ENGL Honors Theses
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This collection contains the scholarship of the W&L Dept. of English's students.
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Recent Submissions
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'A Transitory Possession': Economics of A Streetcar Named Desire
My most specific goal with this research is to offer a new angle for analyzing one of America's greatest plays. I also have a more general goal: to introduce readers to the methodology and benefits of economic criticism. ... -
“Men have power”: A Feminist Reclamation of Marianne Moore’s “Marriage”
I began and ended my research with "Marriage" itself in the same way that this thesis begins and ends with the poem itself. From here I naturally moved to understand Marianne Moore, hoping that through knowing Moore's ... -
A Tale of Three Butterflies: Etymology and Entomology in Shakespeare’s "Coriolanus"
To locate the butterfly’s importance in Coriolanus, I will trace the butterfly’s heritage from two perspectives - first as a word in English, and secondly as a literary symbol in the cultural tradition spanning Hebrew, ... -
"I Made My Moves With Shackled Feet": Understanding the Subversive in the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Kendrick Lamar
Ever since the emergence of dialect speech into popular culture following the conclusion of the Civil War, black writers of vernacular in America have had to manage complicated relationships with both their white editors ... -
The Trope of the Tortured Genius: An Examination of 19th Century British and American Poetry (thesis)
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the trope of the tortured genius in the transatlantic ninetieth century landscape. For the purposes of this paper, a genius is an individual or position that affords perspective, ... -
"Dangerously Brainy" Women and their Male Editors (thesis)
The decision to write on Anne Bradstreet, Mary Shelley, and Sylvia Plath cannot be abstracted from their gender. In the beginning of my thesis process, I was captivated by the question of how male editors affect the works ... -
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 ... -
The Paradox of Virtue: Milton's Satan and the Anti-Hero Tradition (thesis)
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 ... -
Surprised by Joy, Steeped in Sacrament: Shaping the Creative Imaginations of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (thesis)
. . . 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 ... -
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 ... -
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). ... -
I am not my mouth: A Poetry Collection (thesis)
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 ... -
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 ...
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