Earlier critics of Jude often allude to theories of inheritance (particularly Darwin's) to support their claim of the novel's determinism, but readings that specifically focus on Darwinism did not emerge until lately, and ...
Smith's experimental style reflects not just a different way of representing space and narrative time, but also a different way of understanding how people and spaces change within a singular place. The narrative is presented ...
In the months since her mechanical-engineer husband confessed to cheating on her, twentysomething Lenore has moved back in with her parents, gotten a job as a barista, and reconnected with her best friend from college, ...
The Edenic trope of the fallen woman structures the original Fall as Eve's punishment for her embodied desire, for breaking the rules, and has thus permeated literature with feminine characters who are met with repeated ...
Herman Melville's Bartleby begins in a very strange way. The narrator—the lawyer in the narrative's law office setting—grieves that Bartleby, a scrivener who he had employed some years ago, presents an "irreparable loss ...
Perry Smith's last words in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and two recent cinematic adaptations of the novel, Capote and Infamous, cumulatively challenge the concept of finality. The content and portrayal of Smith's execution ...
A pair of two short stories titled "Turkey" and "Loose Fingers." These are followed by a critical afterword detailing the experience of the writing process and the thematic concerns raised by the two pieces.
Fun Home is a complex, gripping, and thought-provoking graphic novel. This autobiography, follows the coming of age story of author Alison Bechdel as she navigates the complicated and confusing relationship that she and ...
An overview of the ways in which The Waste Land exemplifies the distinctive qualities of modernism and shows how voice was Eliot's most important tool in creating them.
This thesis discusses how the poet Christina Rossetti uses the body and mind as a poetic merger to better access and understand her spirit. Through her devotional poetry, Rossetti reclaims the body's role in Biblical ...
"The Tumbled" is a story about a white family's failures: first, to grieve the loss of a loved one, and second, to understand their own history. The Pleutises are stuck in some sort of hell, or purgatory, or time loop, ...
M. Nourbese Philip's book of abstract poetry Zong! tells the story of the murder of more than 100 African slaves aboard the historical slave ship Zong in 1781. Subsequent court cases culminated in an appeal document which ...
Asian Americanness is often described using language that marks this racial categorization’s hybridity and liminality -- the way that they are white, but not white enough and yet the way that they don’t cleanly fit into ...
In her 1978 neo-slave narrative Kindred, Octavia Butler utilizes the science-fiction trope of time travel to allow Dana, a Black woman from the 20th century, to travel to the antebellum South where she both witnesses and ...
This essay investigates the queer poetics of reticence and disidentification in the modernist poet H.D.’s personal archive and poem “Eurydice.” Using a letter found in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections that H.D. wrote to ...
In my thesis, I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral as a metafiction text about its narrator: Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman is beset by conflict between him and his parents that took place in previous novels and inhabits ...
This essay explores how loss is structured by the lyrical, linguistic patterns and citational cadence of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The text is constructed out of over two hundred fragments and loosely narrates the aftermath ...
This thesis examines the critical tradition surrounding William Wordsworth's The Prelude, and seeks to argue the continued importance of Nature in the development of his poetic or Imaginative capabilities. Specifically, ...
In this thesis, I examine Kurt Vonnegut’s use of science fiction elements in Slaughterhouse-Five and uncover how these elements contribute to Vonnegut’s anti-war message. I argue that Vonnegut employs science fiction to ...