W&L Dept. of English
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According to the 2010-2011 Washington and Lee University Catalog (undergraduate), all "honors programs require an honors thesis during the senior year, involving six credits (no more, no less) of independent work, such as a significant report based upon field or laboratory research, a creative accomplishment in the arts, or a comparable scholarly undertaking, demonstrating more than simply a mastery of subject matter." This site provides access to honors theses the University Library has included in a digitization project beginning in 2010. In many cases, these records include online access to the complete contents of theses, but, at the authors' wishes, some of these records limit online access to current W&L researchers. For similar reasons, some records allow no online access at all.
This material is made available for use in research, teaching, and private study, pursuant to U.S. Copyright law. The user assumes full responsibility for any use of the materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials. Any materials used should be fully credited with the source. Permission for publication of this material, in part or in full, must be secured with the Head of Special Collections and Archives.
Preferred citation: [Identification of item], Student Papers, Record Group 38, Special Collections and Archives, Leyburn Library, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA
In some cases the citation format may vary. Please contact the staff of Special Collections and Archives to verify the appropriate format.
Recent Submissions
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Until the Breaking of Day: Stories from Penuel County, Georgia (thesis)
The most important thing to me in this collection is the presence of religion. I came up with the name of the setting of my short stories long before I had even decided that I wanted to write a senior thesis. In a “Bible ... -
“It is for Freedom that You Have Been Set Free”: Christianity, Minor Characters, and Conceptions of Freedom in Three Works by William Wells Brown (thesis)
By the time William Wells Brown was writing these works, abolition as Christian reform in the United States had become a residual discourse left over from earlier conversations. Despite the shift from Christian reform to ... -
Civilized Barbarism: Cannibalism and Rome in 'Coriolanus' and 'Titus Andronicus' (thesis)
Looking at text and performance, this thesis investigates how cannibalism shapes the identity of Rome in Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus. This thesis posits that both plays utilize cannibalistic diction to form their Roman ... -
Surprised by Joy, Steeped in Sacrament: Shaping the Creative Imaginations of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
. . . This, then, is my best guess (from what inadequate and ambiguous evidence I have gathered), as to how the story-germs of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings grew in the soil of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s ... -
The Paradox of Virtue: Milton's Satan and the Anti-Hero Tradition
In the classical sphere, Milton scholars have placed due emphasis on the associations between Paradise Lost and the epic tradition, particularly as expressed through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid at the ... -
Autumn's Return (thesis)
Ultimately, research for this project consisted of two parts: the theoretical and the practical. Because I devised to compose a long work of fiction, I needed to understand the mechanics of writing extended fiction as well ... -
I am not my mouth: A Poetry Collection
I have spent the last six months thinking about what it means to tell a story. In my creative writing thesis, I wanted to explore poetry and its strengths and weaknesses as a mode of communication. I’ve been writing poetry ... -
H. D. and the Religion of Writing (thesis)
My thesis examines how, throughout her career, H.D. seeks to express creativity in reality through occult writing. I trace this goal in H.D.’s major war-inspired works, Sea Garden (1916), The Gift (1944), and Trilogy (1944). ... -
The Story of the Storyteller: The Ruined Cottage and the Arc of Wordsworth's Poetic Career (thesis)
The Ruined Cottage, as we read it in anthologies today, is the tragic story of a young country woman who spends the final decade of her life slowly wasting away, tortured by the enduring hope that one day her husband will ... -
Socialism in Early 20th Century American Literature (thesis)
. . . But I needed to know more in order to understand why someone who called himself a communist or a socialist would turn on friends and neighbors who called themselves something else. So I set out to discover what ... -
"A Language Without Words": Ireland Reimagined in the Plays of Brian Friel (thesis)
In the following chapters, I will introduce two of Brian Friel’s most beloved plays, Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa, focusing particularly on the playwright’s use of different “languages” and his emphasis on the ... -
Salvation, Perdition, and Redemption: The Genre of King Lear and His Three Daughters (thesis)
In changing the ending of the play, then, Shakespeare was rewriting history in a bold fashion. This is not merely a question of characterization, like Richard III, or condensation for dramatic purposes, like Macbeth, but ... -
The Modern Myth (thesis)
Altogether, the five pieces I created for this project reflect a yearlong journey into fairy tale and folklore. I have met witches and anthropomorphized bears on this journey, and discussed life and men with princesses and ... -
The Politics of Poverty: Conscience and Justice in the Modern Novel (thesis)
As a student of literary theory, I am fascinated by how literature explores and elucidates ideology and its concomitant social and cultural impact in the real world—a sort of meta-ideology. With a background in poverty and ... -
Sickness and disability in children's literature : using picture books as a path to understanding and empathy (thesis)
In this paper, I investigate three niches within this category of children's books on sickness and disability: books on common illnesses, books on disabilities, and books on serious or chronic illnesses. Each chapter is ... -
"It's the theatrical" : Sylvia Plath and the audacious performance of an atomic identity (thesis)
The body of this thesis explains Plath's most shocking metaphors by arguing that she is not simply a "confessional" poet, as many have labeled her (Britzolakis 3). Instead, she complicates the very idea of confession or ...
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