English electronic theses and dissertations (MU)
Permanent URI for this collection
The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of the Department of English. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Columbia. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Unserious adaptation : fan modes and the creation of Little Women retellings(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) McAnnally, Anna Lee; Socarides, Alexandra; West, NancyIn this dissertation, I generate an understanding of text-based adaptations. This project argues that 1) Fan culture and fan behavior lead to text-based adaptations (retellings), 2) Retelling novels are adaptations and should be read as such, and 3) Retelling novels result from the intensification of fan behaviors from the 19th century. I ground this project in Little Women; therefore, I first examine the use of fan modes by the March sisters. The first mode of fan engagement examined is the mode of “mirroring,” wherein characters read and subsequently live out the plot of a text. Mirroring mode texts show teens who must adopt the values of Little Women to escape its plot. Then, I examine the mode of “acting out,” wherein characters consciously replicate aspects of Little Women in book club settings. Acting out highlights the role of roleplaying and imagination in the construction of identity, and the role which literary characters have in identity construction. Finally, I examine the approach of “racial reimagining” wherein Black fans reimagine Little Women to have Black protagonists. Racial reimagining highlights the different roles of community for Black and white girls across American history while using the fan modes discussed. In all of these cases, I show that the more intense the use of these modes in a text, the more of a retelling the text becomes, therefore explaining the continuum from fan text to retelling.Item Richard Brome's The Love-Sick Court : a critical edition(University of Missouri--Columbia., 1977) MacLeod, Burnam; Holleran, James V.This dissertation presents both the scholar and the student with a readily accessible edition of Richard Brome's The Love-Sick Court and provides such explanatory material, both in the form of a critical introduction and in the apparatus of textual notes, as is necessary to facilitate an intelligent reading of the play. In order better to acquaint the reader with the life of Richard Brome, a relatively unknown Carolinian playwright, the first section gives a biographical sketch based upon factual and suppositional information. The section which follows examines Brome's intellectual concerns as a dramatist, brings into focus the technical aspects of his art, and then discusses two of his early comedies which contain the formula he used in most of his plays. The next section investigates the historical and dramatic origins of the Platonic love cult as it filtered its way into the English court and found expression in those cavalier romances which delighted theater patrons in the 1630's at the court of Charles the First and on the popular stage; it was this code of ethics fostered by Platonic love that Brome experimented with in The Love-Sick Court in order to provide his audiences with the themes and subject material they relished. Recognizing that The Love-Sick Court is an anomaly in Brome's dramatic canon and pointing out his later strong hostility toward those turgid, Platonic productions of which his play is usually thought to be an imitation, the next section discusses in detail its relationship to the mainstream of Platonic drama, calls attention to similarities in plot, character, and rhetorical elements, and then offers for consideration a recent critical view that the play is a burlesque of the prevailing courtier mode. The conclusion views The Love-Sick Court both as an uncomfortable attempt by Brome to yield to the Platonic fashion and as a gentle and subtle satirization of it.Item Missed(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Cox, Traci Marie; Lewis, Trudy[EMBARGOED UNTIL 08/01/2026] Missed is a hybrid collection of creative and scholarly essays about death, disability, nurturing, and female embodiment. All of the essays exhibit various traits of contemporary creative nonfiction (CNF) prose and honor the ever-growing field's emphasis on honesty, vulnerability, and rigorous intellectual engagement. Certain essays highlight the short, imagery-heavy, "flash" form of CNF; others rely on long-form, firstperson narrative to move the plot forward. Each piece is meant to be formally innovative as well as emotionally courageous, as the elements of Missed are intended to function as a testament to the expressive potential of the creative nonfiction genre. The author's intent in writing Missed was to show how storytellers--and, more broadly, storytelling as an artform of the folk--can transform personal, private devastation into a public literary and cultural witnessing that benefits all who participate in the story-making and storylistening experience. There are so many unknowable and ineffable realities that permeate a human lifeform's existence, and Missed's subjects of absence, silences/silencing, grief and loss, and the notion of "poisonous gifts" thematically participate in a greater, ongoing conversation in the academic arenas of creative nonfiction writing, disability/illness narratives, and folklore studies.Item Gothic fiction and the law : conveyance, criminality, and child custody in the Gothic novel, 1764--1866(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Shin, Yoonjae; Heringman, NoahThis dissertation argues that writers of Gothic fiction during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged purposefully with the law by narrativizing key issues in legal thought. To do so, it reads novels by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, and others alongside legal texts such as William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, royal proclamations regarding sedition, and the political pamphlets of Caroline Norton. Chapter one is primarily interested in the portrayal of inheritance, positing that early Gothic writers connected the issue of conveyance to the progression of history. Chapter two turns its attention to the trial during the period of the French Revolution and suggests a link between political sentiment in Britain and the character of the criminal trial. Chapter three steps back from legal mechanisms and instead looks at the emerging nineteenth-century idea of the criminal type and argues that authors might push back against such a notion by championing a didactic quality intrinsic to the Gothic genre. Finally, chapter four considers how the idea of child custody disputes led female writers to construct imagined alternatives in which maternal rights are enshrined. Adding to the burgeoning study of law and literature, the goal of this study is to examine how legal elements were incorporated into the plots of Gothic novels in order to affirm, critique, or suggest changes to the law and legal practices.Item History, culture and memory in Recollections of Rifleman Harris and Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Visscher, Andrew; Hayes, Rebecca[EMBARGOED UNTIL 05/01/2026] The growing field of "new military history" presents innovative opportunities for literary scholars in the critical interpretation of military memoirs. However, reconciling literary, historical, and military studies requires careful consideration of both goals and outcomes. This thesis establishes a critical framework for the close study of military memoirs by comparing two popular accounts from soldiers who served in the same unit during the First Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars. While Recollections of Rifleman Harris and Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier represent the perspectives of different discourses in separate literary mediums and periods, considering both texts as literary and historical documents within cultural studies allows scholars to construct a more comprehensive picture of the humans behind the war. Drawing upon recent work in cultural military historiography known as "new military history," this framework also considers John A. Lynn's distinction between "popular," "applied," and "academic" history to situate discursive boundaries in the goals of academic institutions. By exploring the contested academic history of the word "culture," considering the literary history of the texts, and conducting a close reading of the texts along lines of identity formation and literary medium, this approach establishes academic framework for the literary study of military memoirs at United States service academies