and the contemporary. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Laug, Katja (2019) Mementoes of the broken body: Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Littau, Karin (2018) Sub-versions of reading. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Loh, Waiyee (2016) Empire of culture : contemporary British and Japanese imaginings of Victorian Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Leonard, Alice (2014) Error in Shakespeare : Shakespeare in error. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lewis, Jennifer (2014) Variations around a theme : the place of Eatonville in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liao, Chia-hui (2011) A critical study of the reception and translation of the poetry of Wang Wei in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ludlow, Elizabeth (2008) 'We can but spell a surface history': the biblical typology of Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawlor, Clark (1993) The classical and the grotesque in the work of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawley, Paul Anthony, Ph.D. (1978) The paradox of self-annihilating expression : representations of ontological instability in the drama of Samuel Beckett. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mukim, Mantra (2022) Lyric failure : Samuel Beckett and poetic form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mak, Wing Haang (2018) Kinaesthetic bodies in contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Martín-Castaño, Mónica (2017) Translating Disney songs from The Little Mermaid (1989) to Tarzan (1999) : an analysis of translation strategies used to dub and subtitle songs into Spanish. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murgia, Claudio (2016) [Beyond] posthuman violence : epic rewritings of ethics in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McGowan, Jack (2016) Slam the book: the role of performance in contemporary UK poetics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Maughan, Christopher J. (2015) Activism Ltd : environmental activism and contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Morrissey, Joseph J. (2013) Gentry women and work and leisure 1770-1820. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mearns, Gabrielle (2012) Appropriate fields of action : nineteenth-century representations of the female philanthropist and the parochial sphere. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Marques dos Santos, Ana Teresa Brisio (2012) Translation, radio and drama during the Estado Novo. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mathieson, Charlotte Eleanor (2010) Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McIntosh, Malachi (2010) "Home" : emigration, identity and modern Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murray, Chris M. (2009) The tragic Coleridge : the philosophy of sacrifice in the life and works. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muzica, Evghenii (2006) 'A place where three roads meet': Sophocles's Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet after Freud. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

MacCartey, Kelli (2004) "different sentiments & different connections supports them" : sensibility, community, and diversity in British women's Romantic-period poetry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Sarah (2003) Death, inheritance and the family : a study of literary responses to inheritance in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Mary Virginia (2003) Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha' : a feminist and deconstructive approach. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muto, Hiroshi (2001) The 'disembodied voice' in fin-de-siècle British literature : its genealogy and significances. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mason, Emma (2000) Religious intellectuals : the poetic gravity of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mounsey, Chris (1992) William Blake's The Four Zoas : a reassessment of its implied metaphysics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Matthews, Julia (1991) Characterization and structure in the development of Tudor comedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Middleton, Tim (1991) The operation of discourse as a motive for critical practice : a Bakhtinian perspective. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (1985) Feminine writing and the problem of the self : an examination of Virginia Woolf's novels in the light of recent critical and psychoanalytic theories. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Munns, Jessica (1980) A critical study of Thomas Otway's plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nichols, K. Madolyn (2014) The women who leave : Irish women writing on emigration. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nardi, Valeria (2012) Translation in advertising : marketing cars in Italy and the UK since the 1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Neculai, Catalina (2008) ‘Some fanatical New York promoting’: literary economies of urban regime transformation in New York City, 1970s-1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Niebrzydowski, Sue (1998) Verry matrymony : representations of the Virgin Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, as wives in medieval England, 1200-1540. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nicholson, John Andrew Lamont (1983) Poetry and action in Byron's development. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Oloff, Kerstin Dagmar (2007) Modernity and the novel in the expanded Caribbean : Wilson Harris, Patrick Chamoiseau and Carlos Fuentes. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Brien, George (1979) Life on the land : the interrelationship between identity and community in the Irish fiction of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton and Charles Lever. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Toole, Bridget (1974) The poet and the city : the city as a theme in English poetry of the nineteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pitt Scott, Harry (2022) Energy futures : finance and petroculture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Phillips, Leah Beth (2016) Myth (un)making : the adolescent female body in mythopoeic YA fantasy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poltrack, Emma (2015) The history and working practices of the Propeller Theatre Company (1997-2011). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Putz, Adam (2010) Shakespeares wake : appropriation and cultural politics in Dublin, 1867-1922. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Piasecki, Bohdan A. (2010) Anthologies of contemporary Polish poetry in English translation : paratexts, narratives, and the manipulation of national literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Parkes, Simon John (2009) Home from the wars: the Romantic revenant-veteran of the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poyner, Jane (2003) The fictions of J. M. Coetzee: master of his craft? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poulson, Sally (2000) Reversed perspectives : a re-examination of the later novels of William Wilkie Collins. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pearl, Monica B. (1999) Alien tears : mourning, melancholia, and identity in AIDS literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Potts, Tracey (1997) Can the Imperialist read? Race and feminist literary theory. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Petrone Fresco, Gabriella (1991) Shakespeare's reception in 18th century Italy : the case of Hamlet. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Qiao, Qingquan (2018) China in Britain in the interwar period : Bertrand Russell, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Shih-I Hsiung. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Quinn, Patrick J. (1988) Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon : from early poetry to autobiography. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudd, Lindy Jane Settle (2023) Lessons from Shakespeare : examining early modern pedagogy as ‘pattern, precedent and lively warrant’ for the modern national curriculum. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Richards, Julian (2022) “This Man Is Great” : Glen Byam Shaw directs Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951-1959. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rybczak, Emil (2020) A bibliographical enquiry into Thomas Johnson's A Collection of the Best English Plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Divya Ramakrishna (2019) New alphabet in sight: representation and the reframing of Dalit identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rumbold, Matthew (2017) Epic relation : the sacred, history and late modernist aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robertson, Lisa C. (2016) New and novel homes : women writing London's housing, 1880-1918. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rzepa, Joanna M. (2014) Literary and theological modernisms : Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Józef Wittlin. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudland, Sophie (2013) Faith, feeling and gender in the writing of Hartley, Wollstonecraft and Blake. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reddick, Yvonne J. (2012) The genius of the stream : Ted Hughes and fluvial influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Sumana (2011) The rise of the 'liminal Briton' : literary and artistic productions of black and Asian women in the Midlands. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rahwan, Yamen Rahmoun (2010) Constellations of allegory : Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter and J.M. Coetzee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reuter, Anne-Marie (2009) Fictions of authority : enchanters, teachers and mentors in selected fiction of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Roynon, Tessa Kate (2006) Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Regan, Lisa (2005) 'Men who are men and women who are women': fascism, psychology and feminist resistance in the work of Winifred Holtby. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rogers, Natasha (2004) The representation of trauma in narrative : a study of six late twentieth century novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Lynn Alison (2003) 'No nine days wonder': embedded Protestant narratives in early modern prose murder pamphlets 1573-1700. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Nicholas (2002) Tragedy and otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reeves, Kate (2000) Laughter and madness in post-war American fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Julia Caroline (2000) The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ruben, Mel (1998) Grace under pressure : re-reading Giselle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robbins, Catherine Ruth (1996) Decadence and sexual politics in three fin-de-siècle writers : Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Eleonora (1991) Strategies for identity : the fiction of Margaret Atwood. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sangangamsakun, Thirayut (2021) Trans-Victorian : rewriting Victorian fiction in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shin, Jung Ju (2020) (Re)turn of the abject: representation of Asian (American) masculinity in the West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shorland, Sophie (2019) ‘Blazing stars’: early modern celebrity culture, 1580-1626. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Schauss, Martin (2018) Like a Thing Forsaken: Beckett, Sebald and the Politics of Materiality. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scherer, Madeleine (2018) A global schema: the Graeco-Roman underworld in Ireland and the Caribbean. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stock, Robert P. (2018) Do you hear what I hear? : inferring voice in celebrity translation in the theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stones, Andrew (2018) Lines of flight: Gilles Deleuze and the becoming of world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Starr, Robert (2017) 'Nailed to the rolls of honour, crucified' : Irish literary responses to the Great War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shafer, Joseph R. (2017) Resistances in bodily form: post-1945 American Poetry and D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Katherine Jo (2016) Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Santos, Emanuelle Rodrigues dos (2016) Late postcoloniality : state, violence and wealth in the literatures of early 21st century Portuguese-speaking Africa. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Selleri, Andrea (2013) The author as a critical category, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheeha, Iman (2013) Staging the servant : an examination of the roles of household servants in early modern domestic tragedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Skomorokhova, Svetlana (2012) "Arising from the depths" (Kupala) : a study of Belarusian literature in English translation. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Christian, (Researcher in English) (2012) Shakespeare's influence on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt school critical theorists. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scarth, Katherine Ada (2012) Near London and Brighton : suburbs in fiction, 1780s-1820s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Francesca M. (2011) The fuzzy theory and women writers in the late eighteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Victoria Ellen (2011) If walls had mouths : representations of the Anglo-Fante household and the domestic slave in nineteenth-century Cape Coast (Ghana). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Senior, Emily (2010) Communicating disease : the Caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheils, Barry (2010) Playing at being : style, ethics, and W.B. Yeats. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Spratley, Peter F. (2008) Wordsworth's sonnet corpus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Charlotte (2005) Shakespeare and the idea of the book. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sim, Wai-chew (2002) Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sedgwick, James Martin (2001) Emily Dickinson's grotesque: ambivalent interactions with uncertainty. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Swain, Stella (1992) The uses of madness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction : the relation between narrative strategy and disturbed states of consciousness. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shuttleworth, Antony (1991) The poetics of impurity : Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Salgado, Kshanike Minoli (1991) Towards a definition of Indian literary feminism : an analysis of the novels of Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Surma, Anne (1991) Disputing authorities : the longer fiction of Rebecca West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shaaban, Bouthaina (1981) Shelley's influence on the Chartist poets, with particular emphasis on Ernest Charles Jones and Thomas Cooper. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tan Xing Long, Ian (2020) Poetry as appropriative proximity : Wallace Stevens, Martin Heidegger and the language of being. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ttoouli, George (2017) Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Thomas, Sita Chandra (2017) ‘In search of a new national story’: Issues of cultural diversity in the casting and performance of Shakespeare in Britain 2012–2016. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor-Brown, Emilie (2016) Miasmas, mosquitoes, and microscopes: parasitology and the British literary imagination, 1885-1935. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tsang, Michael Yat Him (2015) At interregnum : Hong Kong and its English writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Juliette (2003) Foreign music: linguistic estrangement and its textual effects in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Terry, Jennifer Ann (2003) "Shuttles in the rocking loom of history": dislocation in Toni Morrison's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turner, Rachael Lucy (2000) Myth, biography and the female role in the plays of Pam Gems. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Townsend, Joanna Kate (1999) Speaking the body, representing the self : hysterical rhetoric on stage. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Jenny Bourne (1987) Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychology : cultural significance and fictional form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turton, Glyn (1984) Turgenev and the context of English literature, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Udomlamun, Nanthanoot (2013) Materiality and memory in contemporary diasporic and postcolonial fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verlander, Freya (2020) (Skin)aesthetics: a study of skin(s) in spectatorship. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Vince, Máté (2013) From 'aequivocatio' to the 'Jesuitical equivocation' : changing concepts of ambiguity in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Voyiatzaki, Evi (2000) The body in the text : James Joyce's Ulysses and the modern Greek novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verma, Rajiva (1972) Concepts of myth and ritual, and criticism of Shakespeare, 1880-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wolfgang, William Floyd (2020) Grassroots Shakespeare: amateur and community-based Shakespeare performance in the United States of America. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wills, James (2020) Fictions of justice : literary lawyers in the American South, 1946-1966. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wu, Aurelia D. (2019) The cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde in modern China and beyond (1909–2019). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Watt, Gary (2018) Performance rhetoric in Shakespeare and law. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weaver, Camilla (2017) Reading seeing: visuality in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Whitehouse, Paul C. (2016) Violence and frontier in twentieth century Native American literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Laura Clare (2015) Works of taste and fancy : the woman and the child reader in nineteenth century literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Williams, Alun Rhys (2014) Architects of impurity : a study of the political imagination in contemporary fantastic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wako, Miho (2012) Figured in lively paint : Eastern decorative art, English aestheticism, and consumer culture 1862-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

West, John Peter (2011) Dryden and enthusiasm. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

White, Troy Nelson (2010) The Gothic threshold of Sabine Baring-Gould : a study of the Gothic fiction of a Victorian squarson. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webb, Andrew (Andrew S.) (2010) ‘His country...not the country he had fought for’ : British literatures and world lit. theory : the case of Edward Thomas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wells, Sherah Kristen (2009) 'Another world,/its walls are thin': psychosis and Catholicism in the texts of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wallbank, Adrian J. (2008) Political, religious, and philosophical mentoring of the Romantic period : the dialogue genre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Madeleine Alice (2008) Victorian familial enigmas: inheritance and influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Westall, Claire Louise (2007) What should we know of cricket who only England know? : cricket and its heroes in English and Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wong, Hiu Wing (2006) "Talk-stories" in the fictions of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weller, Saranne Esther Elizabeth (2001) 'Written with a Mrs Stowe's feeling' : Uncle Tom's cabin and the paradigms of Southern authorship in the anti-Tom tradition, 1852-1902. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wang, Nian En (1992) The xing : a comparative approach to Chinese theories of the literary symbolic. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webster, Duncan (1984) Representing the economy and the economies of representation : readings in the fiction and criticism of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wheale, John William (1983) Redemption in the work of Francis Stuart. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Jaewon (2022) Post-millennial American and British finance-crisis fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yiannitsaros, Christopher (2016) Deadly domesticity : Agatha Christie's 'middlebrow' Gothic, 1930-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Sun Kyoung (2011) (Re)-constructing Homer : English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey between 1850 and 1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yun, Hunam (2010) Appropriations of Irish drama by modern Korean nationalist theatre : a focus on the influence of Sean O’Casey in a colonial context. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Sample Honors Proposals and Theses

Sample honors proposals.

The following represent a sampling of outstanding English honors project proposals.

Disrupting Stereotypes: A Usability Report on Inclusive Design for Invisible Disabilities, including ADHD and Anxiety (PDF)

Author: Abby Wing Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Janine Solberg, English Department Published: Spring 2023

Sir Lancelot Portrayed in Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur , Chretien de Troyes's Lancelot du Lac and T.H. White's The Once and Future King (PDF)

Author: Taylor Wise Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Jenny Adams, English Department Published: Expected Spring 2017

Jane Austen’s Male Characters Through A Feminist Critical Lens (PDF)

Author: Anastasia Armstrong Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Heidi Holder and Suzanne Daly, English Department Published: Expected Spring 2017

Sample Honors Theses

The following represent a sampling of outstanding English honors thesis projects.

Author: Abby Wing Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Janine Solberg, English Department Published 2023

Abstract: In the Spring 2023 semester, I recruited students and faculty members with disabilities to test the usability of UMass Amherst financial aid web pages. The purpose of my testing was to learn more about the accessibility needs of people with disabilities. I conducted six remote usability tests with participants using Zoom. Each participant completed five tasks and shared their responses to a series of open-ended questions at the end of each test. These tasks involved finding information related to the cost of attending UMass Amherst for prospective students (i.e., total cost of attendance, net cost of attendance, housing costs, dining costs, and scholarships). Afterward, I generated inclusive personas that reflected the diverse characteristics of the participants. These personas, which are further discussed in the conclusion, offer insights into the accessibility needs of students with disabilities.

What I found: while participants are able to complete all tasks, they wished that information was more consolidated for greater navigability. Most of the time participants spent completing tasks involved trying to locate the appropriate pages to complete the tasks. Participants also wished that there was a stronger information hierarchy on cost pages for improved readability.

“This Is Hardly the Happy Ending I Was Expecting”: NIER ’s Rejection of the Heteronormative in Fairy Tales (PDF)

Author: Emily Cerri Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Caroline Yang and TreaAndrea Russworm, English Department Published 2019

Abstract: Despite the perception they are just entertainment, video games have the potential to present criticisms on aspects of culture such as race, gender, and sexuality. Games such as Gone Home and The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories subvert stereotypes of gender and sexuality or highlight the struggles of sexually marginalized groups in a heteronormative society. However, games often miss the opportunity to subvert expectations or represent racially marginalized communities. The game NIER both creates and overlooks critiques of this lack of attention through its use of the fairy tale genre. NIER ’s destabilization of binaries and refusal to conform to gender roles and performance present a critique of heteronormativity and the gender binary of the fairy tale canon. And yet, NIER also misses the opportunity to fully present criticisms on the topics of race, gender, and sexuality. The game’s presentation of race is especially lacking, particularly through its tacit assumption of whiteness as the “unmarked” race. Though attempts to it dismantle some stereotypical racial imagery, it shuts out the possibility of nonwhite people persisting through the apocalypse. Furthermore, while its portrayal of nonheteronormative characters destabilizes the stereotypes of these characters in other media, censorship and pandering to the male gaze ultimately hinder the representation of these marginalized characters. That is, the localization explicitly alters characters’ identities in favor of heteronormativity and the game uses clothing and camera angles to hypersexualize the female protagonist. Its use of fairy tales, which are typically European tales, sometimes highlights their normalized gender and sexual stereotypes and expectations and sometimes subvert them. In other cases, it misses the opportunity to destabilize these notions and instead maintains the status quo. In such ways, NIER also fails to completely queer the fairy tale canon even as it tries to subvert the genre. Nonetheless, while NIER falls short of being a queer critique, it provides the opening for the critical player to do so.

Using Genre Theory to Understand the Way Opinion Journalism is Changing in Today’s Digital World (PDF)

Author: Tess Halpern Thesis Type: Independent Thesis Approved By: Donna LeCourt and Janine Solberg, English Department Published 2019

Abstract: As an editor of opinion journalism during my college years, I have always struggled to not only articulate but also determine which texts constitute opinion journalism and which are simply opinion. As opinions become more ubiquitous with the rise of the digital era, and as they can now be published on platforms like blogs, podcasts, and social media with no regulation or editorial review, this distinction has become even harder to make. Unfortunately, the blurring of the line between opinion journalism and opinion has happened at the precise moment that the legitimacy of journalism has also begun to be questioned more than ever before in my lifetime. The purpose of this research was to definitively draw that line, separating opinion journalism from opinion. To do this, I first determined the genre norms of opinion journalism by studying the texts, the writers, and the publications that define the genre. Following, I then determined where the genre set of opinion journalism ends by studying articles written for non-reputable, digital-only platforms, and platforms that were self-publishing or otherwise had minimal editing and regulation processes. A total of 63 articles from The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Odyssey Online , and personal blogs were analyzed for this research. The results of this study allowed me to track the transformation that opinion journalism, and journalism in general, is currently undergoing. Additionally, it clarified the distinction between opinion journalism and ordinary opinion, allowing me to better understand the genre and the texts that are excluded from that genre.

"You Can Be Useful to Us in a Hundred Different Ways”: A Study of Stage and Screen Adaptations of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (PDF)

Author: Emma Piscia Thesis/Project Type: Independent Honors Thesis Approved By: Heidi Holder and Suzanne Daly, Department Of English Published 2016

Abstract: Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby has been adapted since 1839, when it was still in the midst of its initial serialized publication. It has since been adapted into plays, films, and television miniseries over 250 times, and the number continues to grow. This thesis investigates the history of Nickleby as adapted for stage and screen from 1838 to the present. While there has been much scholarly consideration of adapted Dickens, there has been little in the way of examination of any particular work across periods and genres; Nickleby, with its varied history on stage and screen, certainly merits such critical examination. Works discussed here range from Edward Stirling’s early farce Nicholas Nickleby: or, Doings at Do-The-Boys Hall (1838), through David Edgar’s marathon stage adaptation The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Royal Shakespeare Company 1980), to David Innes Edwards’s and Joy Wilkinson’s The Life and Adventures of Nick Nickleby (a 2012 miniseries). This thesis explores the cultural uses and revisions of Dickens’s text. Key topics of discussion include the highly varied representation of the orphan Smike; the portrayal of physical, sexual, and financial violence; and the sociopolitical and economic themes of the novel that allow it to resonate with contemporary audiences down through the centuries. Using reviews, historical context, literary and film criticism, performance history, and gender theory, this thesis endeavors to explain the persistence of an early Victorian novel in popular culture.

Eye on Research (PDF)

Author: Alexandra Foley Thesis/Project Type: Capstone Thesis Approved By: David Toomey and Janine Solberg, Department Of English Published 2012

Abstract: A collection of the newest discoveries and breaking edge research taking place on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. Here is a list of some of the research published in this thesis: a new synthetic material called “Geckskin” which mimics the adhesion power of Gecko feet developed in Polymer Science department; UBot, a robot designed by UMass’s Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, can learn by interacting with its environment; Gregory Tew, of the Polymer Science department, has found a way to look inside their previously impenetrable membranes of T cells; and Dr. Caitlyn Shea Butler of the Environmental Engineering department has designed a “Microbial Fuel Cell Latrine” that purifies human waste and produces electricity at the same time.

“How could the body politic be made to work in the absence of its head?”: Beheadings, Gender, and Power In Malory’s Morte Darthur (PDF)

Author: Kerry Ditson Thesis/Project Type: Independent Honors Thesis Approved by: Jen Adams, English Department and Sonja Drimmer, Art History Program Published: 2015

Abstract: The Wars of the Roses were without a doubt one of the most transformative and traumatic events of medieval England. This bloody conflict called into question commonly accepted notions of nobility, masculinity, kingship, governance, and violence. The deposition of Richard II in 1399 set into motion aftershocks that would be felt half a century later, as the notion of divinely anointed kingship was called into question—in a world where kings could be gotten rid of, who had the right to rule? The answer came down, in many ways, to one issue: blood.

Closets and Transylvanian Castles: Vampires and Queerness in the Nineteenth-Century Literature and Beyond (PDF)

Author: Maxwell Heath Thesis/Project Type: Independent Honors Thesis Approved by Heidi Holder and Jenny Spencer of the Department of English Published 2015

Abstract: My thesis examines how vampires have been used in literature to depict queer people and explore issues of queerness. Focusing primarily on the nineteenth century with a brief foray into the twentieth, I analyze seven key texts, both well known and relatively obscure, from John Polidori’s groundbreaking “The Vampyre” (1819) to G.S. Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907). This wide range is significant: previous work in the field has tended toward individual studies. I track how the depictions of vampirism and queerness evolved over time, focusing especially on the tropes of disorientation of space and narrative structure, complex patterning of relationships between characters, and conflict between humans and vampires for control of narrative. To this end ideas drawn from theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have been deployed in my analysis. I have discovered that from the first there is a degree of sympathy for queerness which is often occluded by gothic tropes. While the vampires themselves only begin to shift from villains towards more ambiguous figures at the end of the nineteenth century, their victims are often figured as queer and portrayed sympathetically. This suggests that vampires have been used as a way to mask queerness in metaphor so that it could be explored and discussed during a time when any explicit examination was forbidden.

Transplanted (PDF)

Author: Michael Sirois Thesis/Project Type: Independent Honors Thesis Approved by John Hennessy, Department of English Published May 2015

Abstract: My honors thesis project is a manuscript consisting of twenty-four poems. This collection of poetry reflects my transition from a working-class upbringing to completing my degree at the university. The many years I spent working in agriculture influence my poetry significantly, so natural settings and elements serve as a prism for my themes of work, the working-class, and the family. The introduction to my thesis project is included to show the departures from my literary influences.

For more information, see  499Y Honors Research (Part I) or  499T/P Honors Research (Part II) .

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What is a literature review? [with examples]

What is a literature review?

The purpose of a literature review, how to write a literature review, the format of a literature review, general formatting rules, the length of a literature review, literature review examples, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, related articles.

A literature review is an assessment of the sources in a chosen topic of research.

In a literature review, you’re expected to report on the existing scholarly conversation, without adding new contributions.

If you are currently writing one, you've come to the right place. In the following paragraphs, we will explain:

• the objective of a literature review
• how to write a literature review
• the basic format of a literature review

Tip: It’s not always mandatory to add a literature review in a paper. Theses and dissertations often include them, whereas research papers may not. Make sure to consult with your instructor for exact requirements.

The four main objectives of a literature review are:

• Studying the references of your research area
• Summarizing the main arguments
• Identifying current gaps, stances, and issues
• Presenting all of the above in a text

Ultimately, the main goal of a literature review is to provide the researcher with sufficient knowledge about the topic in question so that they can eventually make an intervention.

The format of a literature review is fairly standard. It includes an:

• introduction that briefly introduces the main topic
• body that includes the main discussion of the key arguments
• conclusion that highlights the gaps and issues of the literature

➡️ Take a look at our guide on how to write a literature review to learn more about how to structure a literature review.

First of all, a literature review should have its own labeled section. You should indicate clearly in the table of contents where the literature can be found, and you should label this section as “Literature Review.”

➡️ For more information on writing a thesis, visit our guide on how to structure a thesis .

There is no set amount of words for a literature review, so the length depends on the research. If you are working with a large amount of sources, it will be long. If your paper does not depend entirely on references, it will be short.

Take a look at these three theses featuring great literature reviews:

• School-Based Speech-Language Pathologist's Perceptions of Sensory Food Aversions in Children [ PDF , see page 20]
• Who's Writing What We Read: Authorship in Criminological Research [ PDF , see page 4]
• A Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Online Instructors of Theological Reflection at Christian Institutions Accredited by the Association of Theological Schools [ PDF , see page 56]

Literature reviews are most commonly found in theses and dissertations. However, you find them in research papers as well.

There is no set amount of words for a literature review, so the length depends on the research. If you are working with a large amount of sources, then it will be long. If your paper does not depend entirely on references, then it will be short.

No. A literature review should have its own independent section. You should indicate clearly in the table of contents where the literature review can be found, and label this section as “Literature Review.”

The main goal of a literature review is to provide the researcher with sufficient knowledge about the topic in question so that they can eventually make an intervention.

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Lesson Plan

Jan. 15, 2024, 9:20 a.m.

Lesson plan: Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech as a work of literature

For a google doc version of this lesson, click here .

Introduction

Students will study Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and discuss the rhetorical influences on King's speech, the oratorical devices that King used in delivering his speech and how a speech is similar to/different from other literary forms.

English, Social Studies, Government

Estimated Time

One 50-minute class period, plus extended activities

Grade Level

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most memorable speech from his life as an activist, “ I HAVE A DREAM , ” was delivered on August 28, 1963, before more than 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The speech was part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It not only helped to galvanize the already growing civil rights movement across the country at the time, but also became one of the most influential and inspirational pieces of rhetoric in American history.

Remarkably, midway through his delivery, King suspended his pre-scripted text and began to improvise; what resulted was the speech’s most recognizable section, the passage in which the words “I have a dream” are passionately repeated. Indeed, King’s background as a Baptist preacher in the South instilled in him a talent for improvisation as a speaker and the skill to frame the urgency of the moment.

What is also apparent in “I Have Dream” is King’s deep commitment to scholarship (he earned a Ph.D. from Boston University). King was clearly well-versed in both American history and religious scripture, and he seamlessly weaves references to both into the fabric of his oration. Overall, “I Have a Dream” can be held up as a masterful creative work in itself; its dramatic structure coupled with its image-laden content render a remarkably moving piece of American literature that still strongly resonates today.

• Begin by supplying foundation material for the students through the NewsHour Classroom article and the NewsHour's Martin Luther King, Jr. section, the background explanation above and the links provided.
• Distribute the COMPLETE TEXT OF "I Have a Dream."
• Review the LITERARY TERMS HANDOUT with the students.
• What examples of figurative language can be found in the text? (For example, "seared in the flames of withering injustice"; "manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination"; "whirlwinds of revolt"; "oasis of freedom and justice"; "symphony of brotherhood."
• How do these uses enhance the overall impact of the speech? What oratorical devices does King use to add vitality and force to his speech? (For example, use of refrains such as "I have a dream," "let freedom ring" and "we can never be satisfied"; multiple shifts in sentence lengths; dramatic shifts in tone, such as from enraged to cautionary to hopeful; use of questions as well as exclamations, such as "when will you be satisfied?" and "I have a dream today!")
• In what specific ways does King call forth his experience as a preacher to lend persuasive power to the speech? (For example, he uses several images that call to mind both the plight of black Americans as well as the Old Testament Hebrews under the oppression of slavery — "the manacles of segregation" and the "chains of discrimination"; the final line of the speech invokes "the old Negro spiritual" and is steeped in Biblical influence — "Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
• Discuss the responses as a class.

Extension Activity

• How are the speeches alike and/or different in their choices of language? In other words, do the speeches seem as if they were composed for the general public or rather for specific groups?
• Of the three, which do you see as being the most direct? That is, which speech uses the least amount of figurative language and/or obscure references?
• Which of the three is the most metaphorical in its content? In other words, which makes the most use of figurative language?
• For each speech, explain how relevant its ideas would be in society if the speech were delivered today. Do the mentioned struggles still exist? Has the country evolved since the speeches were given? Has society responded to the specific appeals for change?
• Passionate?
• Intellectual?
• Persuasive?
• 5-10 minutes in length
• Clearly defined opening, body and conclusion
• Clearly defined thesis (main point)
• Use of supporting examples to support thesis
• Use of figurative language
• Use of oratorical devices such as refrain and hyperbole
• Clearly expressed goals (legal reform; public awareness; etc.)

Written by Doug DuBrin, French International School, Bethesda, Maryland, in 2010.

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Reference Examples

More than 100 reference examples and their corresponding in-text citations are presented in the seventh edition Publication Manual . Examples of the most common works that writers cite are provided on this page; additional examples are available in the Publication Manual .

To find the reference example you need, first select a category (e.g., periodicals) and then choose the appropriate type of work (e.g., journal article ) and follow the relevant example.

When selecting a category, use the webpages and websites category only when a work does not fit better within another category. For example, a report from a government website would use the reports category, whereas a page on a government website that is not a report or other work would use the webpages and websites category.

Also note that print and electronic references are largely the same. For example, to cite both print books and ebooks, use the books and reference works category and then choose the appropriate type of work (i.e., book ) and follow the relevant example (e.g., whole authored book ).

Examples on these pages illustrate the details of reference formats. We make every attempt to show examples that are in keeping with APA Style’s guiding principles of inclusivity and bias-free language. These examples are presented out of context only to demonstrate formatting issues (e.g., which elements to italicize, where punctuation is needed, placement of parentheses). References, including these examples, are not inherently endorsements for the ideas or content of the works themselves. An author may cite a work to support a statement or an idea, to critique that work, or for many other reasons. For more examples, see our sample papers .

Reference examples are covered in the seventh edition APA Style manuals in the Publication Manual Chapter 10 and the Concise Guide Chapter 10

Related handouts

• Common Reference Examples Guide (PDF, 147KB)
• Reference Quick Guide (PDF, 225KB)

Textual Works

Textual works are covered in Sections 10.1–10.8 of the Publication Manual . The most common categories and examples are presented here. For the reviews of other works category, see Section 10.7.

• Journal Article References
• Magazine Article References
• Newspaper Article References
• Blog Post and Blog Comment References
• UpToDate Article References
• Book/Ebook References
• Diagnostic Manual References
• Children’s Book or Other Illustrated Book References
• Classroom Course Pack Material References
• Religious Work References
• Chapter in an Edited Book/Ebook References
• Dictionary Entry References
• Wikipedia Entry References
• Report by a Government Agency References
• Report with Individual Authors References
• Brochure References
• Ethics Code References
• Fact Sheet References
• ISO Standard References
• Press Release References
• White Paper References
• Conference Presentation References
• Conference Proceeding References
• Published Dissertation or Thesis References
• Unpublished Dissertation or Thesis References
• ERIC Database References
• Preprint Article References

Data and Assessments

Data sets are covered in Section 10.9 of the Publication Manual . For the software and tests categories, see Sections 10.10 and 10.11.

• Data Set References
• Toolbox References

Audiovisual Media

Audiovisual media are covered in Sections 10.12–10.14 of the Publication Manual . The most common examples are presented together here. In the manual, these examples and more are separated into categories for audiovisual, audio, and visual media.

• Artwork References
• Clip Art or Stock Image References
• Film and Television References
• Musical Score References
• Online Course or MOOC References
• Podcast References
• PowerPoint Slide or Lecture Note References
• Radio Broadcast References
• TED Talk References
• Transcript of an Audiovisual Work References
• YouTube Video References

Online Media

Online media are covered in Sections 10.15 and 10.16 of the Publication Manual . Please note that blog posts are part of the periodicals category.

• Facebook References
• Instagram References
• LinkedIn References
• Online Forum (e.g., Reddit) References
• TikTok References
• X References
• Webpage on a Website References
• Clinical Practice References
• Open Educational Resource References
• Whole Website References