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Theses/Dissertations from 2024
Victim or Villain: Female Resilience and Agency in the Face of Trauma in Chimamanda Adichie’s, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s, Nervous Conditions (1988), Adaobi Juliet Chukwuma
An Environmental Struggle: Nature’s Role in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, Jake Lawson
The Neoliberal Noirs of Gary Indiana, Carson Morgan
Gentleman Death in Silk and Lace: Death and the Maiden in Vampire Literature and Film, Emily Wilson
Theses/Dissertations from 2023
Bibliotherapy: A Literary and Linguistic Analysis of Literature, Matthew Curry
Mankind is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading of Philip K. Dick’s Selected Works, Gabriel Davis
The Hysterical Woman: An Analysis of Trauma in Gothic Women’s Literature and Modern Horror Film, Molly Holdway
Linguistic Features of Metaphor, Metonymy and Narrative Gap in “The Yellow Wallpaper:” A Literary Analysis, Sherry Kaye Ms.
“It’s Alive!” The Birth and Afterlife of the Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous
Consuming the World: Poetic Appetite, Memory, and Identity in Li-Young Lee’s Food Poems, Claire Liszka
Tell the Bees that Transcendentalism is Lost: The Search for the Lost Transcendental Space in the Bee Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, Adyson M. Ross
Führer and Father in Flux: Fascism and Desire in the Works of George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, K. Tyler Wick
Theses/Dissertations from 2022
A Lesson in Mourning: The Evolution of the English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
Cyberspace vs Green Space: Nature’s Psychological Influence in Neuromancer, Blade Runner 2049, and The Stone Gods, Zackery Castle
Posthumanism in the Early Modern Period: Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, Kayli Compton
Loving the Mountains, Leaving the Mountains: The Appalachian Dilemma and Jim Wayne Miller’s The Brier Poems, Madeline Dawson
Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk
Visions of Christ in The Dollmaker, Ray Fine
The Whale-Road to Road House: A Study of the Contemporary Transmission of Beowulf, Haley Grindstaff
At What Price: Insidious Hegemony and Character Archetypes Woven into Until Dawn, Courtney Harvey
“It is not enough to be in one cage with one self”: The Poetic Subject, Incarceration, and Envisioning Abolition, Emily Price
Searching for Hades in Archaic Greek Literature, Daniel Stoll
Theses/Dissertations from 2021
From Byronic to Gothic Blood Sucker: Subversion toward a Non-Gendered Identity, Hannah Hoover
The Failure of Chivalry, Courtesy, and Knighthood Post-WWI as Represented in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Taylor L. Hubbard
“It could have happened to any of you”: Post-Wounded Women in Three Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Novels, Abby N. Lewis
Intuition of an Outsider: From Nothing to Voice in George Scarbrough’s Poetry, William Moore
Fanfiction: A Look into the Disruptions of Gender Identity through Tropes, Stephanie Preslar
Theses/Dissertations from 2020
Blend it Like Beckett: Samuel Beckett and Experimental Contemporary Creative Writing, Sam Nicole Campbell
Deconstructing the "Woman of Sentiment": Parody as Agency in the Poetry of Phoebe Cary, Scottie Garber-Roberts
Environmental Cybernetics: Technology and the Perception of Remediated Space, Lucas Gentry
The Powerful Presence of Dams in Appalachian Poetry, Zoe Hester
"Wand'ring this Woody Maze": Deciphering the Obscure Wilderness of Paradise Regained, Brooke Johnson
“Fetch M’Dear”: Healers, Midwives, Witches, and Conjuring Women in Select YA and Toni Morrison Novels, Diane Mallett-Birkitt
Samuel Daniel’s Lyric Reception: The Role of Poet-Critics from Wordsworth to Winters, Caleb McGhee
Kind King or Tyrannical Ruler? An Analysis of Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, Amanda S. Nicholson
Govoreeting with Lewdies: A Critical Discourse Analysis of A Clockwork Orange and its Translations Across Media and Language, Willie Wallace
Theses/Dissertations from 2019
The Dangerous Women of the Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring the Female Characters in Love in Excess, Roxana, and A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey
When Process Becomes Processing: Managing Instructor Response to Student Disclosure of Trauma in the Composition Classroom, Kelci Barton
Evolving Mediums: Over the Garden Wall and the Divine Comedy, Karissa Doughty
Fir-Flower Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry through Asian Aesthetics in Early Modernist Poets, Matthew Gilbert
North of Ourselves: Identity and Place in Jim Wayne Miller’s Poetry, Micah McCrotty
The Gendering of Death Personifications in Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol from Baudelaire to Barnes, Amanda McNally
'A Dream of Completion': The Journey of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp
Theses/Dissertations from 2018
Environmental Deterioration in Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis of Serena and Strange as This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft
New Criticism—Not So New to Tennessee’s High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff
An Intersectional Feminist Perspective of Emmett Till in Young Adult Literature, Claire Jones
Bertha Harris' Confessions of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine to the Gothic South, Kara Russell
“I’ve Been Given the Wrong Mother:” Reconsidering Absent Mothers in Postmodern British Literature, Amanda G. Sawyers
“All the Foundation of the Earth becomes Desolate” Tracing Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon connections through a Shared Literary Frontier, Adam E. Timbs
Theses/Dissertations from 2017
Celtic Water Hags, Violent Children, and Wild Men: Reexamining the Syncretic Nature of Beowulf, James L. Baugher
Transmutations of Ophelia's "Melodious Lay", Danielle Byington
The Establishment and Development of the Mockingbird as the Nightingale’s “American Rival”, Gabe Cameron
The Unkindness of Strangers: Exploring Success and Isolation in the Dramatic Works of Tennessee Williams, Chelsea Nicole Gilbert
Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation in Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell
Composing the Postmodern Self in Three Works of 1980s British Literature, Jonathan Hill
Only the Earth Remains: Exploring the Machine in Selected Lyric Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Mark Hutton
Young Adult Literature and Empathy in Appalachian Adolescents, Kelsey R. Kiser
"Some Things Grew No Less With Time:" Tracing ATU 510B from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, Rachel L. Maynard
Get Thee to a Nunnery: Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe, Sarah E. Wolfe
Theses/Dissertations from 2016
Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and The Canterbury Tales: Parallels in the Comic Genius of Henry Fielding and Geoffrey Chaucer, Zachary A. Canter
Virginia Woolf’s Fictional Biographies, Orlando and Flush, as Prefigures of Postmodernism, Jacob C. Castle
Keats and America: Attitudes and Appropriations, Jessica Hall
Reconciling the Past in Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis
New Appalachians of the Twenty-First Century: Reinventing Metanarratives and Master-Images of Southern Appalachian Literature, Kelsey Alannah Solomon
Theses/Dissertations from 2015
Functional and Stylistic Features of Sports Announcer Talk: A Discourse Analysis of the Register of Major League Soccer Television Broadcasts, Marco Balzer-Siber
Jess's Search for an Understanding of Truth in Fred Chappell's Kirkman Tetralogy, Alex L. Blumenstock
The Lawrentian Woman: Monsters in the Margins of 20th-Century British Literature, Dusty A. Brice
Southerner as Other: Exploring Regional Identity through the Southern Vampire, Lauren N. Fowler
Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Beth Katherine Miller
Redefining the Unrepentant Prostitute in Victorian Poetry, Marijana Stojkovic
Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century, Jacob L. Vines
Theses/Dissertations from 2013
Other: Poems, Catherine Pritchard Childress
“Between the Dream and Reality”: Divination in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Robert A. Kottage
Theses/Dissertations from 2012
“To Make Myself for a Person”: The Bildungsroman in Modern Jewish-American Literature, Kari Lynn Keeling
Translational Wit: Seventeenth-Century Literary Translations of Selections from Ovid’s Heroides, Sean I. Levenson
Theses/Dissertations from 2011
The Digital Folklore Project: Tracking the Oral Tradition on the World Wide Web., Jasen Bacon
The Rage of the Wolf: Metamorphosis and Identity in Medieval Werewolf Tales., Jessica Lynne Bettini
The Excursion: A Screenplay Adaptation of Francis Brooke’s The Excursion., Jennifer Sim Daniel
Communicative Language Teaching in Current Chinese Colleges and Universities., Xiaorong Li
Theses/Dissertations from 2010
Black and White on Black: Whiteness and Masculinity in the Works of Three Australian Writers - Thomas Keneally, Colin Thiele, and Patrick White., Matthew Israel Byrge
Fatherhood and Fatherland in Chimamanda Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus"., Audrey D. Peters
Theses/Dissertations from 2009
POW/MIC: Prisoners of Words/Missing in Canon: Liberating the Neglected British War Poets of The Great War., Larry T. French
Replacing the Priest: Tradition, Politics, and Religion in Early Modern Irish Drama., Leslie Ann Valley
Theses/Dissertations from 2008
The Evolution of Feminine Loyalty Trends in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Appalachian Literature., Candace Jean Daniel
On the Road from Melville to Postmodernism: The Case for Kerouac's Canonization., Jeffrey Warren King
Theses/Dissertations from 2007
The Adolescent Rebellion against Panoptical Society: A Foucauldian Analysis of Adolescent Development in Contemporary Young Adult Novels., Clarissa Elizabeth Allen
Hearing Adam: Gender Relationships in the Short Fiction of Caroline Gordon., Linda Elaine Hipple
Trophies or Treasures: The Burden of Choice for Mothers, Wives, and Daughters in Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Bostonians., Melissa C. Huisman
Theses/Dissertations from 2006
Double the Novels, Half the Recognition: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Contribution to the Evolution of the Victorian Novel., Lori Elizabeth Baker
The Narrative Lens: Understanding Eudora Welty's Fiction through Her Photography., Brandon Clarke Ballentine
Reviving the Subject: A Feminist Argument for Mimesis in Literature., Messina Lyle
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Opium., Donald John Marotta
Articulation as an Act of Futility: A Deconstructive Exploration of Textual Articulation as It Functions within a First-Person Narrative Structure., Wilson Wright Onstott
Theses/Dissertations from 2005
A Psychological Literary Critique from a Jungian Perspective of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India., David W. Elliott
Trapped in Bluebeard's Chamber: Rose Terry Cooke and Nineteenth-Century "Desperate Housewives.", Bridget Renee Garland
Two from the Underworld: Short Fiction., Stephen Glass