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 2021
Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse, Hailey Whetten
Theses/Dissertations from 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad, Marcia Eppich-Harris
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
Submissions from 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
Genderless bodies: Stigma and the myth of womanhood, Ellen M Letizia
Envy and jealousy in the novels of the Brontes: 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
Submissions from 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 "Finnegans 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
Submissions from 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
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
Submissions from 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
Submissions from 2003
Toward a re-formed confession: Johann Gerhard's "Sacred Meditations" and "repining restlessnesse" in the poetry of George Herbert, Erik Peder Ankerberg
Idiographic spaces: Representation, ideology and realism in the postmodern British novel, Gordon B McConnell
Submissions from 2002
Reading into it: Wallace Stegner's novelistic sense of time and place, Colin Charles Irvine
Brisbane and beyond: Revising social capitalism in mid-nineteenth-century America, Michael Charles Mattek
Submissions from 2001
Christians and mimics in W. B. Yeats' "Collected Poems", Patrick Shannon Mulrooney
Renaissance roles and the process of social change, John Jerome Wieland
'Straunge disguize': Allegory and its discontents in Spenser's "Faerie Queene", Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko
Submissions from 2000
Reading American women's autobiography: Spheres of identity, spheres of influence, Amy Corine Getty
"Making strange": The art and science of selfhood in the works of John Banville, Heather Maureen Moran
Writing Guadalupe: Mediacion and (mis)translation in borderland text(o)s, Jenny T Olin-Shanahan
Writing Guadalupe: Mediacion and (Mis)Translation in Borderland Text(o)s, Jenny T. Olin-Shanahan
Submissions from 1999
Setting the word against the word: The search for self-understanding in "Richard II", Richard Jean Erable
Contextualizing spiritual authority in "The Book of Margery Kempe", Mary Lynn Morse
The depiction of religion in eighteenth-century English literature from Swift to Johnson, Beverly Trescott Mueller
The problem of obscurity in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Charles Puthota
"Spheral change": D. G. Rossetti envisioning an alternative Victorian masculinity, Jay D Sloan
Submissions from 1998
Cantles of contention: A Kierkegaardian reading of "Hamlet", "Troilus and Cressida", and "Antony and Cleopatra", Michael G. Bielmeier
The Petrarchan convention and Tudor court politics in poetry of Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney, Ok-Sook Hong
For love or money: The economics of illicit sexuality in English eighteenth-century legal sources and prose narratives, Kristen Hoffman Senior
The otherness of blackness: Emergent ambiguities in early American prose literature, David Lawrence White
Old times not forgotten: Family and storytelling in twentieth-century Southern literature, Lisa Ann Cade Wieland
Old Times not Forgotten: Family and Storytelling in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Lisa Ann Cade Wieland
Willa Cather and the American idiom, Li Zhu
Submissions from 1997
The theologization of English: A history of the rise and development of academic English studies in Britain and America, Joel Robert Christenson