On the first day of summer in the year 2103, valedictorian of the Excel High graduating class Ola Brewer-Asaju is ready for a weekend of outfits, parties, and fun with her best friend before her summer job starts. ...
"I sit between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade," Oscar Wilde writes to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, known affectionately as "Bosie," from the solitude of his prison cell (54). The letter – given the title De ...
This thesis focuses on two children's novels: What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge, published in 1872, and its 2015 ‘rewrite', Katy by Jacqueline Wilson. Although Susan Coolidge was influenced by social standards of the time, ...
This paper explores Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People, a fictional representation of a real-world ecological disaster, and its imaginative implications through the theory of the posthuman. The narrator and protagonist—a ...
A focus on Claudia Rankine's use of the second person in her self-described lyric Citizen, in which I argue she invites all readers toparticipate in what ends up being a form of "wake work," a term coined by Christina ...
This thesis presents the ways in which confessional poet Sylvia Plath traversed literary boundaries through her anti-normative poetics and strove to rupture what psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva delineates as the ...
J.D. Salinger stormed Utah Beach as an infantry member of the D-Day invasion. For the rest of his career and life, he grappled with the trauma of the second World War. He sought restoration in many forms of therapy, physical ...
As I Lay Dying is a disorienting, anachronistic novel that depicts a poor family struggling to navigate loss, an environmental crisis, and the modernizing South. The 59 individually-narrated sections of the novel provide ...
This essay explores the role of the humanist designer in the creation of AI in an academic and social posthuman setting. Set on the cusp of the 21st century, Powers's pseudo-autobiographical Galatea 2.2 reimagines the myth ...
Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) is latent with racialized metaphors surrounding elevators in the early modernization of the 20th century United States. Through the use of the black box, or perfect elevator, ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
"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, ...
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.
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 ...