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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

The Drama of Last Things: Reckoning in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama , Spencer M. Daniels

African Spirituality in Literature Written by Women of African Descent , Brigét V. Harley

Hidden Monstrosities: The Transformation of Medieval Characters and Conventions in Shakespeare's Romances , Lynette Kristine Kuliyeva

Making the Invisible Visible: (Re)envisioning the Black Body in Contemporary Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Urshela Wiggins McKinney

Lawful Injustice: Novel Readings of Racialized Temporality and Legal Instabilities , Danielle N. Mercier

“Manne, for thy loue wolde I not lette”: Eucharistic Portrayals of Caritas in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Drama 1350-1650 , Rachel Tanski

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Of Mētis and Cuttlefish: Employing Collective Mētis as a Theoretical Framework for Marginalized Communities , Justiss Wilder Burry

What on earth are we doing (?): A Field-Wide Exploration of Design Courses in TPC , Jessica L. Griffith

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study of Cortez, Florida , Karla Ariel Maddox

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Using Movie Clips to Understand Vivid-Phrasal Idioms’ Meanings , Rasha Salem S. Alghamdi

Writing Supports for Honors Thesis Students: An Applied Program Evaluation Study , Krysta Banke

An Exercise in Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, and Ableism in the STAR TREK Franchise , Jessica A. Blackman

Vulnerable Resistance in Victorian Women’s Writing , Stephanie A. Harper

Curricular Assemblages: Understanding Student Writing Knowledge (Re)circulation Across Genres , Adam Phillips

Anthropocene Fiction: Empathy, Kinship, and the Troubled Waters at the End of the World , Megan Mandell Stowe

PAD Beyond the Classroom: Integrating PAD in the Scrum Workplace , Jade S. Weiss

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Social Cues in Animated Pedagogical Agents for Second Language Learners: the Application of The Embodiment Principle in Video Design , Sahar M. Alyahya

A Field-Wide Examination of Cross-Listed Courses in Technical Professional Communication , Carolyn M. Gubala

Labor-Based Grading Contracts in the Multilingual FYC Classroom: Unpacking the Variables , Kara Kristina Larson

Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth Century Irish and American Literature , Elizabeth Ricketts

Oppression, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Power Dynamics of Naming and Un-naming in African American Literature, 1794 to 2019 , Melissa "Maggie" Romigh

Generic Expectations in First Year Writing: Teaching Metadiscoursal Reflection and Revision Strategies for Increased Generic Uptake of Academic Writing , Kaelah Rose Scheff

Reframing the Gothic: Race, Gender, & Disability in Multiethnic Literature , Ashely B. Tisdale

Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres , Adrienne D. Vivian

Mental Illness Diagnosis and the Construction of Stigma , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Rhetorical Roundhouse Kicks: Tae Kwon Do Pumsae Practice and Non-Western Embodied Topoi , Spencer Todd Bennington

9/11 Then and Now: How the Performance of Memorial Rhetoric by Presidents Changes to Construct Heroes , Kristen M. Grafton

Kinesthetically Speaking: Human and Animal Communication in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century , Dana Jolene Laitinen

Exploring Refugee Students’ Second Language (L2) Motivational Selves through Digital Visual Representations , Nhu Le

Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema , Shauna A. Maragh

Instrumentalization Theory: An Analytical Heuristic for a Heightened Social Awareness of Machine Learning Algorithms in Social Media , Andrew R. Miller

Intercessory Power: A Literary Analysis of Ethics and Care in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon , Alice Walker’s Meridian , and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child , Kelly Mills

The Power of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach to Comic Studies , Stephanie N. Phillips

Female Identity and Sexuality in Contemporary Indonesian Novels , Zita Rarastesa

"The Fiery Furnaces of Hell": Rhetorical Dynamism in Youngstown, OH , Joshua M. Rea

“We developed solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, and Space-Time in Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction , Kimber L. Wiggs

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Remembrance of a Wound: Ethical Mourning in the Works of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Junot Díaz , José Aparicio

Taking an “Ecological Turn” in the Evaluation of Rhetorical Interventions , Peter Cannon

New GTA’s and the Pre-Semester Orientation: The Need for Informed Refinement , Jessica L. Griffith

Reading Rape and Answering with Empathy: A New Approach to Sexual Assault Education for College Students , Brianna Jerman

The Karoo , The Veld , and the Co-Op: The Farm as Microcosm and Place for Change in Schreiner, Lessing, and Head , Elana D. Karshmer

"The weak are meat, and the strong do eat"; Representations of the Slaughterhouse in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature , Stephanie Lance

Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony , Yulia O. Nekrashevich

Queer Authority in Old and Middle English Literature , Elan J. Pavlinich

Because My Garmin Told Me To: A New Materialist Study of Agency and Wearable Technology , Michael Repici

No One Wants to Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis of Service Course Assignments , Tanya P. Zarlengo

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida , Haili A. Alcorn

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature , Timothy M. Curran

Seeing Trauma: The Known and the Hidden in Nineteenth-Century Literature , Alisa M. DeBorde

Analysis of User Interfaces in the Sharing Economy , Taylor B. Johnson

Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization , Scott Neumeister

The Spectacle of The Bomb: Rhetorical Analysis of Risk of The Nevada Test Site in Technical Communication, Popular Press, and Pop Culture , Tiffany Wilgar

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals , Cassie Patricia Childs

“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , J. Kevin Jordan

Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature , Sucheta Kanjilal

Science in the Sun: How Science is Performed as a Spatial Practice , Natalie Kass

Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage , Curtis Le Van

Tensions Between Democracy and Expertise in the Florida Keys , Elizabeth A. Loyer

Institutional Review Boards and Writing Studies Research: A Justice-Oriented Study , Johanna Phelps-Hillen

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature , Tangela La'Chelle Serls

Aphra Behn on the Contemporary Stage: Behn's Feminist Legacy and Woman-Directed Revivals of The Rover , Nicole Elizabeth Stodard

(Age)ncy in Composition Studies , Alaina Tackitt

Constructing Health Narratives: Patient Feedback in Online Communities , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Rupturing the World of Elite Athletics: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Suspension of the 2011 IAAF Regulations on Hyperandrogenism , Ella Browning

Shaping Climate Citizenship: The Ethics of Inclusion in Climate Change Communication and Policy , Lauren E. Cagle

Drop, Cover, and Hold On: Analyzing FEMA's Risk Communication through Visual Rhetoric , Samantha Jo Cosgrove

Material Expertise: Applying Object-oriented Rhetoric in Marine Policy , Zachary Parke Dixon

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman : From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic , Jarad Heath Fennell

Instattack: Instagram and Visual Ad Hominem Political Arguments , Sophia Evangeline Gourgiotis

Hospitable Climates: Representations of the West Indies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , Marisa Carmen Iglesias

Chosen Champions: Medieval and Early Modern Heroes as Postcolonial Reactions to Tensions between England and Europe , Jessica Trant Labossiere

Science, Policy, and Decision Making: A Case Study of Deliberative Rhetoric and Policymaking for Coastal Adaptation in Southeast Florida , Karen Patricia Langbehn

A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetoric in PhotoShopBattles , Jonathan Paul Ray

Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels , Mary Allison Wise

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Representations of Gatsby: Ninety Years of Retrospective , Christine Anne Auger

Robust, Low Power, Discrete Gate Sizing , Anthony Joseph Casagrande

Wrestling with Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry , Paul T. Corrigan

#networkedglobe: Making the Connection between Social Media and Intercultural Technical Communication , Laura Anne Ewing

Evidence of Things Not Seen: A Semi-Automated Descriptive Phrase and Frame Analysis of Texts about the Herbicide Agent Orange , Sarah Beth Hopton

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home , Rondrea Danielle Mathis

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, and the Social Media Aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing , Megan M. Mcintyre

Now, We Hear Through a Voice Darkly: New Media and Narratology in Cinematic Art , James Anthony Ricci

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry , Katherine Jesse Royce

Women's Narratives of Confinement: Domestic Chores as Threads of Resistance and Healing , Jacqueline Marie Smith

Domestic Spaces in Transition: Modern Representations of Dwelling in the Texts of Elizabeth Bowen , Shannon Tivnan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Paradise Always Already Lost: Myth, Memory, and Matter in English Literature , Elizabeth Stuart Angello

Overcoming the 5th-Century BCE Epistemological Tragedy: A Productive Reading of Protagoras of Abdera , Ryan Alan Blank

Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema , Adam Breckenridge

Material and Textual Spaces in the Poetry of Montagu, Leapor, Barbauld, and Robinson , Jessica Lauren Cook

Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of Three Plays by William Shakespeare , Angela Eward-Mangione

Risk of Compliance: Tracing Safety and Efficacy in Mef-Lariam's Licensure , Julie Marie Gerdes

Beyond Performance: Rhetoric, Collective Memory, and the Motive of Imprinting Identity , Brenda M. Grau

Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression , Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes

Integrating Reading and Writing For Florida's ESOL Program , George Douglas Mcarthur

Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley , Katherine Marie McGee

Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni Morrison's Fiction , Jessica Mckee

The "Defective" Generation: Disability in Modernist Literature , Deborah Susan Mcleod

Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity , Joy Ann Sanchez-Taylor

Hermes, Technical Communicator of the Gods: The Theory, Design, and Creation of a Persuasive Game for Technical Communication , Eric Walsh

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Rhetorical Spirits: Spirituality as Rhetorical Device in New Age Womanist of Color Texts , Ronisha Witlee Browdy

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Home > ACADEMIC-UNITS > College of Arts and Sciences > Department of English Language and Literature > ENGLISH_ETD

MA in English Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2018 2018.

Implementing Critical Analysis in the Classroom to Negate Southern Stereotypes in Multi-Media , Julie Broyhill

Fan Fiction in the English Language Arts Classroom , Kristen Finucan

Transferring the Mantle: The Voice of the Poet Prophet in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson , Heidi Brown Hyde

The Effects of Social Media as Low-Stakes Writing Tasks , Roxanne Loving

Student and Teacher Perceptions of Multiliterate Assignments Utilizing 21st Century Skills , Jessica Kennedy Miller

The Storytellers’ Trauma: A Place to Call Home in Caribbean Literature , Ilari Pass

Post Title IX Representations of Professional Female Athletes , Emily Shaw

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

“Not as She is” but as She is Expected to Be: Representations, Limitations, and Implications of the “Woman” and Womanhood in Selected Victorian Literature and Contemporary Chick Lit. , Amanda Ellen Bridgers

The Intrinsic Factors that Influence Successful College Writing , Kenneth Dean Carlstrom

"Where nature was most plain and pure": The Sacred Locus Amoenus and its Profane Threat in Andrew Marvell's Pastoral Poetry , James Brent King

Colorblind: How Cable News and the “Cult of Objectivity” Normalized Racism in Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign , Amanda Leeann Shoaf

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences , Joseph Austin Thurmond

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Nature, Function, and Value of Emojis as Contemporary Tools of Digital Interpersonal Communication , Nicole L. Bliss-Carroll

Exile and Identity: Chaim Potok's Contribution to Jewish-American Literature , Sarah Anne Hamner

A Woman's Voice and Identity: Narrative Métissage as a Solution to Voicelessness in American Literature , Kali Lauren Oldacre

Pop, Hip Hop, and Empire, Study of a New Pedagogical Approach in a Developmental Reading and English Class , Karen Denise Taylor

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Abandoning the Shadows and Seizing the Stage: A Perspective on a Feminine Discourse of Resistance Theatre as Informed by the Work of Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, and the Sistren Theatre Collective , Brianna A. Bleymaier

Mexican Immigrants as "Other": An Interdisciplinary Analysis of U.S. Immigration Legislation and Political Cartoons , Olivia Teague Morgan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

"I Am a Living Enigma - And You Want To Know the Right Reading of Me": Gender Anxiety in Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel and The Guilty River , Hannah Allford

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Gender Performance and the Reclamation of Masculinity in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns , John William Salyers Jr.

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

"That's a Lotta Faith We're Putting in a Word": Language, Religion, and Heteroglossia as Oppression and Resistance in Comtemporary British Dystopian Fiction , Haley Cassandra Gambrell

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Mirroring the Madness: Caribbean Female Development in the Works of Elizabeth Nunez , Lauren Delli Santi

"Atlas Shrugged" and third-wave feminism: An unlikely alliance , Paul McMahan

"Sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on": The use of cross-dressing in order to achieve female agency in Shakespeare's transvestite comedies , Heather Lynn Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Between the Way to the Cross and Emmaus: Deconstructing Identity in the 325 CE Council of Nicaea and "The Shack" , Trevar Simmons

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Recent PhD Dissertations

Terekhov, Jessica (September 2022) -- "On Wit in Relation to Self-Division"

Selinger, Liora (September 2022) -- "Romanticism, Childhood, and the Poetics of Explanation"

Lockhart, Isabel (September 2022) -- "Storytelling and the Subsurface: Indigenous Fiction, Extraction, and the Energetic Present"

Ashe, Nathan (April 2022) – "Narrative Energy: Physics and the Scientific Real in Victorian Literature”

Bartley, Scott H. (April 2022) – “Watch it closely: The Poetry and Poetics of Aesthetic Focus in The New Criticism and Middle Generation”

Mctar, Ali (November 2021) – “Fallen Father: John Milton, Antinomianism, and the Case Against Adam”

Chow, Janet (September 2021) – “Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk”

Thorpe, Katherine (September 2021) – “Protean Figures: Personified Abstractions from Milton’s Allegory to Wordsworth’s Psychology of the Poet”

Minnen, Jennifer (September 2021) – “The Second Science: Feminist Natural Inquiry in Nineteenth-Century British Literature”

Starkowski, Kristen (September 2021) – “Doorstep Moments: Close Encounters with Minor Characters in the Victorian Novel”

Rickard, Matthew (September 2021) – “Probability: A Literary History, 1479-1700”

Crandell, Catie (September 2021) – “Inkblot Mirrors: On the Metareferential Mode and 19th Century British Literature”

Clayton, J.Thomas (September 2021) – “The Reformation of Indifference: Adiaphora, Toleration, and English Literature in the Seventeenth Century”

Goldberg, Reuven L. (May 2021) – “I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and the Trans Narrative”

Soong, Jennifer (May 2021) – “Poetic Forgetting”

Edmonds, Brittney M. (April 2021) – “Who’s Laughing Now? Black Affective Play and Formalist Innovation in Twenty-First Century black Literary Satire”

Azariah-Kribbs, Colin (April 2021) – “Mere Curiosity: Knowledge, Desire, and Peril in the British and Irish Gothic Novel, 1796-1820”

Pope, Stephanie (January 2021) – “Rethinking Renaissance Symbolism: Material Culture, Visual Signs, and Failure in Early Modern Literature, 1587-1644”

Kumar, Matthew (September 2020) – “The Poetics of Space and Sensation in Scotland and Kenya”

Bain, Kimberly (September 2020) – “On Black Breath”

Eisenberg, Mollie (September 2020) – “The Case of the Self-Conscious Detective Novel: Modernism, Metafiction, and the Terms of Literary Value”

Hori, Julia M. (September 2020) – “Restoring Empire: British Imperial Nostalgia, Colonial Space, and Violence since WWII”

Reade, Orlando (June 2020) – “Being a Lover of the World: Lyric Poetry and Political Disaffection after the English Civil War”

Mahoney, Cate (June 2020) – “Go on Your Nerve: Confidence in American Poetry, 1860-1960”

Ritger, Matthew (April 2020) – “Objects of Correction:  Literature and the Birth of Modern Punishment”

VanSant, Cameron (April 2020) – “Novel Subjects:  Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Transformation of British Subjecthood”

Lennington, David (November 2019) – “Anglo-Saxon and Arabic Identity in the Early Middle Ages”

Marraccini, Miranda (September 2019) – “Feminist Types: Reading the Victoria Press”

Harlow, Lucy (June 2019) – “The Discomposed Mind”

Williamson, Andrew (June 2019) – “Nothing to Say:  Silence in Modernist American Poetry”

Adair, Carl (April 2019) – “Faithful Readings: Religion, Hermeneutics, and the Habits of Criticism”

Rogers, Hope (April 2019) – “Good Girls: Female Agency and Convention in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”

Green, Elspeth (January 2019) – “Popular Science and Modernist Poetry”

Braun, Daniel (January 2019) – Kinds of Wrong: The Liberalization of Modern Poetry 1910-1960”

Rosen, Rebecca (November 2018) – “Making the body Speak: Anatomy, Autopsy and Testimony in Early America, 1639-1790”

Blank, Daniel (November 2018) – Shakespeare and the Spectacle of University Drama”

Case, Sarah (September 2018) – Increase of Issue: Poetry and Succession in Elizabethan England”

Kucik, Emanuela  (June 2018) – “Black Genocides and the Visibility Paradox in Post-Holocaust African American and African Literature”

Quinn, Megan  (June 2018) – “The Sensation of Language: Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley”

McCarthy, Jesse D.  (June 2018) – “The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, 1945-1965

Johnson, Colette E.  (June 2018) – “The Foibles of Play: Three Case Studies on Play in the Interwar Years”

Gingrich, Brian P.  (June 2018) – “The Pace of Modern Fiction: A History of Narrative Movement in Modernity”

Marcus, Sara R.  (June 2018) – “Political Disappointment: A Partial History of a Feeling”

Parry, Rosalind A.  (April 2018) – “Remaking Nineteenth-Century Novels for the Twentieth Century”

Gibbons, Zoe  (January 2018) – “From Time to Time:  Narratives of Temporality in Early Modern England, 1610-1670”

Padilla, Javier  (September 2017) – “Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Temporality:  Between Modernity and Coloniality”

Alvarado, Carolina (June 2017) – "Pouring Eastward: Editing American Regionalism, 1890-1940"

Gunaratne, Anjuli (May 2017) – "Tragic Resistance: Decolonization and Disappearance in Postcolonial Literature"

Glover, Eric (May 2017) – "By and About:  An Antiracist History of the Musicals and the Antimusicals of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston"

Tuckman, Melissa (April 2017) – "Unnatural Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Poetry"

Eggan, Taylor (April 2017) – "The Ecological Uncanny: Estranging Literary Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Narrative Fiction"

Calver, Harriet (March 2017) – "Modern Fiction and Its Phantoms"

Gaubinger, Rachel (December 2016) – "Between Siblings: Form and Family in the Modern Novel"

Swartz, Kelly (December 2016) – "Maxims and the Mind: Sententiousness from Seventeenth-Century Science to the Eighteenth-Century Novel"

Robles, Francisco (June 2016) – “Migrant Modalities: Radical Democracy and Intersectional Praxis in American Literatures, 1923-1976”

Johnson, Daniel (June 2016) – “Visible Plots, Invisible Realms”

Bennett, Joshua (June 2016) – “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of the Animal in 20th Century African American Literature”

Scranton, Roy (January 2016) – “The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the Politics of Trauma, 1945-1975

Jacob, Priyanka (November 2015) – “Things That Linger: Secrets, Containers and Hoards in the Victorian Novel”

Evans, William (November 2015) – “The Fiction of Law in Shakespeare and Spenser”

Vasiliauskas, Emily (November 2015) – “Dead Letters: The Afterlife Before Religion”

Walker, Daniel (June 2015) – “Sociable Uncertainties: Literature and the Ethics of Indeterminacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain”

Reilly, Ariana (June 2015) – “Leave-Takings: Anti-Self-Consciousness and the Escapist Ends of the Victorian Marriage Plot”

Lerner, Ross (June 2015) – "Framing Fanaticism: Religion, Violence, and the Reformation Literature of Self-Annihilation”

Harrison, Matthew (June 2015) – "Tear Him for His Bad Verses: Poetic Value and Literary History in Early Modern England”

Krumholtz, Matthew (June 2015) – “Talking Points: American Dialogue in the Twentieth Century”

Dauber, Maayan (March 2015) – "The Pathos of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein (with a coda on J.M. Coetzee)”

Hostetter, Lyra (March 2015) – “Novel Errantry: An Annotated Edition of Horatio, of Holstein (1800)”

Sanford, Beatrice (January 2015) – “Love’s Perception: Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Attachment”

Chong, Kenneth (January 2015) – “Potential Theologies: Scholasticism and Middle English Literature”

Worsley, Amelia (September 2014) – “The Poetry of Loneliness from Romance to Romanticism”

Hurtado, Jules (June 2014) – “The Pornographer at the Crossroads: Sex, Realism and Experiment in the Contemporary English Novel”

Rutherford, James (June 2014) – "Irrational Actors: Literature and Logic in Early Modern England”

Wilde, Lisa (June 2014) – “English Numeracy and the Writing of New Worlds, 1543-1622”

Hyde, Emily (November 2013) – “A Way of Seeing: Modernism, Illustration, and Postcolonial Literature”

Ortiz, Ivan (September 2013) – “Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport”

Aronowicz, Yaron (September 2013) – “Fascinated Moderns: The Attentions of Modern Fiction”

Wythoff, Grant (September 2013) – “Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination”

Ramachandran, Anitha (September 2013) – "Recovering Global Women’s Travel Writings from the Modern Period: An Inquiry Into Genre and Narrative Agency”

Reuland, John (April 2013) – “The Self Unenclosed: A New Literary History of Pragmatism, 1890-1940”

Wasserman, Sarah (January 2013) – “Material Losses: Urban Ephemera in Contemporary American Literature and Culture”

Kastner, Tal (November 2012) – "The Boilerplate of Everything and the Ideal of Agreement in American Law and Literature"

Labella, John (October 2012) – "Lyric Hemisphere: Latin America in United States Poetry, 1927-1981"

Kindley, Evan (September 2012) – "Critics and Connoisseurs: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Modernism"

Smith, Ellen (September 2012) – "Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927-1945"

Werlin, Julianne (September 2012) – "The Impossible Probable: Modeling Utopia in Early Modern England"

Posmentier, Sonya (May 2012) – "Cultivation and Catastrophe:  Forms of Nature in Twentieth-Century Poetry of the Black Diaspora"

Alfano, Veronica (September 2011) – “The Lyric in Victorian Memory”

Foltz, Jonathan (September 2011) – “Modernism and the Narrative Cultures of Film”

Coghlan, J. Michelle (September 2011) – “Revolution’s Afterlife; The Paris Commune in American Cultural Memory, 1871-1933”

Christoff, Alicia (September 2011) – “Novel Feeling”

Shin, Jacqueline (August 2011) – “Picturing Repose: Between the Acts of British Modernism”

Ebrahim, Parween (August 2011) – “Outcasts and Inheritors: The Ishmael Ethos in American Culture, 1776-1917”

Reckson, Lindsay (August 2011) – “Realist Ecstasy: Enthusiasm in American Literature 1886 - 1938"

Londe, Gregory (June 2011) – “Enduring Modernism: Forms of Surviving Location in the 20th Century Long Poem”

Brown, Adrienne (June 2011) – “Reading Between the Skylines: The Skyscraper in American Modernism”

Russell, David (June 2011) – “A Literary History of Tact: Sociability, Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain”

Hostetter, Aaron (December 2010) – "The Politics of Eating and Cooking in Medieval English Romance"

Moshenska, Joseph (November 2010) – " 'Feeling Pleasures': The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England"

Walker, Casey (September 2010) – "The City Inside: Intimacy and Urbanity in Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf"

Rackin, Ethel (August 2010) – "Ornamentation and Essence in Modernist Poetry"

Noble, Mary (August 2010) – "Primitive Marriage: Anthropology and Nineteenth-Century Fiction"

Fox, Renee (August 2010) – "Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation, History and the Politics of Literary Innovation, 1868-1903"

Hopper, Briallen (June 2010) – “Feeling Right in American Reform Culture”

Lee, Wendy (June 2010) -- "Failures of Feeling in the British Novel from Richardson to Eliot"

Moyer, James (March 2010) – "The Passion of Abolitionism: How Slave Martyrdom Obscures Slave Labor”

Forbes, Erin (September 2009) – “Genius of Deep Crime:  Literature, Enslavement and the American Criminal”

Crawforth, Hannah (September 2009) – “The Politics and Poetics of Etymology in Early Modern Literature”

Elliott, Danielle (April 2009) – "Sea of Bones: The Middle Passage in Contemporary Poetry of the Black Atlantic”

Yu, Wesley (April 2009) – “Romance Logic: The Argument of Vernacular Verse in the Scholastic Middle Ages”

Cervantes, Gabriel (April 2009) – "Genres of Correction: Anglophone Literature and the Colonial Turn in Penal Law 1722-1804”

Rosinberg, Erwin (January 2009) – "A Further Conjunction: The Couple and Its Worlds in Modern British Fiction”

Walsh, Keri (January 2009) – "Antigone in Modernism: Classicism, Feminism, and Theatres of Protest”

Heald, Abigail (January 2009) – “Tears for Dido: A Renaissance Poetics of Feeling”

Bellin, Roger (January 2009) – "Argument: The American Transcendentalists and Disputatious Reason”

Ellis, Nadia (November 2008) – "Colonial Affections: Formulations of Intimacy Between England and the Caribbean, 1930-1963”

Baskin, Jason (November 2008) – “Embodying Experience: Romanticism and Social Life in the Twentieth Century”

Barrett, Jennifer-Kate (September 2008) – “ ‘So Written to Aftertimes’: Renaissance England’s Poetics of Futurity”

Moss, Daniel (September 2008) – “Renaissance Ovids: The Metamorphosis of Allusion in Late Elizabethan England”

Rainof, Rebecca (September 2008) – “Purgatory and Fictions of Maturity: From Newman to Woolf”

Darznik, Jasmin (November 2007) – “Writing Outside the Veil: Literature by Women of the Iranian Diaspora”

Bugg, John (September 2007) – “Gagging Acts: The Trials of British Romanticism”

Matson, John (September 2007) – “Marking Twain: Mechanized Composition and Medial Subjectivity in the Twain Era”

Neel, Alexandra (September 2007) – “The Writing of Ice: The Literature and Photography of Polar Regions”

Smith-Browne, Stephanie (September 2007) – “Gothic and the Pacific Voyage: Patriotism, Romance and Savagery in South Seas Travels and the Utopia of the Terra Australis”

Bystrom, Kerry (June 2007) – “Orphans and Origins: Family, Memory, and Nation in Argentina and South Africa”

Ards, Angela (June 2007) – “Affirmative Acts: Political Piety in African American Women’s Contemporary Autobiography”

Cragwall, Jasper (June 2007) – “Lake Methodism”

Ball, David (June 2007) – “False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism, 1850-1950”

Ramdass, Harold (June 2007) – “Miswriting Tragedy: Genealogy, History and Orthography in the Canterbury Tales, Fragment I”

Lilley, James (June 2007) – “Common Things: Transatlantic Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging, 1764-1840”

Noble, Mary (March 2007) – “Primitive Marriage: Anthropology and Nineteenth-Century Fiction”

Passannante, Gerard (January 2007) – “The Lucretian Renaissance: Ancient Poetry and Humanism in an Age of Science”

Tessone, Natasha (November 2006) – “The Fiction of Inheritance: Familial, Cultural, and National Legacies in the Irish and Scottish Novel”

Horrocks, Ingrid (September 2006) – “Reluctant Wanderers, Mobile Feelings: Moving Figures in Eighteenth-Century Literature”

Bender, Abby (June 2006) – “Out of Egypt and into bondage: Exodus in the Irish National Imagination”

Johnson, Hannah (June 2006) – “The Medieval Limit: Historiography, Ethics, Culture”

Horowitz, Evan (January 2006) – “The Writing of Modern Life”

White, Gillian (November 2005) – “ ‘We Do Not Say Ourselves Like That in Poems’: The Poetics of Contingency in Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop

Baudot, Laura (September 2005) – “Looking at Nothing: Literary Vacuity in the Long Eighteenth Century”

Hicks, Kevin (September 2005) – “Acts of Recovery: American Antebellum Fictions”

Stern, Kimberly (September 2005) – “The Victorian Sibyl: Women Reviewers and the Reinvention of Critical Tradition”

Nardi, Steven (May 2005) – “Automatic Aesthetics: Race, Technology, and Poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and American New Poetry”

Sayeau, Michael (May 2005) – “Everyday: Literature, Modernity, and Time”

Cooper, Lawrence (April 2005) – “Gothic Realities: The Emergence of Cultural Forms Through Representations of the Unreal”

Betjemann, Peter (November 2004) – “Talking Shop: Craft and Design in Hawthorne, James, and Wharton”

Forbes, Aileen (November 2004) – “Passion Play: Theaters of Romantic Emotion”

Keeley, Howard (November 2004) – “Beyond Big House and Cabin: Dwelling Politically in Modern Irish Literature”

Machlan, Elizabeth (November 2004) – “Panic Rooms: Architecture and Anxiety in New York Stories from 1900 to 9/11”

McDowell, Demetrius (November 2004) – “Hawthorne, James, and the Pressures of the Literary Marketplace”

Waldron, Jennifer (November 2004) – “Eloquence of the Body: Aesthetics, Theology, and English Renaissance Theater”

e-Publications@Marquette

Home > ARTSSCI > English > dissertations

English Dissertations and Theses

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 2024 2024

Muslim Cultural Resistance , Ibtisam M. Abujad

Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect , Liamog Seamus Drislane

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITING: A CRITICAL EDITION OF A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND TRAVELS OF MRS. NANCY PRINCE (1856) , Susan E. Landwer

Disillusionment and Domesticity in Mid-20th-Century British Catholic Literature , Catherine Simmerer

A LIBERATED WEST?: FEMALE AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF THE "REAL AND THE FANTASIZED" ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER , Amanda Diane Zastrow

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Lifting the Postmodern Veil: Cosmopolitanism, Humanism, and Decolonization in Global Fictions of the 21st Century , Matthew Burchanoski

Gothic Transformations and Remediations in Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Wendy Fall

Milton’s Learning: Complementarity and Difference in Paradise Lost , Peter Spaulding

“The Development of the Conceptive Plot Through Early 19th-Century English Novels” , Jannea R. Thomason

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Gonzo Eternal , John Francis Brick

Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing , Jackielee Derks

Innovation, Genre, and Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel , David Aiden Kenney II

Reluctant Sons: The Irish Matrilineal Tradition of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien , Jessie Wirkus Haynes

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, and Ambivalence in Early Modern Literature , Mark Edward Wisniewski

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse , Hailey Whetten

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 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 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 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 2016

Changing the Victorian Habit Loop: The Body in the Poetry and Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris , Bryan Gast

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 2008

"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad , Marcia Eppich-Harris

Bearing the Mark of the Social: Notes Towards a Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman , Megan M. Muthupandiyan

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

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 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

Denise Levertov: Through An Ecofeminist Lens , Katherine A. Hanson

The Wit of Wrestling: Devotional-Aesthetic Tradition in Christina Rossetti's Poetry , Maria M.E. Keaton

Genderless Bodies: Stigma and the Myth of Womanhood , Ellen M. Letizia

Envy and Jealousy in the Novels of the Brontës: 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

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 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 Finnegan's 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

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 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 III

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

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 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

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Toward a Re-Formed Confession: Johann Gerhard's Sacred Meditations and "Repining Restlessnesse" in the Poetry of George Herbert , Erik P. Ankerberg

Idiographic Spaces: Representation, Ideology and Realism in the Postmodern British Novel , Gordon B. McConnell

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Reading into It: Wallace Stegner's Novelistic Sense of Time and Place , Colin C. Irvine

Brisbane and Beyond: Revising Social Capitalism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America , Michael C. Mattek

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Christians and Mimics in W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems , Patrick Mulrooney

Renaissance Roles and the Process of Social Change , John Wieland

'Straunge Disguize': Allegory and Its Discontents in Spenser's Faerie Queene , Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko

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Home > College of Arts and Sciences > English Language and Literature > Master's Theses

Master's Theses - English Language and Literature

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

“Hideous things have happened here”: Rape myths, rape culture, and healing in adolescent literature , Holly J. Greca

Moments of excess: Type 1 diabetes and the myth of control in adolescent fiction for girls , Michelle E. LeGault

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

A sociophonetic analysis of female-sounding virtual assistants , Alyssa Allen

Vampire narratives: Looking at queer-centric experiences in comparison to hetero-centric norms in order to model a new queer vampiric experience , Marah Heikkila

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Overhearers’ perceptions of familiarity between interlocutors in computer-mediated communication based on GIF usage , Alexa F. Druckmiller

Feminism by proxy: Jane Austen’s critique of patriarchal society in Pride and Prejudice and Emma , Alexis Miller

The memory of mythmaking: Transgenerational trauma and disability as a collective experience in Afrofuturist storytelling , Jessica Tapley

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Body image/imagining bodies: Trauma, control, and healing in graphic memoirs about anorexia , Kristine M. Gatchel

Word-final /t/-release and linguistic style: An investigation of the speech of two Jewish women from metro Detroit , Janet Leppala

Hermione syndrome: Reexamining feminist sidekicks and power in 2000-2010 children’s and young adult fantasy literature , Josiah Pankiewicz

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Fear and (non) fiction: Agrarian anxiety in “The Colour Out of Space” , Antonio Barroso

Sculpted from clay, shaped by power: Feminine narrative and agency in Wonder Woman , Mikala Carpenter

Players in a storm: Climate and political migrants in The Tempest and Othello , Darcie Rees

Reclaiming racial/ethnic identity vs. reconstructing Asian American masculinity in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese , Hyun-Joo Yoo

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

The organization of turn-taking in fieldwork settings: A case study , Amy Brunett

Exploring the political impact of literature and literary studies in American government , Taylor Dereadt

"We met in a bar by happenstance": Master narratives in couples stories , Brent A. Miller

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

What is the negro woman's story?: Negro Story Magazine and the dialogue of feminist voices , Maureen Convery

Illustrating adolescent awareness: Teaching historical injustices and promoting agency through picture books in secondary classrooms , Melissa Hoak

Phonemic inventory of the Shor language , Uliana Kazagasheva

Cannibalism in contact narratives and the evolution of the wendigo , Michelle Lietz

Parody and the pen: Pippi Longstocking, Harriet M. Welsch, and Flavia de Luce as disrupters of space, language, and the male gaze , Kelsey McLendon

Haec fortis sequitur illam indocti possident: A linguistic analysis of demonstratives in genres of early Latin fragments , Erica L. Meszaros

Tricking for change: Establishing the literary trickster in the western tradition , Christopher Michael Stuart

Because, x: A new construction of because in popular culture , Stephanie Walla

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Literature Thesis Topics

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This page provides a comprehensive list of literature thesis topics , offering a valuable resource for students tasked with writing a thesis in the field of literature. Designed to cater to a wide array of literary interests and academic inquiries, the topics are organized into 25 diverse categories, ranging from African American Literature to Young Adult Literature. Each category includes 40 distinct topics, making a total of 1000 topics. This structure not only facilitates easy navigation but also aids in the identification of precise research areas that resonate with students’ interests and academic goals. The purpose of this page is to inspire students by presenting a breadth of possibilities, helping them to formulate a thesis that is both original and aligned with current literary discussions.

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Literature Thesis Topics

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  • The evolution of African American narrative forms from slave narratives to contemporary fiction.
  • An analysis of the Harlem Renaissance: Artistic explosion and its impact on African American identity.
  • The role of music and oral tradition in African American literature.
  • A study of code-switching in African American literature and its effects on cultural and linguistic identity.
  • Gender and sexuality in African American women’s literature.
  • The portrayal of race and racism in the works of Toni Morrison.
  • The influence of African spirituality and religion in African American literature.
  • Exploring Afrofuturism through the works of Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin.
  • The representation of the family in African American literature post-1960s.
  • The use of southern settings in African American literature: A study of place and identity.
  • Intersectionality in the writings of Audre Lorde and Angela Davis.
  • The depiction of African American men in literature and media: Stereotypes vs. reality.
  • The impact of the Black Arts Movement on contemporary African American culture.
  • Literary responses to the Civil Rights Movement in African American literature.
  • The role of education in African American autobiographical writing.
  • The portrayal of historical trauma and memory in African American literature.
  • Analyzing black masculinity through the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
  • The treatment of racial ambiguity and colorism in African American fiction.
  • The influence of hip-hop and rap on contemporary African American poetry.
  • The narrative strategies used in African American science fiction.
  • Postcolonial readings of African American literature: Transnational perspectives.
  • The evolution of black feminism reflected in literature.
  • The significance of folk motifs in the works of Zora Neale Hurston.
  • The impact of the Great Migration on literary depictions of African American life.
  • Urbanism and its influence on African American literary forms.
  • The legacy of Langston Hughes and his influence on modern African American poetry.
  • Comparing the racial politics in African American literature from the 20th to the 21st century.
  • The role of African American literature in shaping public opinion on social justice issues.
  • Mental health and trauma in African American literature.
  • The literary critique of the American Dream in African American literature.
  • Environmental racism and its representation in African American literature.
  • The adaptation of African American literary works into films and its cultural implications.
  • Analyzing class struggle through African American literary works.
  • The portrayal of African Americans in graphic novels and comics.
  • Exploring the African diaspora through literature: Connections and divergences.
  • The influence of Barack Obama’s presidency on African American literature.
  • Representation of African American LGBTQ+ voices in modern literature.
  • The use of speculative elements to explore social issues in African American literature.
  • The role of the church and religion in African American literary narratives.
  • Literary examinations of police brutality and racial profiling in African American communities.
  • The evolution of the American Dream in 20th-century American literature.
  • An analysis of naturalism and realism in the works of Mark Twain and Henry James.
  • The depiction of the frontier in American literature and its impact on national identity.
  • Exploring postmodern techniques in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
  • The influence of immigration on American narrative forms and themes.
  • The role of the Beat Generation in shaping American counter-culture literature.
  • Feminist themes in the novels of Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.
  • Ecocriticism and the portrayal of nature in American literature from Thoreau to contemporary authors.
  • The depiction of war and its aftermath in American literature: From the Civil War to the Iraq War.
  • The treatment of race and ethnicity in the novels of John Steinbeck.
  • The role of technology and media in contemporary American fiction.
  • The impact of the Great Depression on American literary works.
  • An examination of gothic elements in early American literature.
  • The influence of transcendentalism in the works of Emerson and Whitman.
  • Modernist expressions in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound.
  • The depiction of suburban life in mid-20th-century American literature.
  • The cultural significance of the Harlem Renaissance in the development of American literature.
  • Identity and self-exploration in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  • Analyzing the concept of alienation in the works of Edward Albee and Arthur Miller.
  • The role of political activism in the plays of August Wilson.
  • The portrayal of children and adolescence in American literature.
  • The use of satire and humor in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut.
  • Exploring the American South through the literature of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.
  • The representation of LGBTQ+ characters in American novels from the 1960s to present.
  • Consumer culture and its critique in American post-war fiction.
  • The legacy of slavery in American literature and its contemporary implications.
  • The motif of the journey in American literature as a metaphor for personal and collective discovery.
  • The role of the wilderness in shaping American environmental literature.
  • An analysis of dystopian themes in American science fiction from Philip K. Dick to Octavia Butler.
  • The representation of Native American culture and history in American literature.
  • The treatment of mental health in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
  • American expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s: Lost Generation narratives.
  • The influence of jazz music on the narrative structure of American literature.
  • The intersection of law and morality in the novels of Herman Melville.
  • Post-9/11 themes in contemporary American literature.
  • The evolution of feminist literature in America from the 19th century to modern times.
  • Examining consumerism and its discontents in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis.
  • The portrayal of American cities in 20th-century literature.
  • The impact of the civil rights movement on American literary production.
  • The use of magical realism in the works of contemporary American authors.
  • The role of fairy tales in the development of child psychology.
  • Representation of family structures in modern children’s literature.
  • Gender roles in classic vs. contemporary children’s books.
  • The evolution of the hero’s journey in children’s literature.
  • Moral lessons and their conveyance through children’s stories.
  • The impact of fantasy literature on children’s imaginative development.
  • Depictions of cultural diversity in children’s books.
  • The use of animals as characters and their symbolic meanings in children’s stories.
  • The portrayal of disability in children’s literature and its impact on inclusivity.
  • The influence of children’s literature on early reading skills.
  • Analysis of cross-generational appeal in children’s literature.
  • The role of illustrations in enhancing narrative in children’s books.
  • Censorship and controversial topics in children’s literature.
  • Adaptations of children’s literature into films and their impact on the stories’ reception.
  • The representation of historical events in children’s literature.
  • Exploring the educational value of non-fiction children’s books.
  • The treatment of death and loss in children’s literature.
  • The role of magic and the supernatural in shaping values through children’s books.
  • Psychological impacts of children’s horror literature.
  • The significance of award-winning children’s books in educational contexts.
  • The influence of digital media on children’s book publishing.
  • Parental figures in children’s literature: From authoritarian to nurturing roles.
  • Narrative strategies used in children’s literature to discuss social issues.
  • Environmental themes in children’s literature and their role in fostering eco-consciousness.
  • The adaptation of classic children’s literature in the modern era.
  • The portrayal of bullying in children’s books and its implications for social learning.
  • The use of humor in children’s literature and its effects on engagement and learning.
  • Comparative analysis of children’s book series and their educational impacts.
  • Development of identity and self-concept through children’s literature.
  • The effectiveness of bilingual children’s books in language teaching.
  • The role of rhyme and rhythm in early literacy development through children’s poetry.
  • Sociopolitical themes in children’s literature and their relevance to contemporary issues.
  • The portrayal of technology and its use in children’s science fiction.
  • The representation of religious themes in children’s books.
  • The impact of children’s literature on adult readership.
  • The influence of children’s literature on children’s attitudes towards animals and nature.
  • How children’s literature can be used to support emotional intelligence and resilience.
  • The evolution of adventure themes in children’s literature.
  • Gender representation in children’s graphic novels.
  • Analyzing the narrative structure of children’s picture books.
  • Cross-cultural influences in the modernist movements of Europe and Japan.
  • The depiction of the Other in Western and Eastern literature.
  • Comparative analysis of postcolonial narratives in African and South Asian literatures.
  • The concept of the tragic hero in Greek and Shakespearean drama.
  • The treatment of love and marriage in 19th-century French and Russian novels.
  • The portrayal of nature in American transcendentalism vs. British romanticism.
  • Influence of Persian poetry on 19th-century European poets.
  • Modern reinterpretations of classical myths in Latin American and Southern European literature.
  • The role of dystopian themes in Soviet vs. American cold war literature.
  • Magic realism in Latin American and Sub-Saharan African literature.
  • Comparative study of feminist waves in American and Middle Eastern literature.
  • The depiction of urban life in 20th-century Brazilian and Indian novels.
  • The theme of exile in Jewish literature and Palestinian narratives.
  • Comparative analysis of existential themes in French and Japanese literature.
  • Themes of isolation and alienation in Scandinavian and Canadian literature.
  • The influence of colonialism on narrative structures in Irish and Indian English literature.
  • Analysis of folk tales adaptation in German and Korean children’s literature.
  • The portrayal of historical trauma in Armenian and Jewish literature.
  • The use of allegory in Medieval European and Classical Arabic literature.
  • Representation of indigenous cultures in Australian and North American novels.
  • The role of censorship in Soviet literature compared to Francoist Spain.
  • Themes of redemption in African-American and South African literature.
  • Narrative techniques in stream of consciousness: Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector.
  • The intersection of poetry and politics in Latin American and Middle Eastern literature.
  • The evolution of the epistolary novel in 18th-century England and France.
  • Comparative study of the Beat Generation and the Angolan writers of the 1960s.
  • The depiction of spiritual journeys in Indian and Native American literatures.
  • Cross-cultural examinations of humor and satire in British and Russian literatures.
  • Comparative analysis of modern dystopias in American and Chinese literature.
  • The impact of globalization on contemporary European and Asian novelists.
  • Postmodern identity crisis in Japanese and Italian literature.
  • Comparative study of the concept of heroism in ancient Greek and Indian epics.
  • Ecocriticism in British and Brazilian literature.
  • The influence of the French Revolution on English and French literature.
  • Representation of mental illness in 20th-century American and Norwegian plays.
  • Themes of migration in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean literatures.
  • Gender and sexuality in contemporary African and Southeast Asian short stories.
  • The literary portrayal of technological advances in German and American literature.
  • Comparative study of children’s fantasy literature in the British and Egyptian traditions.
  • The role of the supernatural in Japanese and Celtic folklore narratives.
  • The impact of digital culture on narrative forms in contemporary literature.
  • Representation of the global financial crisis in 21st-century novels.
  • Analysis of identity and self in the age of social media as depicted in contemporary literature.
  • The role of dystopian themes in reflecting contemporary societal fears.
  • Post-9/11 political and cultural narratives in American literature.
  • The influence of migration on shaping multicultural identities in contemporary novels.
  • Gender fluidity and queer identities in contemporary literary works.
  • Environmental concerns and ecocriticism in 21st-century fiction.
  • The resurgence of the epistolary novel form in the digital age.
  • The depiction of mental health in contemporary young adult literature.
  • The role of indigenous voices in contemporary world literature.
  • Neo-colonialism and its representation in contemporary African literature.
  • The intersection of film and literature in contemporary storytelling.
  • Analysis of consumerism and its critique in modern literary works.
  • The rise of autobiographical novels in contemporary literature and their impact on narrative authenticity.
  • Technological dystopias and human identity in contemporary science fiction.
  • The representation of terrorism and its impacts in contemporary literature.
  • Examination of contemporary feminist literature and the evolution of feminist theory.
  • The literary treatment of historical memory and trauma in post-Soviet literature.
  • The changing face of heroism in 21st-century literature.
  • Contemporary plays addressing the challenges of modern relationships and family dynamics.
  • The use of supernatural elements in modern literary fiction.
  • The influence of Eastern philosophies on Western contemporary literature.
  • The portrayal of aging and death in contemporary novels.
  • The dynamics of power and corruption in new political thrillers.
  • The evolution of narrative voice and perspective in contemporary literature.
  • Representation of refugees and asylum seekers in modern fiction.
  • The impact of pandemics on literary themes and settings.
  • Postmodern approaches to myth and folklore in contemporary writing.
  • The critique of nationalism and patriotism in 21st-century literature.
  • The use of satire and irony to critique contemporary political climates.
  • Emerging forms of literature, such as interactive and visual novels, in the digital era.
  • The representation of class struggle in contemporary urban narratives.
  • Changes in the portrayal of romance and intimacy in new adult fiction.
  • The challenge of ethical dilemmas in contemporary medical dramas.
  • Examination of space and place in the new landscape of contemporary poetry.
  • Contemporary reimaginings of classical literature characters in modern settings.
  • The role of privacy, surveillance, and paranoia in contemporary narratives.
  • The blending of genres in contemporary literature: The rise of hybrid forms.
  • The portrayal of artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity in contemporary works.
  • The role of memory and nostalgia in the literature of the Jewish diaspora.
  • Narratives of displacement and identity in the African diaspora.
  • The portrayal of the Indian diaspora in contemporary literature.
  • Cross-cultural conflicts and identity negotiations in Korean diaspora literature.
  • The influence of colonial legacies on Caribbean diaspora writers.
  • The concept of “home” and “belonging” in Palestinian diaspora literature.
  • Exploring the Irish diaspora through literary expressions of exile and return.
  • The impact of migration on gender roles within Middle Eastern diaspora communities.
  • Representation of the Vietnamese diaspora in American literature.
  • Transnationalism and its effects on language and narrative in Chicano/Chicana literature.
  • Dual identities and the search for authenticity in Italian-American diaspora writing.
  • The evolution of cultural identity in second-generation diaspora authors.
  • Comparative analysis of diaspora literature from former Yugoslav countries.
  • The depiction of generational conflicts in Chinese-American diaspora literature.
  • The use of folklore and mythology in reconnecting with cultural roots in Filipino diaspora literature.
  • The representation of trauma and recovery in the literature of the Armenian diaspora.
  • Intersectionality and feminism in African diaspora literature.
  • The role of culinary culture in narratives of the Indian diaspora.
  • Identity politics and the struggle for cultural preservation in diaspora literature from Latin America.
  • The portrayal of exile and diaspora in modern Jewish Russian literature.
  • The impact of globalization on diaspora identities as reflected in literature.
  • Language hybridity and innovation in Anglophone Caribbean diaspora literature.
  • Literary portrayals of the challenges faced by refugees in European diaspora communities.
  • The influence of remittances and transnational ties on Filipino diaspora literature.
  • The use of magical realism to express diasporic experiences in Latin American literature.
  • The effects of assimilation and cultural retention in Greek diaspora literature.
  • The role of digital media in shaping the narratives of contemporary diasporas.
  • The depiction of the African American return diaspora in literature.
  • Challenges of integration and discrimination in Muslim diaspora literature in Western countries.
  • The portrayal of Soviet diaspora communities in post-Cold War literature.
  • The narratives of return and reintegration in post-colonial diaspora literatures.
  • The influence of historical events on the literature of the Korean War diaspora.
  • The role of diaspora literature in shaping national policies on immigration.
  • Identity crisis and cultural negotiation in French-Algerian diaspora literature.
  • The impact of diaspora on the evolution of national literatures.
  • Literary exploration of transracial adoption in American diaspora literature.
  • The exploration of queer identities in global diaspora communities.
  • The influence of the digital age on the literary expression of diaspora experiences.
  • Themes of loss and alienation in Canadian diaspora literature.
  • The role of literature in documenting the experiences of the Syrian diaspora.
  • The role of the supernatural in the works of Shakespeare.
  • The portrayal of women in Victorian novels.
  • The influence of the Romantic poets on modern environmental literature.
  • The depiction of poverty and social class in Charles Dickens’ novels.
  • The evolution of the narrative form in British novels from the 18th to the 20th century.
  • Themes of war and peace in post-World War II British poetry.
  • The impact of colonialism on British literature during the Empire.
  • The role of the Byronic hero in Lord Byron’s works and its influence on subsequent literature.
  • The critique of human rights in the plays of Harold Pinter.
  • The representation of race and ethnicity in post-colonial British literature.
  • The influence of Gothic elements in the novels of the Brontë sisters.
  • Modernism and its discontents in the works of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot.
  • The treatment of love and marriage in Jane Austen’s novels.
  • The use of irony and satire in Jonathan Swift’s writings.
  • The evolution of the tragic hero from Shakespeare to modern plays.
  • Literary depictions of the British countryside in poetry and prose.
  • The rise of feminist literature in England from Mary Wollstonecraft to the present.
  • The portrayal of children and childhood in Lewis Carroll’s works.
  • Analyzing the quest motif in British Arthurian literature.
  • The influence of the Industrial Revolution on English literature.
  • Themes of alienation and isolation in the novels of D.H. Lawrence.
  • The representation of religious doubt and faith in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.
  • The role of espionage and national identity in British spy novels.
  • Literary responses to the Irish Troubles in 20th-century British literature.
  • The evolution of comic and satirical plays in British theatre from Ben Jonson to Tom Stoppard.
  • The treatment of death and mourning in the works of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.
  • Comparative study of myth and mythology in the works of William Blake and Ted Hughes.
  • The depiction of the British Empire and its legacies in contemporary British literature.
  • The role of landscape and environment in shaping the novels of Thomas Hardy.
  • The influence of music and poetry on the lyrical ballads of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
  • The impact of technology on society as depicted in the novels of Aldous Huxley.
  • The critique of societal norms and manners in Oscar Wilde’s plays.
  • Literary explorations of mental illness in the early 20th century.
  • The intersection of literature and science in the works of H.G. Wells.
  • The role of the sea in British literature: From Shakespeare’s tempests to Joseph Conrad’s voyages.
  • The impact of Brexit on contemporary British literature.
  • Themes of exile and displacement in the poetry of W.H. Auden.
  • The influence of American culture on post-war British literature.
  • The role of the detective novel in British literature, from Sherlock Holmes to contemporary works.
  • The portrayal of the “New Woman” in late 19th-century English literature.
  • The evolution of feminist thought in literature from the 19th century to the present.
  • Analysis of the portrayal of women in dystopian literature.
  • Intersectionality and its representation in contemporary feminist texts.
  • The role of women in shaping modernist literature.
  • Feminist critique of traditional gender roles in fairy tales and folklore.
  • The portrayal of female agency in graphic novels and comics.
  • The influence of second-wave feminism on literature of the 1960s and 1970s.
  • Postcolonial feminism in the works of authors from Africa and the Caribbean.
  • The depiction of motherhood in feminist literature across cultures.
  • The impact of feminist theory on the analysis of classical literature.
  • Ecofeminism: exploring the link between ecology and gender in literature.
  • Feminist perspectives on sexuality and desire in literature.
  • The intersection of feminism and disability in literary texts.
  • The role of the female gothic in understanding women’s oppression and empowerment.
  • Representation of transgender and non-binary characters in feminist literature.
  • Feminism and the critique of capitalism in literary works.
  • The representation of women in science fiction and fantasy genres.
  • Analysis of domesticity and the private sphere in 19th-century literature.
  • Feminist reinterpretations of mythological figures and stories.
  • The role of women in revolutionary narratives and political literature.
  • Feminist analysis of the body and corporeality in literature.
  • The portrayal of female friendships and solidarity in novels.
  • The influence of feminist literature on contemporary pop culture.
  • Gender and power dynamics in the works of Shakespeare from a feminist perspective.
  • The impact of digital media on feminist literary criticism.
  • Feminist literary responses to global crises and conflicts.
  • Queer feminism and literature: Exploring texts that intersect gender, sexuality, and feminist theory.
  • The portrayal of women in wartime literature from a feminist viewpoint.
  • Feminist poetry movements and their contribution to literary history.
  • The influence of feminist literary theory on teaching literature in academic settings.
  • Feminist analysis of women’s voices in oral narratives and storytelling traditions.
  • Representation of women in the detective and mystery genres.
  • The use of satire and humor in feminist literature to challenge societal norms.
  • Feminist perspectives on religious texts and their interpretations.
  • The critique of marriage and relationships in feminist novels.
  • Women’s narratives in the digital age: Blogs, social media, and literature.
  • Feminist literature as a tool for social change and activism.
  • The influence of feminist literature on legal and social policy reforms.
  • Gender roles in children’s literature: A feminist critique.
  • The role of feminist literature in redefining beauty standards and body image.
  • The evolution of the Gothic novel from the 18th century to contemporary Gothic fiction.
  • The representation of the sublime and the terrifying in Gothic literature.
  • The role of haunted landscapes in Gothic narratives.
  • Psychological horror vs. supernatural horror in Gothic literature.
  • The portrayal of madness in classic Gothic novels.
  • The influence of Gothic literature on modern horror films.
  • Themes of isolation and alienation in Gothic fiction.
  • The use of architecture as a symbol of psychological state in Gothic literature.
  • Gender roles and the portrayal of women in Victorian Gothic novels.
  • The revival of Gothic elements in 21st-century young adult literature.
  • The depiction of villains and anti-heroes in Gothic stories.
  • Comparative analysis of European and American Gothic literature.
  • The intersection of Gothic literature and romanticism.
  • The influence of religious symbolism and themes in Gothic narratives.
  • Gothic elements in the works of contemporary authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice.
  • The role of curses and prophecies in Gothic storytelling.
  • Gothic literature as social and cultural critique.
  • The representation of death and the afterlife in Gothic novels.
  • The use of dual personalities in Gothic literature.
  • The impact of Gothic literature on fashion and visual arts.
  • The role of secrecy and suspense in creating the Gothic atmosphere.
  • The depiction of the monstrous and the grotesque in Gothic texts.
  • Exploring the Gothic in graphic novels and comics.
  • The motif of the journey in Gothic literature.
  • The portrayal of science and experimentation in Gothic stories.
  • Gothic elements in children’s literature.
  • The role of nature and the natural world in Gothic narratives.
  • Themes of inheritance and the burden of the past in Gothic novels.
  • The influence of Gothic literature on the development of detective and mystery genres.
  • The portrayal of patriarchal society and its discontents in Gothic fiction.
  • The Gothic and its relation to postcolonial literature.
  • The use of folklore and myth in Gothic narratives.
  • The narrative structure and techniques in Gothic literature.
  • The role of the supernatural in defining the Gothic genre.
  • Gothic literature as a reflection of societal anxieties during different historical periods.
  • The motif of entrapment and escape in Gothic stories.
  • Comparative study of Gothic literature and dark romanticism.
  • The use of setting as a character in Gothic narratives.
  • The evolution of the ghost story within Gothic literature.
  • The function of mirrors and doubling in Gothic texts.
  • The portrayal of traditional spiritual beliefs in Indigenous literature.
  • The impact of colonization on Indigenous narratives and storytelling.
  • Analysis of language revitalization efforts through Indigenous literature.
  • Indigenous feminist perspectives in contemporary literature.
  • The role of land and environment in Indigenous storytelling.
  • Depictions of family and community in Indigenous novels.
  • The intersection of Indigenous literature and modernist themes.
  • The representation of cultural trauma and resilience in Indigenous poetry.
  • The use of oral traditions in modern Indigenous writing.
  • Indigenous perspectives on sovereignty and autonomy in literary texts.
  • The role of Indigenous literature in national reconciliation processes.
  • Contemporary Indigenous literature as a form of political activism.
  • The influence of Indigenous languages on narrative structure and poetics.
  • The depiction of urban Indigenous experiences in literature.
  • Analysis of Indigenous science fiction and speculative fiction.
  • The portrayal of intergenerational trauma and healing in Indigenous stories.
  • The role of mythology and folklore in contemporary Indigenous literature.
  • Indigenous authors and the global literary market.
  • The use of non-linear narratives in Indigenous storytelling.
  • Comparative study of Indigenous literatures from different continents.
  • The portrayal of Indigenous identities in children’s and young adult literature.
  • Representation of gender and sexuality in Indigenous literature.
  • The role of art and imagery in Indigenous narratives.
  • The influence of non-Indigenous readerships on the publication of Indigenous texts.
  • Environmental justice themes in Indigenous literature.
  • The depiction of historical events and their impacts in Indigenous novels.
  • Indigenous literature as a tool for education and cultural preservation.
  • The dynamics of translation in bringing Indigenous stories to a wider audience.
  • The treatment of non-human entities and their personification in Indigenous stories.
  • The influence of Indigenous storytelling techniques on contemporary cinema.
  • Indigenous authorship and intellectual property rights.
  • The impact of awards and recognitions on Indigenous literary careers.
  • Analysis of Indigenous autobiographies and memoirs.
  • The role of mentorship and community support in the development of Indigenous writers.
  • Comparative analysis of traditional and contemporary forms of Indigenous poetry.
  • The effect of digital media on the dissemination of Indigenous stories.
  • Indigenous resistance and survival narratives in the face of cultural assimilation.
  • The role of Indigenous literature in shaping cultural policies.
  • Exploring hybrid identities through Indigenous literature.
  • The representation of Indigenous spiritual practices in modern novels.
  • The application of deconstruction in contemporary literary analysis.
  • The impact of feminist theory on the interpretation of classic literature.
  • Marxism and its influence on the critique of 21st-century novels.
  • The role of psychoanalytic theory in understanding character motivations and narrative structures.
  • Postcolonial theory and its application to modern diaspora literature.
  • The relevance of structuralism in today’s literary studies.
  • The intersection of queer theory and literature.
  • The use of ecocriticism to interpret environmental themes in literature.
  • Reader-response theory and its implications for understanding audience engagement.
  • The influence of New Historicism on the interpretation of historical novels.
  • The application of critical race theory in analyzing literature by authors of color.
  • The role of biographical criticism in studying authorial intent.
  • The impact of digital humanities on literary studies.
  • The application of narrative theory in the study of non-linear storytelling.
  • The critique of capitalism using cultural materialism in contemporary literature.
  • The evolution of feminist literary criticism from the second wave to the present.
  • Hermeneutics and the philosophy of interpretation in literature.
  • The study of semiotics in graphic novels and visual literature.
  • The role of myth criticism in understanding modern reinterpretations of ancient stories.
  • Comparative literature and the challenges of cross-cultural interpretations.
  • The impact of globalization on postcolonial literary theories.
  • The application of disability studies in literary analysis.
  • Memory studies and its influence on the interpretation of narrative time.
  • The influence of phenomenology on character analysis in novels.
  • The role of orientalism in the depiction of the East in Western literature.
  • The relevance of Bakhtin’s theories on dialogism and the carnivalesque in contemporary media.
  • The implications of translation studies for interpreting multilingual texts.
  • The use of animal studies in literature to critique human-animal relationships.
  • The role of affect theory in understanding emotional responses to literature.
  • The critique of imperialism and nationalism in literature using postcolonial theories.
  • The implications of intersectionality in feminist literary criticism.
  • The application of Freudian concepts to the analysis of horror and Gothic literature.
  • The use of genre theory in classifying emerging forms of digital literature.
  • The critique of linguistic imperialism in postcolonial literature.
  • The use of performance theory in the study of drama and poetry readings.
  • The relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony in literary studies.
  • The examination of space and place in urban literature using spatial theory.
  • The impact of surveillance culture on contemporary narrative forms.
  • The application of chaos theory to the analysis of complex narrative structures.
  • The role of allegory in political and religious texts through historical and contemporary lenses.
  • Adaptation theory and the translation of literary narratives into film.
  • The role of the director as an interpreter of literary texts in cinema.
  • Comparative analysis of narrative techniques in novels and their film adaptations.
  • The impact of film adaptations on the reception of classic literature.
  • The portrayal of historical events in literature and film.
  • The influence of screenplay structure on literary narrative forms.
  • The representation of gender roles in book-to-film adaptations.
  • The intertextuality between film scripts and their source novels.
  • The use of visual symbolism in films adapted from literary works.
  • The portrayal of psychological depth in characters from literature to film.
  • The adaptation of non-fiction literature into documentary filmmaking.
  • The impact of the author’s biographical elements on film adaptations.
  • The role of music and sound in enhancing narrative elements from literature in films.
  • The evolution of the horror genre from literature to film.
  • The representation of science fiction themes in literature and their adaptation to cinema.
  • The influence of fan culture on the adaptation process.
  • The depiction of dystopian societies in books and their cinematic counterparts.
  • The challenges of translating poetry into visual narrative.
  • The portrayal of magical realism in literature and film.
  • The depiction of race and ethnicity in adaptations of multicultural literature.
  • The role of the viewer’s perspective in literature vs. film.
  • The effectiveness of dialogue adaptation from literary dialogues to film scripts.
  • The impact of setting and locale in film adaptations of regional literature.
  • The transformation of the mystery genre from page to screen.
  • The adaptation of children’s literature into family films.
  • The narrative construction of heroism in literary epics and their film adaptations.
  • The influence of graphic novels on visual storytelling in films.
  • The adaptation of classical mythology in modern cinema.
  • The ethics of adapting real-life events and biographies into film.
  • The role of cinematic techniques in depicting internal monologues from novels.
  • The comparison of thematic depth in short stories and their film adaptations.
  • The portrayal of alienation in modern literature and independent films.
  • The adaptation of stage plays into feature films.
  • The challenges of adapting experimental literature into conventional film formats.
  • The representation of time and memory in literature and film.
  • The adaptation of young adult novels into film franchises.
  • The role of directorial vision in reinterpreting a literary work for the screen.
  • The cultural impact of blockbuster adaptations of fantasy novels.
  • The influence of cinematic adaptations on contemporary novel writing.
  • The role of censorship in the adaptation of controversial literary works to film.
  • The portrayal of the American Revolution in contemporary historical novels.
  • The impact of the World Wars on European literary expression.
  • The depiction of the Victorian era in British novels.
  • Literary responses to the Great Depression in American literature.
  • The representation of the Russian Revolution in 20th-century literature.
  • The influence of the Harlem Renaissance on African American literature.
  • The role of literature in documenting the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
  • The depiction of colonialism and its aftermath in African literature.
  • The influence of historical events on the development of national literatures.
  • The role of literary works in shaping public memory of historical tragedies.
  • The portrayal of the Holocaust in European and American literature.
  • The use of allegory to critique political regimes in 20th-century literature.
  • The depiction of indigenous histories and resistances in literature.
  • The representation of the French Revolution in romantic literature.
  • Literature as a tool for national identity construction in postcolonial states.
  • The portrayal of historical figures in biographical novels.
  • The influence of the Cold War on spy novels and political thrillers.
  • The impact of migration and diaspora on historical narratives in literature.
  • The role of the ancient world in shaping modern historical novels.
  • The depiction of the Industrial Revolution and its impacts in literature.
  • The role of women in historical novels from the feminist perspective.
  • The representation of religious conflicts and their historical impacts in literature.
  • The influence of myth and folklore on historical narrative constructions.
  • The depiction of the American West in literature and its historical inaccuracies.
  • The role of literature in the preservation of endangered languages and cultures.
  • The impact of digital archives on the study of literature and history.
  • The use of literature to explore counterfactual histories.
  • The portrayal of piracy and maritime history in adventure novels.
  • Literary depictions of the fall of empires and their historical contexts.
  • The impact of archaeological discoveries on historical fiction.
  • The influence of the Spanish Civil War on global literary movements.
  • The depiction of social upheavals and their impacts on literary production.
  • The role of literature in documenting the environmental history of regions.
  • The portrayal of non-Western historical narratives in global literature.
  • The impact of historical laws and policies on the lives of characters in novels.
  • The influence of public health crises and pandemics on literature.
  • The representation of trade routes and their historical significance in literature.
  • The depiction of revolutions and uprisings in Latin American literature.
  • The role of historical texts in the reimagining of genre literature.
  • The influence of postmodernism on the interpretation of historical narratives in literature.
  • The exploration of existential themes in modern literature.
  • The representation of Platonic ideals in Renaissance literature.
  • Nietzschean perspectives in the works of postmodern authors.
  • The influence of Stoicism on characters’ development in classical literature.
  • The portrayal of ethical dilemmas in war novels.
  • The philosophical underpinnings of utopian and dystopian literature.
  • The role of absurdism in the narratives of 20th-century plays.
  • The concept of ‘the Other’ in literature, from a phenomenological viewpoint.
  • The depiction of free will and determinism in science fiction.
  • The influence of feminist philosophy on contemporary literature.
  • The exploration of Socratic dialogue within literary texts.
  • The reflection of Cartesian dualism in Gothic novels.
  • Buddhist philosophy in the works of Eastern and Western authors.
  • The impact of existentialism on the characterization in novels by Camus and Sartre.
  • The use of allegory to explore philosophical concepts in medieval literature.
  • The portrayal of hedonism and asceticism in biographical fiction.
  • The exploration of phenomenology in autobiographical narratives.
  • Literary critiques of capitalism through Marxist philosophy.
  • The relationship between language and reality in post-structuralist texts.
  • The depiction of nihilism in Russian literature.
  • The intersection of Confucian philosophy and traditional Asian narratives.
  • The exploration of human nature in literature from a Hobbesian perspective.
  • The influence of pragmatism on American literary realism.
  • The portrayal of justice and injustice in novels centered on legal dilemmas.
  • The exploration of existential risk and future ethics in speculative fiction.
  • The philosophical examination of memory and identity in memoirs and autobiographies.
  • The role of ethics in the portrayal of artificial intelligence in literature.
  • The literary interpretation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism.
  • The reflection of Epicurean philosophy in modern travel literature.
  • The influence of Kantian ethics on the narratives of moral conflict.
  • The representation of libertarian philosophies in dystopian literature.
  • The philosophical discourse on beauty and aesthetics in literature.
  • The exploration of virtue ethics through historical biographical novels.
  • The philosophical implications of transhumanism in cyberpunk literature.
  • The use of literature to explore the philosophical concept of the sublime.
  • The narrative structures of temporality and eternity in philosophical novels.
  • The impact of neo-Platonism on the symbolism in Renaissance poetry.
  • The portrayal of existential isolation in urban contemporary novels.
  • The reflection of utilitarianism in social and political novels.
  • The exploration of ethical ambiguity in spy and thriller genres.
  • The portrayal of psychological disorders in modernist literature.
  • Exploration of trauma and its narrative representation in post-war novels.
  • The use of stream of consciousness as a method to explore cognitive processes in literature.
  • The psychological impact of isolation in dystopian literature.
  • The depiction of childhood and development in coming-of-age novels.
  • Psychological manipulation in the narrative structure of mystery and thriller novels.
  • The role of psychological resilience in characters surviving extreme conditions.
  • The influence of Freudian theory on the interpretation of dreams in literature.
  • The use of psychological archetypes in the development of mythological storytelling.
  • The portrayal of psychological therapy and its impacts in contemporary fiction.
  • Analysis of cognitive dissonance through characters’ internal conflicts in novels.
  • The exploration of the Jungian shadow in villain characters.
  • Psychological profiling of protagonists in crime fiction.
  • The impact of societal expectations on mental health in historical novels.
  • The role of psychology in understanding unreliable narrators.
  • The depiction of addiction and recovery in autobiographical works.
  • The exploration of grief and mourning in poetry.
  • Psychological theories of love as depicted in romantic literature.
  • The narrative portrayal of dissociative identity disorder in literature.
  • The use of psychological suspense in Gothic literature.
  • The representation of anxiety and depression in young adult fiction.
  • Psychological effects of war on soldiers as depicted in military fiction.
  • The role of psychoanalysis in interpreting symbolic content in fairy tales.
  • The psychological impact of technological change as seen in science fiction.
  • The exploration of existential crises in philosophical novels.
  • The depiction of social psychology principles in literature about cults and mass movements.
  • Psychological aspects of racial and gender identity in contemporary literature.
  • The representation of the subconscious in surreal and absurd literature.
  • The application of psychological resilience theories in survival literature.
  • The portrayal of parental influence on child development in family sagas.
  • Psychological theories of aging as explored in literature about the elderly.
  • The depiction of sensory processing disorders in fictional characters.
  • Psychological effects of immigration and cultural assimilation in diaspora literature.
  • The role of narrative therapy in autobiographical writing and memoirs.
  • The portrayal of obsessive-compulsive disorder in narrative fiction.
  • Psychological implications of virtual realities in cyberpunk literature.
  • The representation of psychopathy in anti-hero characters.
  • The exploration of group dynamics and leadership in epic tales.
  • Psychological interpretations of magical realism as a reflection of cultural psyche.
  • The use of literature in the therapeutic practice and understanding of mental health issues.
  • The influence of Christian theology on medieval epic poems.
  • The role of allegory in interpreting medieval morality plays.
  • The depiction of chivalry and courtly love in Arthurian legends.
  • Comparative analysis of the heroic ideals in Beowulf and the Song of Roland.
  • The impact of the Black Death on the themes of medieval poetry and prose.
  • The portrayal of women in medieval romances.
  • The use of dreams as a narrative device in medieval literature.
  • The representation of the otherworldly and supernatural in medieval texts.
  • The function of medieval bestiaries in literature and their symbolic meanings.
  • The influence of the Crusades on medieval literature across Europe.
  • The evolution of the troubadour and trouvère traditions in medieval France.
  • The depiction of feudalism and social hierarchy in medieval narratives.
  • The role of satire and humor in the Canterbury Tales.
  • The impact of monastic life on medieval literary production.
  • The use of vernacular languages in medieval literature versus Latin texts.
  • The portrayal of sin and redemption in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
  • The literary responses to the Mongol invasions in medieval Eurasian literature.
  • The development of allegorical interpretation in medieval biblical exegesis.
  • The influence of Islamic culture on medieval European literature.
  • The representation of Jewish communities in medieval Christian literature.
  • The concept of kingship and rule in Anglo-Saxon literature.
  • The use of landscape and nature in medieval Celtic stories.
  • The role of pilgrimage in shaping medieval narrative structures.
  • The depiction of witchcraft and magic in medieval texts.
  • Gender roles and their subversion in Middle English literature.
  • The literary legacy of Charlemagne in medieval European epics.
  • The portrayal of disability and disease in medieval literature.
  • The use of relics and iconography in medieval religious writings.
  • The medieval origins of modern fantasy literature tropes.
  • The use of cryptography and secret messages in medieval romance literature.
  • The influence of medieval astronomy and cosmology on literary works.
  • The role of manuscript culture in preserving medieval literary texts.
  • The depiction of Vikings in medieval English and Scandinavian literature.
  • Medieval literary depictions of Byzantine and Ottoman interactions.
  • The representation of sermons and homilies in medieval literature.
  • The literary forms and functions of medieval liturgical drama.
  • The influence of classical antiquity on medieval literary forms.
  • The use of irony and parody in medieval fabliaux.
  • The role of the troubadour poetry in the development of lyrical music traditions.
  • The impact of medieval legal texts on contemporary narrative forms.
  • The influence of urbanization on narrative form in Modernist literature.
  • Stream of consciousness technique in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
  • The role of symbolism and imagery in T.S. Eliot’s poetry.
  • The depiction of the World War I experience in Modernist novels.
  • The impact of Freudian psychology on Modernist character development.
  • The intersection of visual arts and narrative structure in Modernist poetry.
  • The critique of imperialism and colonialism in Modernist texts.
  • The representation of gender and sexuality in Modernist literature.
  • The influence of technology and industrialization on Modernist themes.
  • The use of fragmentation and non-linear narratives in Modernist fiction.
  • The evolution of the novel form in Modernist literature.
  • The role of existential philosophy in shaping Modernist themes.
  • The critique of traditional values and societal norms in Modernist works.
  • The portrayal of alienation and isolation in the Modernist era.
  • The impact of Jazz music on the rhythm and structure of Modernist poetry.
  • The role of expatriate writers in the development of Modernist literature.
  • The influence of Russian literature on Modernist authors.
  • The exploration of time and memory in Modernist narrative techniques.
  • The depiction of urban alienation and anonymity in Modernist literature.
  • The role of patronage and literary salons in the promotion of Modernist art.
  • The impact of cinema on Modernist narrative techniques.
  • The representation of religious doubt and spiritual crisis in Modernist texts.
  • The influence of Cubism on the form and structure of Modernist poetry.
  • The use of irony and satire in the critiques of Modernist society.
  • The interplay between Modernist literature and the emerging psychoanalytic discourse.
  • The depiction of the breakdown of language and communication in Modernist works.
  • The role of the anti-hero in Modernist novels.
  • The impact of existential despair on the themes of Modernist literature.
  • The representation of the New Woman in Modernist fiction.
  • The influence of Eastern philosophies on Modernist thought and writings.
  • The critique of materialism and consumer culture in Modernist literature.
  • The role of myth and narrative reconfiguration in Modernist poetry.
  • The depiction of war trauma and its aftermath in Modernist literature.
  • The representation of racial and ethnic identities in Modernist works.
  • The impact of avant-garde movements on Modernist literary forms.
  • The influence of European intellectual movements on American Modernist writers.
  • The role of the flâneur in Modernist literature and urban exploration.
  • The exploration of linguistic innovation in the works of Gertrude Stein.
  • The critique of historical progress in Modernist narratives.
  • The impact of existentialism on the depiction of the absurd in Modernist theatre.
  • The representation of colonial impact on identity in postcolonial narratives.
  • The role of language and power in postcolonial literature.
  • The portrayal of gender and resistance in postcolonial women’s writings.
  • The depiction of hybridity and cultural syncretism in postcolonial texts.
  • The influence of native folklore and mythology in postcolonial storytelling.
  • The critique of neocolonialism and globalization in contemporary postcolonial literature.
  • The exploration of diaspora and migration in postcolonial narratives.
  • The role of the subaltern voice in postcolonial literature.
  • The impact of postcolonial theory on Western literary criticism.
  • The representation of landscapes and spaces in postcolonial works.
  • The portrayal of historical trauma and memory in postcolonial fiction.
  • The exploration of identity and belonging in postcolonial children’s literature.
  • The use of magical realism as a political tool in postcolonial literature.
  • The depiction of urbanization and its effects in postcolonial cities.
  • The role of religion in shaping postcolonial identities.
  • The impact of apartheid and its aftermath in South African literature.
  • The representation of indigenous knowledge systems in postcolonial texts.
  • The critique of patriarchy in postcolonial narratives.
  • The exploration of linguistic decolonization in postcolonial writing.
  • The portrayal of conflict and reconciliation in postcolonial societies.
  • The depiction of postcolonial resistance strategies in literature.
  • The representation of climate change and environmental issues in postcolonial contexts.
  • The role of education in postcolonial literature.
  • The impact of tourism and exoticism on postcolonial identities.
  • The exploration of economic disparities in postcolonial narratives.
  • The representation of refugees and asylum seekers in postcolonial literature.
  • The portrayal of political corruption and governance in postcolonial works.
  • The depiction of cultural preservation and loss in postcolonial societies.
  • The role of oral traditions in contemporary postcolonial literature.
  • The portrayal of transnational identities in postcolonial fiction.
  • The exploration of gender fluidity and sexuality in postcolonial texts.
  • The depiction of labor migration and its effects in postcolonial literature.
  • The role of the media in shaping postcolonial discourses.
  • The impact of Western pop culture on postcolonial societies.
  • The portrayal of intergenerational conflict in postcolonial families.
  • The depiction of mental health issues in postcolonial contexts.
  • The exploration of postcolonial futurism in African speculative fiction.
  • The representation of native resistance against colonial forces in historical novels.
  • The critique of linguistic imperialism in postcolonial education.
  • The depiction of decolonization movements in postcolonial literature.
  • The use of metafiction and narrative self-awareness in postmodern literature.
  • The role of irony and playfulness in postmodern texts.
  • The exploration of fragmented identities in postmodern novels.
  • The deconstruction of traditional narrative structures in postmodern works.
  • The representation of hyperreality and the simulation of reality in postmodern fiction.
  • The critique of consumer culture and its influence on postmodern characters.
  • The exploration of historiographic metafiction and the reinterpretation of history.
  • The role of pastiche and intertextuality in postmodern literature.
  • The depiction of paranoia and conspiracy in postmodern narratives.
  • The portrayal of cultural relativism and the challenge to universal truths.
  • The use of multimedia and digital influences in postmodern writing.
  • The exploration of existential uncertainty in postmodern philosophy and literature.
  • The role of gender and identity politics in postmodern texts.
  • The depiction of postmodern urban landscapes and architecture in literature.
  • The representation of globalization and its effects in postmodern novels.
  • The portrayal of ecological crises and environmental concerns in postmodern fiction.
  • The critique of scientific rationalism and technology in postmodern literature.
  • The exploration of linguistic experimentation and its impact on narrative.
  • The role of the anti-hero and flawed protagonists in postmodern stories.
  • The depiction of social fragmentation and alienation in postmodern works.
  • The representation of non-linear time and its effect on narrative perspective.
  • The portrayal of the dissolution of boundaries between high and low culture.
  • The use of parody and satire to critique political and social norms.
  • The exploration of subjectivity and the breakdown of the authorial voice.
  • The role of performance and spectacle in postmodern drama.
  • The depiction of marginalization and minority voices in postmodern literature.
  • The representation of the interplay between virtual and physical realities.
  • The portrayal of ephemeral and transient experiences in postmodern texts.
  • The critique of capitalism and neoliberal economics in postmodern narratives.
  • The exploration of human relationships in the context of media saturation.
  • The depiction of dystopian societies and their critiques of contemporary issues.
  • The role of surreal and absurd elements in postmodern storytelling.
  • The portrayal of cultural pastiches and their implications for identity formation.
  • The exploration of narrative unreliability and ambiguous truths.
  • The depiction of multiple realities and parallel universes in postmodern fiction.
  • The representation of anarchism and resistance in postmodern literature.
  • The critique of colonial narratives and their postmodern reevaluations.
  • The exploration of therapeutic narratives in postmodern psychology and literature.
  • The role of chance and randomness in the structure of postmodern plots.
  • The portrayal of artistic and cultural decadence in postmodern settings.
  • The impact of humanism on the themes and forms of Renaissance poetry.
  • The influence of Renaissance art on the literature of the period.
  • The role of court patronage in the development of literary forms during the Renaissance.
  • The depiction of love and courtship in Shakespeare’s comedies.
  • The use of classical myths in Renaissance drama.
  • The portrayal of political power in the plays of Christopher Marlowe.
  • The evolution of the sonnet form from Petrarch to Shakespeare.
  • The representation of women in Renaissance literature and the role of gender.
  • The impact of the Reformation on English literature during the Renaissance.
  • The development of narrative prose during the Renaissance.
  • The influence of Italian literature on English Renaissance writers.
  • The role of allegory in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene .
  • The depiction of the supernatural in Renaissance drama.
  • The exploration of identity and self in Renaissance autobiographical writings.
  • The rise of satire and its development during the English Renaissance.
  • The concept of the tragic hero in Renaissance tragedy.
  • The role of travel and exploration narratives in shaping Renaissance literature.
  • The influence of Machiavellian philosophy on Renaissance literary characters.
  • The representation of religious conflicts and sectarianism in Renaissance texts.
  • The depiction of colonialism and its early impacts in Renaissance literature.
  • The portrayal of the city and urban life in Renaissance literature.
  • The use of rhetoric and persuasion in the sermons and speeches of the Renaissance.
  • The depiction of friendship and societal bonds in Renaissance literature.
  • The influence of Renaissance music on the poetic forms of the time.
  • The role of magic and science in the literature of the Renaissance.
  • The treatment of classical philosophy in Renaissance humanist literature.
  • The representation of nature and the environment in pastoral literature.
  • The depiction of courtly and peasant life in Renaissance drama.
  • The influence of Renaissance literature on later literary movements.
  • The portrayal of villains and their motivations in Renaissance plays.
  • The development of printing technology and its impact on Renaissance literature.
  • The role of language and dialect in the literature of the English Renaissance.
  • The depiction of the New World in Renaissance travel literature.
  • The exploration of moral and ethical issues in Renaissance philosophical writings.
  • The impact of Spanish literature on the Renaissance literary scene.
  • The role of soliloquies in deepening character development in Renaissance drama.
  • The treatment of death and mortality in Renaissance poetry.
  • The representation of court politics and intrigue in Renaissance historical plays.
  • The development of comedic elements in Renaissance literature.
  • The exploration of Renaissance literary criticism and its approaches to interpretation.
  • The exploration of nature and the sublime in Romantic poetry.
  • The role of the individual and personal emotion in Romantic literature.
  • The impact of the French Revolution on Romantic literary themes.
  • The representation of the Byronic hero in Romantic novels.
  • The influence of Gothic elements on Romantic literature.
  • The depiction of women and femininity in the works of Romantic poets.
  • The role of imagination and creativity in Romantic theories of art and literature.
  • The portrayal of childhood and innocence in Romantic literature.
  • The influence of Eastern cultures on Romantic poetry and prose.
  • The interplay between science and religion in Romantic texts.
  • The Romantic fascination with death and the macabre.
  • The depiction of landscapes and rural life in Romantic poetry.
  • The role of folklore and mythology in shaping Romantic narratives.
  • The impact of Romanticism on national identities across Europe.
  • The exploration of exile and alienation in Romantic literature.
  • The critique of industrialization and its social impacts in Romantic writing.
  • The development of the historical novel in Romantic literature.
  • The role of letters and correspondence in Romantic literary culture.
  • The representation of revolutionary ideals and their disillusionment in Romantic texts.
  • The exploration of human rights and liberty in Romantic works.
  • The portrayal of artistic genius and its torments in Romantic literature.
  • The depiction of friendship and romantic love in Romantic poetry.
  • The influence of Romantic literature on the development of modern environmentalism.
  • The role of music and its inspiration on Romantic poetry.
  • The exploration of time and memory in Romantic literary works.
  • The depiction of urban versus rural dichotomies in Romantic texts.
  • The impact of Romanticism on later literary movements such as Symbolism and Decadence.
  • The role of melancholy and introspection in Romantic poetry.
  • The representation of dreams and visions in Romantic literature.
  • The depiction of storms and natural disasters as metaphors in Romantic writing.
  • The exploration of political reform and radicalism in Romantic works.
  • The portrayal of the supernatural and its role in Romantic narratives.
  • The influence of Romantic literature on the visual arts.
  • The depiction of heroism and adventure in Romantic epics.
  • The role of solitude and contemplation in Romantic poetry.
  • The exploration of national folklore in the Romantic movement across different cultures.
  • The critique of reason and rationality in favor of emotional intuition.
  • The depiction of the quest for immortality and eternal youth in Romantic literature.
  • The role of the pastoral and the picturesque in Romantic aesthetics.
  • The exploration of spiritual and transcendental experiences in Romantic texts.
  • The role of dystopian worlds in critiquing contemporary social issues.
  • The portrayal of artificial intelligence and its ethical implications in science fiction.
  • The evolution of space opera within science fiction literature.
  • The depiction of alternate histories in fantasy literature and their cultural significance.
  • The use of magic systems in fantasy novels as metaphors for real-world power dynamics.
  • The representation of gender and sexuality in speculative fiction.
  • The influence of scientific advancements on the development of science fiction themes.
  • Environmentalism and ecocriticism in science fiction and fantasy narratives.
  • The role of the hero’s journey in modern fantasy literature.
  • The portrayal of utopias and their transformation into dystopias.
  • The impact of post-apocalyptic settings on character development and moral choices.
  • The exploration of virtual reality in science fiction and its implications for the future of society.
  • The representation of alien cultures in science fiction and the critique of human ethnocentrism.
  • The use of mythology and folklore in building fantasy worlds.
  • The influence of cyberpunk culture on contemporary science fiction.
  • The depiction of time travel and its impact on narrative structure and theme.
  • The role of military science fiction in exploring warfare and peace.
  • The portrayal of religious themes in science fiction and fantasy.
  • The impact of fan fiction and its contributions to the science fiction and fantasy genres.
  • The exploration of psychological themes through science fiction and fantasy narratives.
  • The role of colonization in science fiction narratives.
  • The impact of science fiction and fantasy literature on technological innovation.
  • The depiction of societal collapse and reconstruction in speculative fiction.
  • The role of language and linguistics in science fiction, such as in creating alien languages.
  • The portrayal of non-human characters in fantasy literature and what they reveal about human nature.
  • The use of science fiction in exploring philosophical concepts such as identity and consciousness.
  • The representation of disabled characters in science fiction and fantasy.
  • The influence of historical events on the development of fantasy literature.
  • The critique of capitalism and corporate governance in dystopian science fiction.
  • The role of political allegory in science fiction during the Cold War.
  • The representation of indigenous peoples in fantasy settings.
  • The impact of climate change on the settings and themes of speculative fiction.
  • The exploration of bioethics and genetic modification in science fiction.
  • The impact of globalization as seen through science fiction narratives.
  • The role of women authors in shaping modern science fiction and fantasy.
  • The exploration of sentient machines and the definition of life in science fiction.
  • The use of archetypes in fantasy literature and their psychological implications.
  • The narrative strategies used to build suspense and mystery in fantasy series.
  • The influence of Eastern philosophies on Western science fiction.
  • The portrayal of family and community in post-apocalyptic environments.
  • The representation of the British Empire and colonialism in Victorian novels.
  • The impact of the Industrial Revolution on the social landscape in Victorian literature.
  • The depiction of gender roles and the domestic sphere in Victorian novels.
  • The influence of Darwinian thought on Victorian characters and themes.
  • The role of the Gothic tradition in Victorian literature.
  • The portrayal of morality and ethics in the works of Charles Dickens.
  • The exploration of class disparity and social mobility in Victorian fiction.
  • The depiction of urban life and its challenges in Victorian literature.
  • The role of realism in Victorian novels and its impact on literary form.
  • The representation of mental illness and psychology in Victorian fiction.
  • The critique of materialism and consumer culture in Victorian literature.
  • The portrayal of children and childhood in Victorian narratives.
  • The exploration of romanticism versus realism in Victorian poetry.
  • The depiction of religious doubt and spiritual crises in Victorian texts.
  • The role of women writers in the Victorian literary scene.
  • The portrayal of the “New Woman” in late Victorian literature.
  • The exploration of scientific progress and its ethical implications in Victorian works.
  • The depiction of crime and punishment in Victorian detective fiction.
  • The influence of aestheticism and decadence in late Victorian literature.
  • The representation of imperial anxieties and racial theories in Victorian novels.
  • The role of sensation novels in shaping Victorian popular culture.
  • The portrayal of marriage and its discontents in Victorian literature.
  • The depiction of rural life versus urbanization in Victorian narratives.
  • The exploration of philanthropy and social reform in Victorian texts.
  • The role of the supernatural and the occult in Victorian fiction.
  • The portrayal of art and artists in Victorian literature.
  • The representation of travel and exploration in Victorian novels.
  • The depiction of the aristocracy and their decline in Victorian literature.
  • The influence of newspapers and media on Victorian literary culture.
  • The role of patriotism and national identity in Victorian writings.
  • The exploration of the Victorian underworld in literature.
  • The depiction of legal and judicial systems in Victorian fiction.
  • The portrayal of addiction and vice in Victorian texts.
  • The role of foreign settings in Victorian novels.
  • The depiction of technological advancements in transportation in Victorian literature.
  • The influence of French and Russian literary movements on Victorian authors.
  • The role of epistolary form in Victorian novels.
  • The portrayal of altruism and self-sacrifice in Victorian narratives.
  • The depiction of servants and their roles in Victorian households.
  • The exploration of colonial and postcolonial readings of Victorian texts.
  • The role of translation in shaping the global reception of classic literary works.
  • The impact of globalization on the development of contemporary world literature.
  • Comparative analysis of national myths in literature across different cultures.
  • The influence of postcolonial theory on the interpretation of world literature.
  • The depiction of cross-cultural encounters and their implications in world novels.
  • The role of exile and migration in shaping the themes of world literature.
  • The representation of indigenous narratives in the global literary marketplace.
  • The portrayal of urbanization in world literature and its impact on societal norms.
  • The exploration of feminist themes across different cultural contexts in literature.
  • The depiction of historical trauma and memory in literature from post-conflict societies.
  • The role of magical realism in expressing political and social realities in Latin American literature.
  • The exploration of identity and hybridity in diaspora literature from around the world.
  • The impact of censorship and political repression on literary production in authoritarian regimes.
  • Comparative study of the Gothic tradition in European and Latin American literature.
  • The influence of religious texts on narrative structures and themes in world literature.
  • The role of nature and the environment in shaping narrative forms in world literature.
  • The exploration of time and memory in post-Soviet literature.
  • The portrayal of love and marriage across different cultural contexts in world novels.
  • The impact of technological changes on narrative forms and themes in world literature.
  • The exploration of human rights issues through world literature.
  • The depiction of war and peace in Middle Eastern literature.
  • Comparative analysis of the tragic hero in Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh theater.
  • The role of traditional folk stories in contemporary world literature.
  • The influence of African oral traditions on modern African literature.
  • The exploration of social justice and activism in world literature.
  • The portrayal of children and childhood in world literature.
  • The depiction of the supernatural and the uncanny in world literary traditions.
  • The impact of colonial histories on contemporary literature in former colonies.
  • The exploration of gender and sexuality in Scandinavian literature.
  • The portrayal of disability and mental health in world literature.
  • The role of food and cuisine in cultural identity as depicted in world literature.
  • Comparative study of poetry from the Middle Eastern and Western traditions.
  • The exploration of death and the afterlife in world religious texts and their literary influences.
  • The portrayal of the artist and the creative process in world literature.
  • The impact of economic crises on characters and plot development in world novels.
  • The exploration of architectural spaces and their symbolism in world literature.
  • The role of multilingualism and code-switching in narrative development in world literature.
  • The depiction of aging and intergenerational relationships in world novels.
  • The influence of classical Chinese literature on East Asian modern narratives.
  • The role of the sea and maritime culture in world literary traditions.
  • The portrayal of identity and self-discovery in YA literature.
  • The representation of mental health issues in YA novels.
  • The evolution of the coming-of-age narrative in modern YA fiction.
  • The role of dystopian settings in YA literature as metaphors for adolescent struggles.
  • The depiction of family dynamics and their impact on young protagonists.
  • The treatment of romance and relationships in YA fiction.
  • The exploration of LGBTQ+ themes and characters in YA literature.
  • The impact of social media and technology on character development in YA novels.
  • The portrayal of bullying and social exclusion in YA fiction.
  • The representation of racial and cultural diversity in YA literature.
  • The use of fantasy and supernatural elements to explore real-world issues in YA fiction.
  • The role of friendship in character development and plot progression in YA novels.
  • The depiction of resilience and personal growth in YA protagonists.
  • The influence of YA literature on young readers’ attitudes towards social issues.
  • The portrayal of disability and inclusivity in YA narratives.
  • The role of sports and extracurricular activities in shaping YA characters.
  • The exploration of historical events through YA historical fiction.
  • The impact of war and conflict on young characters in YA literature.
  • The depiction of academic pressure and its consequences in YA novels.
  • The portrayal of artistic expression as a form of coping and identity in YA literature.
  • The use of alternate realities and time travel in YA fiction to explore complex themes.
  • The role of villainy and moral ambiguity in YA narratives.
  • The exploration of environmental and ecological issues in YA literature.
  • The portrayal of heroism and leadership in YA novels.
  • The impact of grief and loss on YA characters and their journey.
  • The depiction of addiction and recovery narratives in YA literature.
  • The portrayal of economic disparities and their effects on young characters.
  • The representation of non-traditional family structures in YA novels.
  • The exploration of self-empowerment and activism in YA literature.
  • The depiction of crime and justice in YA mystery and thriller genres.
  • The role of mythology and folklore in crafting YA fantasy narratives.
  • The portrayal of exile and migration in YA fiction.
  • The impact of YA literature in promoting literacy and reading habits among teens.
  • The exploration of gender roles and expectations in YA novels.
  • The depiction of peer pressure and its influence on YA characters.
  • The portrayal of escapism and adventure in YA fiction.
  • The role of magical realism in conveying psychological and emotional truths in YA literature.
  • The exploration of ethical dilemmas and moral choices in YA narratives.
  • The depiction of the future and speculative technology in YA science fiction.
  • The portrayal of societal norms and rebellion in YA dystopian novels.

We hope this comprehensive list of literature thesis topics empowers you to narrow down your choices and sparks your curiosity in a specific area of literary studies. With 1000 unique topics spread across 25 categories, from traditional to emerging fields, there is something here for every literary scholar. The diversity of topics not only reflects the dynamic nature of literature but also encompasses a range of perspectives and cultural backgrounds, ensuring that every student can find a topic that resonates deeply with their scholarly interests and personal passions. Utilize this resource to embark on a thought-provoking and intellectually rewarding thesis writing journey.

Literature and Thesis Topic Potential

Literature encompasses a vast and vibrant spectrum of themes and narrative techniques that mirror, critique, and reshape the complex world we live in. For students embarking on the challenging yet rewarding journey of thesis writing, delving into the multitude of literature thesis topics can unlock profound insights and present significant scholarly opportunities. This exploration is not merely an academic exercise; it is a deep dive into the human experience, offering a unique lens through which to view history, culture, and society. Engaging with literature in this way not only enhances one’s understanding of various literary genres and historical periods but also sharpens analytical, critical, and creative thinking skills.

Current Issues in Literature

One prevailing issue in contemporary literary studies is the exploration of identity and representation within literature. This includes examining how narratives portray race, gender, sexuality, and disability. The rise of identity politics has encouraged a reevaluation of canonical texts and a push to broaden the literary canon to include more diverse voices. Such studies challenge traditional narratives and open up discussions on power dynamics within literature.

Another significant issue is the impact of digital technology on literature. The digital age has introduced new forms of literature, such as hypertext fiction and digital poetry, which utilize the interactive capabilities of digital devices to create multifaceted narratives. This shift has led to new interpretations of authorship and readership, as the boundaries between the two blur in interactive media. Thesis topics might explore how these technological innovations have transformed narrative structures and themes or how they affect the psychological engagement of the reader.

Environmental literature has also emerged as a poignant area of study, especially in the context of growing global concerns about climate change and sustainability. This trend in literature reflects an urgent need to address the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Theses in this area could examine narratives that focus on ecological disasters, the anthropocene, or the role of non-human actors in literature, providing new insights into environmental ethics and awareness.

Recent Trends in Literature

The recent trend towards blending genres within literature has led to innovative narrative forms that defy conventional genre classifications. Works that fuse elements of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction challenge readers to engage with literature in new and complex ways. These hybrid genres often address contemporary issues through the lens of speculative or fantastical settings, offering fresh perspectives on familiar problems. Thesis topics in this area could explore how these blended genres comment on societal issues or how they represent historical narratives through a fantastical lens.

Another noteworthy trend is the increasing prominence of autobiographical and memoir writing, which highlights personal narratives and individual experiences. This shift towards personal storytelling reflects a broader societal interest in authentic and individualized narratives, often exploring themes of identity, trauma, and resilience. Students could develop thesis topics that analyze how these works serve as both personal catharsis and a social commentary, or how they use narrative techniques to blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction.

Global literature, written in or translated into English, has expanded the geographical boundaries of literary analysis and introduced a plethora of voices and stories from around the world. This trend not only diversifies the range of literary works available but also introduces new themes and narrative strategies influenced by different cultural backgrounds. Thesis research could investigate how global literature addresses universal themes through culturally specific contexts, or how it challenges Western literary paradigms.

Future Directions in Literature

As literature continues to evolve, one of the exciting future directions is the potential integration of literary studies with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies could lead to new forms of literary creation and analysis, where AI-generated literature becomes a field of study, or where machine learning is used to uncover patterns in large volumes of text. Thesis topics might explore the ethical implications of AI in literature, the authenticity of AI-authored texts, or how AI can be used to interpret complex literary theories.

Another future direction is the increasing intersection between literature and other disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach can deepen understanding of how literature affects the human brain, influences behavior, or reflects cultural evolution. Students could develop theses that examine the neurocognitive impacts of reading fiction, or how literary studies can contribute to our understanding of human culture and societal development.

Finally, the role of literature in addressing and influencing social and political issues is likely to increase. As global challenges like migration, inequality, and climate change persist, literature that addresses these issues not only provides commentary but also raises awareness and fosters empathy. Future thesis topics could focus on how literature serves as a tool for social justice, how it influences public policy, or how it helps shape collective memory and identity in times of crisis.

The exploration of literature thesis topics offers students a panorama of possibilities for deep academic inquiry and personal growth. By engaging deeply with literature, students not only fulfill their academic objectives but also gain insights that transcend scholarly pursuits. This exploration enriches personal perspectives and fosters a profound appreciation for the power of words and stories. The pursuit of literature thesis topics is thus not merely academic—it is a journey into the heart of human experience, offering endless opportunities for discovery and impact.

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Dissertations.

Marcus Alaimo: “The Romantic-Utilitarian Debate” directed by David Bromwich, Leslie Brisman, Stefanie Markovits

Andie Berry: “This Has Not Happened: African American Performances At The Edge Of The Century” directed by Daphne A. Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, Marc Robinson

Daniel de la Rocha: “Frustrated Journeys: Social Immobility and the Aesthetics of Disappointment in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” directed by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Marta Figlerowicz, Stefanie Markovits

Seamus Dwyer: “Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425” directed by Jessica Brantley, Ardis Butterfield, Emily Thornbury

Emily Glider: “Geopolitical Players: Diplomacy, Trade, and English Itinerant Theater in Early Modern Europe” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, Ayesha Ramachandran

Tobi Haslett: “All This Sociology and Economics Jazz: Blackness, Writing, and Totality after Civil Rights” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Michael Warner, Michael Denning

Adam C. Keller: “Character in Conflict: Soldiers and the Formation of Eighteenth-Century Literary Character” directed by David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, Anastasia Eccles

Elizabeth R. Mundell-Perkins: “Matter of the Mind: Narrative’s Knowledge and the Novel of Impressionability, 1897-present” directed by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Marta Figlerowicz, Juno Richards

Colton Valentine: “Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque” directed by Marta Figlerowicz, Stefanie Markovits, Katie Trumpener, Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Elizabeth Colette Wiet: “Maximalism: An Art of the Minor” directed by Marc Robinson, Joseph Roach

Helen Hyoun Jung Yang: “Healed by Water: American Hydropathy and the Search for Meaning in Nature” directed by Caleb Smith, John Durham Peters, Wai Chee Dimock

December 2023

Shu-han Luo: “Didactic Poetry as Formal Experiment in Early Medieval England” directed by Emily Thornbury, Ardis Butterfield, Lucas Bender

Cera Smith: “Blackened Biology: Physiology of the Self and Society in African American Literature and Sculpture” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Tavia Nyong’o, Aimee Meredith Cox

Michael Abraham: “The Avant-Garde of Feeling: Queer Love and Modernism” directed by Langdon Hammer, Marta Figlerowicz, Ben Glaser

Peter Conroy: “Unreconciled: American Power and the End of History, 1945 to the Present” directed by Joe Cleary, Joseph North, Paul North

Trina Hyun: “Media Theologies, 1615-1668” directed by John Durham Peters, Catherine Nicholson, Marta Figlerowicz, John Rogers (University of Toronto)

Margaret McGowan: “A Natural History of the Novel: Species, Sense, Atmosphere” directed by Jonathan Kramnick, Katie Trumpener, Marta Figlerowicz

Benjamin Pokross: “Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes” directed by Caleb Smith, Greta LaFleur, Michael Warner

Sophia Richardson: “Reading the Surface in Early Modern English Literature” directed by Catherine Nicholson, Lawrence Manley, John Rogers(University of Toronto)

Melissa Shao Hsuan Tu: “Sonic Virtuality: First-Person Voices in Late Medieval English Lyric” directed by Ardis Butterfield, Jessica Brantley, John Durham Peters

Sarah Weston: “The Cypher and the Abyss: Outline Against Infinity” directed by Paul Fry, Tim Barringer, John Durham Peters

December 2022

Anna Hill: “Sublime Accumulations: Narrating the Global Climate, 1969-2001” directed by Joe Cleary, Marta Figlerowicz, Ursula Heise (UCLA)

Christopher McGowan: “Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre” directed by Joe Cleary, Michael Denning, Katie Trumpener

Samuel Huber: “Every Day About the World: Feminist Internationalism in the Second Wave” directed by  Jacqueline Goldsby, Margaret Homans, Jill Richards

Shayne McGregor: “An Intellectual History of Black Literary Discourse 1910-1956” directed by Joseph North, Robert Stepto

Brandon Menke: “Slow Tyrannies: Queer Lyricism, Visual Regionalism, and the Transfigured World” directed by Langdon Hammer, Wai Chee Dimock, Marta Figlerowicz

Arthur Wang: “Minor Theories of Everything: On Popular Science and Contemporary Fiction” directed by Amy Hungerford, John Durham Peters, Sunny Xiang

December 2021

Sarah Robbins: “Re(-)Markable Texts: Making Meaning of Revision in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature” directed by Caleb Smith, Jacqueline Goldsby, Anthony Reed

David de León: “Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter” directed by  Langdon Hammer, Daphne Brooks, Marta Figlerowicz

Clio Doyle: “Rough Beginnings: Imagining the Origins of Agriculture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain” directed by Lawrence Manley, David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson

Clay Greene: “The Preexistence of the Soul in the Early English Enlightenment: 1640-1740” directed by John Rogers, Jonathan Kramnick, Lawrence Manley

December 2020

Wing Chun Julia Chan: “Veritable Utopia: Revolutionary Russia and the Modernism of the British Left” directed by Katie Trumpener, Jill Richards, Katerina Clark

James Eric Ensley: “Troubled Signs: Thomas Hoccleve’s Objects of Absence” directed by Jessica Brantley, Alastair Minnis, Ardis Butterfield

Paul Franz: “Because so it is made new”: D. H. Lawrence’s charismatic modernism directed by David Bromwich, Ben Glaser, and Langdon Hammer

Chelsie Malyszek: Just Words: Diction and Misdirection in Modern Poetry directed by Lanny Hammer, David Bromwich, and Ben Glaser

Justin Park: “The Children of Revenge: Managing Emotion in Early English Literature” directed by Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, David Kastan

Peter Raccuglia: “Lives of Grass: Prairie Literature and US Settler Capitalism” directed by Michael Warner, Jonathan Kramnick, Michael Denning

Ashley James: “ ‘Moist, Fleshy, Pulsating Surfaces’: Seeing and Reading Black Life after Experientiality” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Elizabeth Alexander, and Anthony Reed

Brittany Levingston: “In the Day of Salvation: Christ and Salvation in Early Twentieth-Century African American Literature” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Robert Stepto, and Anthony Reed

Lukas Moe: “Radical Afterlives: U.S. Poetry, 1935-1968” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer, Jacqueline Goldsby, and Michael Denning

Carlos Nugent: “Imagined Environments: Mediating Race and Nature in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Michael Warner

Anna Shechtman: “The Media Concept: A Genealogy” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford, John Durham Peters, and Michael Warner

December 2019

Bofang Li: “Old Media/New Media: Intimate Networked Publics and the Commodity Text Since 1700” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock, R. John Williams, and Francesco Casetti

Scarlet Luk: “Gender Unbound: The Novel Narrator Beyond the Binary” directed by Professors Margaret Homans, Jill Campbell, and Jill Richards

Phoenix Alexander: “Voices with Vision: Writing Black, Feminist Futures in Twentieth-Century African America” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, and Wai Chee Dimock

Andrew S. Brown: “Artificial Persons: Fictions of Representation in Early Modern Drama” directed by Professors David Kastan, John Rogers, and Joseph Roach

Margaret Deli: “Authorizing Taste: Connoisseurship and Transatlantic Modernity, 1880-1959” directed by Professors Ruth Yeazell, Joseph Cleary, and R. John Williams

Ann Killian: “Expanding Lyric Networks: The Transformation of a Genre in Late Medieval England” directed by Professors Ardis Butterfield, Jessica Brantley, and Alastair Minnis

Alexandra Reider: “The Multilingual English Manuscript Page, c. 950-1300” directed by Professors Roberta Frank, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

December 2018

Seo Hee Im: “After Totality: Late Modernism and the Globalization of the Novel” directed by Professors Joseph Cleary, Katie Trumpener, and Marta Figlerowicz

Angus Ledingham: “Styles of Abstraction: Objectivity and Moral Thought in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” directed by Professors David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, and Stefanie Markovits

Jason Bell: “Archiving Displacement in America” directed by Professors Caleb Smith, Wai Chee Dimock, and Jacqueline Goldsby

Joshua Stanley: “If but Once We Have Been Strong: Collective Agency and Poetic Technique in England during the Period of Early Capitalism” directed by Professors Paul Fry, David Bromwich, and Anthony Reed

December 2017

Carla Baricz: “Early Modern Two-Part and Sequel Drama, 1490-1590” directed by Professors David Quint, Lawrence Manley, and David Kastan

Edward King: “The World-Historical Novel: Writing the Periphery” directed by Professors Joseph Cleary, R. John Williams, and Michael Denning

Palmer Rampell: “The Genres of the Person in Post-World War II America” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford, Michael Warner, and R. John Williams

Anya Adair: “Composing the Law: Literature and Legislation in Early Medieval England” directed by Professors Roberta Frank, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

Robert Bradley Holden: “Milton between the Reformation and Enlightenment: Religion in an Age of Revolution” directed by Professors David Quint, Bruce Gordon, and John Rogers

Andrew Kau: “Astraea’s Adversary: The Rivalry Between Law and Literature in Elizabethan England” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley, David Quint, and David Kastan

Natalie Prizel: “The Good Look: Victorian Visual Ethics and the Problem of Physical Difference” direcgted by Professors Janice Carlisle and Tim Barringer

Rebecca Rush: “The Fetters of Rhyme: Freedom and Limitation in Early Modern Verse” direcgted by Professors David Quint, David Kastan, and John Rogers

Prashant Sharma: “Conversions to the Baroque: Catholic Modernism from James Joyce to Graham Greene” directed by Professors Paul Fry, Joseph Cleary, and Marta Figlerowicz

Joseph Stadolnik: “Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature” directed by Professors Ardis Butterfield and Alastair Minnis

Steven Kirk Warner: “Versions of Narcissus: The Aesthetics and Erotics of the Male Form in English Renaissance Poetry” directed by Professors John Rogers and Catherine Nicholson

December 2016

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews: “The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the University since 1970” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer, Paul Fry, and Wai Chee Dimock

Alexis Chema: “Fancy’s Mirror: Romantic Poetry and the Art of Persuasion” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Paul Fry

Daniel Jump: “Metadiscursive Struggle and the Eighteenth-Century British Social Imaginary: From the End of Licensing to the Revolution Controversy” directed by Professors Michael Warner, Jill Campbell, and Paul Fry

Jordan Brower: “A Literary History of the Studio System, 1911-1950” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, JD Connor, and Joe Cleary

Ryan Carr: “Expressivism in America” directed by Michael Warner, Caleb Smith, and Paul Fry

Megan Eckerle: “Speculation and Time in Late Medieval Visionary Discourse” directed by Jessica Brantley and Alastair Minnis

Gabriele Hayden: “Routes and Roots of the New World Baroque: U.S. Modernist Poets Translate from Spanish” directed by Landon Hammer and Wai Chee Dimock

Matthew Hunter: “The Pursuit of Style in Shakespeare’s Drama” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, and Brian Walsh

Leslie Jamison: “The Recovered: Addiction and Sincerity in 20th Century American Literature” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Caleb Smith

Jessica Matuozzi: “Double Agency: A Multimedia History of the War on Drugs” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Amy Hungerford, and Anthony Reed

Aaron Pratt: “The Status of Printed Playbooks in Early Modern England” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, and Keith Wrightson

Madeleine Saraceni: “The Idea of Writing for Women in Late Medieval Literature” directed by Jessica Brantley, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

J. Antonio Templanza: “Know to Know No More: The Composition of Knowledge in Milton’s Epic Poetry” directed by John Rogers and Paul Fry

Andrew Willson: “Idle Works: Unproductiveness, Literature Labor, and the Victorian Novel” directed by Janice Carlisle, Stefanie Markovits, and Ruth Yeazell

December 2015

Melina Moe: “Public Intimacies: Literary and Sexual Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century” directed by Katie Trumpener, Wendy Lee, Jonathan Kramnick, and Jill Campbell

Merve Emre: “Paraliterary Institutions” directed by Wai Chee Dimock and Amy Hungerford

Samuel Fallon: “Personal Effects: Personal and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England” directed by David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson, and Lawrence Manley

Edgar Garcia: “Deep Land: Hemispheric Modernisms and Indigenous Media” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, Langdon Hammer, and Anthony Reed

Jean Elyse Graham: “The Book Unbound: Print Logic between Old Books and New Media” directed by David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson, and R. John Williams

December 2014

Len Gutkin: “Dandiacal Forms” directed by Amy Hungerford, Sam See, and Katie Trumpener

Justin Sider: “Parting Words: Address and Exemplarity in Victorian Poetry” directed by Linda Peterson, Leslie Brisman, and Stefanie Markovits

William Weber: “Shakespearean Metamorphoses” directed by David Kastan

Thomas Koenigs: “Fictionality in the United States, 1789-1861” directed by Michael Warner, Jill Campbell, and Caleb Smith

Andrew Kraebel: “English Traditions of Biblical Criticism and Translation in the Later Middle Ages” directed by Alastair Minnis, Jessica Brantley, and Ian Cornelius

Tessie Prakas: “The Office of the Poet: Ministry and Verse Practice in the Seventeenth Century” directed by John Rogers, David Kastan, and Catherine Nicholson

Nienke Christine Venderbosch: “‘Tha Com of More under Misthleothum Grendel Gongan’: The Scholarly and Popular Reception of Beowulf ’s Grendel from 1805 to the Present Day” directed by Roberta Frank and Paul Fry

Eric Weiskott: “The Durable Alliterative Tradition” directed by Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, Ian Cornelius

December 2013

Anthony Domestico: “Theologies of Crisis in British Literature of the Interwar Period” directed by Amy Hungerford and Pericles Lewis

Glyn Salton-Cox: “Cobbett and the Comintern:  Transnational Provincialism and Revolutionary Desire from the Popular Front to the New Left” directed by Katie Trumpener, Katerina Clark, and Joe Cleary

Samuel Alexander: “Demographic Modernism: Character and Quantification in Twentieth Century Fiction” directed by Professors Pericles Lewis and Barry McCrea

Andrew Karas: “Versions of Modern Poetry” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Langdon Hammer

James Ross Macdonald: “Popular Religious Belief and Literature in Early Modern England” directed by Professors David Kastan and John Rogers

December 2012

Michael Komorowski: “The Arts of Interest: Private Property and the English Literary Imagination in the Age of Milton” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Fiona Robinson: “Raising the Dead: Writing Lives and Writing Wars in Britain, 1914-1941” directed by Professors Katie Trumpener, Margaret Homans, and Sam See

Nathalie Wolfram: “Novel Play: Gothic Performance and the Making of Eighteenth Century Fiction” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Katie Trumpener

Michaela Bronstein: “Imperishable Consciousness: The Rescue of Meaning in the Modernist Novel” directed by Professors Ruth Yeazell and Pericles Lewis

David Currell: “Epic Satire: Structures of Heroic Mockery in Early Modern English Literature” directed by Professor David Quint

Andrew Heisel: “Reading in Darkness: Sacred Text and Aesthetics in the Long Eighteenth Century” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Elliott Visconsi

Hilary Menges: “Authorship before Copyright: The Monumental Book, 1649-1743” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and John Rogers

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma: “Poetry and the Making of the Anglophone Literary World, 1950-1975” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Langdon Hammer

December 2011

Patrick Gray: “The Passionate Stoic: Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Rome” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley and David Quint

Christopher Grobe: “Performing Confession: American Poetry, Performance, and New Media 1959” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford and Joseph Roach

Sebastian LeCourt: “Culture and Secularity: Religion in the Victorian Anthropological Imagination” directed by Professors Linda Peterson and Katie Trumpener

Laura Saetveit Miles: “Mary’s Book: The Annunciation in Middle England” directed by Jessica Brantley and Alastair Minnis

Stephen Tedeschi: “Urbanization in English Romantic Poetry” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Christopher R. Miller

Julia Fawcett: “Over-Expressing the Self: Celebrity, Shandeism, and Autobiographical Performance, 1696-1801” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Joseph Roach

Daniel Gustafson: “Stuart Restorations: History, Memory, Performance” directed by Professor Joseph Roach and Elliott Visconsi

Sarah Mahurin: “American Exodus: Migration and Oscillation in the Modern American Novel” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Robert Stepto

Erica Levy McAlpine: “Lyric Elsewhere: Strategies of Poetic Remove” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Sarah Novacich: “Ark and Archive: Narrative Enclosures in Medieval and Early Modern Texts” directed by Professors Roberta Frank and Alastair Minnis

Jesse Schotter: “The Hieroglyphic Imagination: Language and Visuality in Modern Fiction and Film” directed by Professors Peter Brooks and Pericles Lewis

Matthew Vernon: “Strangers in a Familiar Land: The Medieval and African-American Literary Tradition” directed by Professor Alastair Minnis

Chia-Je Weng: “Natural Religion and Its Discontents: Critiques and Revisions in Blake and Coleridge” directed by Professors Leslie Brisman and Paul Fry

Nicole Wright: “‘A contractile power’: Boundaries of Character and the Culpable Self in the British Novel, 1750-1830” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Katie Trumpener

December 2010

Molly Farrell: “Counting Bodies: Imagining Population in the New World” directed by Professor Wai Chee Dimock

John Muse: “Short Attention Span Theaters: Modernist Shorts Since 1880” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Marc Robinson

Denis Ferhatović: “An Early English Poetics of the Artifact” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

Colin Gillis: “Forming the Normal: Sexology and the Modern British Novel, 1890-1939” directed by Professors Laura Frost and Pericles Lewis

Katherine Harrison: “Tales Twice Told: Sound Technology and American Fiction after 1940” directed by Professor Amy Hungerford

Jean Otsuki: “British Modernism in the Country” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Margaret Homans

Erin Peterson: “On Intrusion and Interruption: An Exploration of an Early Modern Literary Mode” directed by Professor John Rogers

Patrick Redding: “A Distinctive Equality: The Democratic Imagination in Modern American Poetry” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Emily Setina: “Modernism’s Darkrooms: Photography and Literary Process” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Pericles Lewis

Jordan Zweck: “Letters from Heaven in the British Isles, 800-1500” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

December 2009

Elizabeth Twitchell Antrim: “Relief Work: Aid to Africa in the American Novel Since 1960” directed by Professor Wai Chee Dimock

Emily Coit: “The Trial of Abundance: Consumption and Morality in the Anglo-American Novel, 1871-1907” directed by Professors Catherine Labio and Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Andrew Goldstone: “Modernist Fictions of Aesthetic Autonomy” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Amy Hungerford

Matthew Mutter: “Poetry Against Religion, Poetry As Religion: Secularism and its Discontents in Literary Modernism” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Pericles Lewis

Anna Chen: “Kinship Lessons: The Cultural Uses of Childhood in Late Medieval England” directed by Professors Jessica Brantley and Lee Patterson

Anne DeWitt: “The Uses of Scientific Thinking and the Realist Novel” directed by Professor Linda Peterson

Irina Dumitrescu: “The Instructional Moment in Anglo-Saxon Literature” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

Susannah Hollister: “Poetries of Geography in Postwar America” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Langdon Hammer

James Horowitz: “Rebellious Hearts and Loyal Passions: Imagining Civic Consciousness in Ovidian Writing on Women, 1680-1819” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Elliott Visconsi

Ben LaBreche: “The Rule of Friendship: Literary Culture and Early Modern Liberty” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

December 2008

Sarah Van der Laan: “What Virtue and Wisdom Can Do: Homer’s Odyssey in the Renaissance Imagination” directed by Professor David Quint

Annmarie Drury: “Literary Translators and Victorian Poetry” directed by Professor Linda Peterson

Jeffrey Glover: “People of the Word: Puritans, Algonquians, and the Politics of Print in Early New England” directed by Professors Elizabeth Dillon and Wai Chee Dimock

Dana Goldblatt: “From Contract to Social Contract: Fortescue’s Governance and Malory’s Morte ” directed by Professors David Quint and Alastair Minnis

Kamran Javadizadeh: “Bedlam and Parnassus: Madness and Poetry in Postwar America” directed by Professor Langdon Hammer

Ayesha Ramachandran: “Worldmaking in Early Modern Europe: Global Imaginations from Montaigne to Milton” directed by Professors Annabel Patterson and David Quint

Jennifer Sisk: “Forms of Speculation: Religious Genres and Religious Inquiry in Late Medieval England” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Ariel Watson: “The Anxious Triangle: Modern Metatheatres of the Playwright, Performer, and Spectator” directed by Professor Joseph Roach

Jesse Zuba: “The Shape of Life: First Books and the Twentieth-Century Poetic Career” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Amy Hungerford

December 2007

Rebecca Boggs: “The Gem-Like Flame: the Aesthetics of Intensity in Hopkins, Crane, and H.D.” directed by Professor Langdon Hammer

Maria Fackler: “A Portrait of the Artist Manqué : Form and Failure in the British Novel Since 1945” directed by Professors Pericles Lewis and Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Melissa Ganz: “Fictions of Contract: Women, Consent, and the English Novel, 1722-1814” directed by Professor Jill Campbell

Siobhan Phillips: “The Poetics of Everyday Time in Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Morgan Swan: “The Literary Construction of a Capital City: Late-Medieval London and the Difficulty of Self-Definition” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Andrea Walkden: “Lives, Letters and History: Walton to Defoe” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Rebecca Berne: “Regionalism, Modernism and the American Short Story Cycle” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Vera Kutzinski

Leslie Eckel: “Transatlantic Professionalism: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Jennifer Baker

December 2006

Gregory Byala: “Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Beginning” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Pericles Lewis

Eric Lindstrom: “Romantic Fiat” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Paul H. Fry

Megan Quigley: “Modernist Fiction and the Re-instatement of the Vague” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Pericles Lewis

Randi Saloman: “Where Truth is Important: The Modern Novel and the Essayistic Mode” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Laura Frost

Michael Wenthe: “Arthurian Outsiders: Heterogeneity and the Cultural Politics of Medieval Arthurian Literature” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Christopher Bond: “Exemplary Heroism and Christian Redemption in the Epic Poetry of Spenser and Milton” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Lara Cohen: “Counterfeit Presentments: Fraud and the Production of Nineteenth-Century American Literature” directed by Professors Elizabeth Dillon and Wai Chee Dimock

Nicholas Salvato: “Uncloseting Drama: Modernism’s Queer Theaters” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Michael Trask

Anthony Welch: “Songs of Dido: Epic Poetry and Opera in Seventeenth-Century England” directed by Professor David Quint

December 2005

Brooke Conti: “Anxious Acts: Religion and Autobiography in Early Modern England” directed by Professor Annabel Patterson

Brett Foster: “The Metropolis of Popery: Writing of Rome in the English Renaissance” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley and David Quint

Curtis Perrin: “Langland’s Comic Vision” directed by Professor Traugott Lawler

LIT@MIT

Writing a Thesis

Writing thesis in literature.

thesis english literature

“God Speed” by Edmund Leighton, 1900

Sample Titles of Recent Theses in Literature

thesis english literature

“Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves” by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1973

What does a thesis do for me?

Thesis writers can be assured that they have been well prepared for graduate study, and can attest to that fact in their applications and interviews. They have also gained skills that will help them in any workplace. The intensive, self-motivated focus on one topic can be (at times) frustrating, overwhelming, and deeply gratifying: the rewards are many, and most students find their love of literature strengthened through their own efforts and dedication, as well as through the opportunity to work one-on-one with faculty scholars. The time and commitment involved in the process of writing a thesis may or may not exceed the credit hours officially accorded, but the rewards are great. This is a serious undertaking and assumes that the thesis candidate is a responsible adult, able to make deadlines and keep to them without external prodding, and ready to become a literary scholar with a mind of her own.

What do I do for my thesis?

thesis english literature

“Donna con tavolette cerate e stilo (cosiddetta “Saffo”)/Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called “Sappho”)” fresco ca. 50 CE

Fall Semester: Preparatory Work

If they have not done so in the the Spring of the junior year, thesis candidates should consult with faculty prior to Registration Day to determine who would be an appropriate advisor. The thesis will eventually be read and evaluated by three faculty members: the advisor my suggest second and third readers, or may leave the decision to the student. Developing an argument takes time, but candidates should begin with a clear set of interests in mind, and ideally with background reading underway. Students may choose to focus on a particular author or literary text, or to connect several authors and texts through attention to a shared thematic or formal pattern.

Regular Supervision and Deadlines

thesis english literature

“Beloved” by Joe Morse, 2015

Spring Semester: 12-Unit Thesis

During the spring semester, the thesis candidate signs up for the 12-unit Thesis and devotes substantial energy to expanding, completing, and revising the work. The student should continue to meet on a regular basis with the advisor, and should also be sharing draft chapters with the second and third readers as soon as possible. The thesis process involves extensive revision as well as writing, and students need to anticipate that as the semester proceeds their readers will have an increasing number of competing demands on their time from other classes: chapters may not be returned with comments and recommendations for revision until some time after being submitted, and thesis writers need to plan accordingly. A complete first draft should be submitted by the end of spring break or the beginning of April, depending on the academic calendar and the advisor’s schedule. This ensures adequate time for commentary and extensive final revision before the official Institute deadline for undergraduate theses (usually at the end of the penultimate week of classes, and listed on the official Academic Calendar).

After Completion

thesis english literature

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Mad Tea Party” by Sir John Tenniel, 1865

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Home > Arts and Sciences > English > Theses and Dissertations

English Department Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

HOUSE OF HORRORS: SHIRLEY JACKSON AND THE PERILS OF THE DOMESTIC IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1945-1965 , AnnMarie DeMichiel

THE EMPIRE: A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL , Tatiana Duvanova

THIS COULD BE HEAVEN OR THIS COULD BE HELL: FIGURATIONS OF URBAN LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY CALIFORNIA , Diana Turken

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Muscadine: Poems , Albert Hosia Jerriod Avant

MIDDLE CHILDREN OF HISTORY: MALE-AUTHORED POST-1960s FICTION & THE NIHILISM OF WHITE MALE PROTAGONISTS , Emma C. Baughman

THE (MIS)FORMATION OF IDENTITY IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOVELS: IDEOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND THE SELF , Youngji Cho

COMPUTATIONAL CLOSE READING: A CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL LITERARY METHODOLOGY , Damiano Consilvio

DIAGNOSTIC BRAINS, EXPERIENTIAL MINDS AND METAMODERNISM: MCEWAN, SELF, AND MCCARTHY AS CASE STUDIES , Mohamed Anis Ferchichi

RESISTING ARREST: AN (AUTO-THEORETICAL) ESSAY ON PRISON LITERATURE , James A. Ferry

WAITING TOO LONG TO MOVE AT GREEN LIGHTS , Michael Landreth

IS IT FREEDOM YOU WANT?: FEMINIST MORMON HOUSEWIVES “DEAR FMH” COLUMN AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE ETHICS OF CARE IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ADVICE COLUMNS , Julia Unger

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

THE TEXT(TILES) OF ADINKRA SYMBOLS: WEST AFRICAN ART, GENDER, & POETIC TRANSLATIONS , Rachel A. Ansong

BLACK FEMINIST AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: HOW IDENTITY CAN AFFECT PEER REVIEW PRACTICES IN THE COLLEGE WRITING CLASSROOM , Eileen M. James

TO SCALE DRAGONS: COMPRISING THINGS LOST AND TWO ESSAYS ON FANTASY , André V. Katkov

THE ALICE ATOM COMPENDIUM , Nick Mendillo

BROKEN DOZER, HAUNTED VALE: THE ECOPOETICS OF AMBIENT LANGUAGE , Andrew Merecicky

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

TRUE CRIME, WOMEN, AND SENSATIONALIZED REPRESENTATIONS IN THE ITALIAN AMERICAN IMAGINARY , Francesca Borrione

FANTASIZING REPRODUCTION: THE BIOLOGIZATION OF THE DESIRE FOR PROGRESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE , Xinqiang Chang

GENDERED & GENREFIED BODIES: HEROISM AS PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE IN SWORD & SORCERY FANTASY , Anthony Conrad Chieffalo

INTIMATE DISTANCES: AN ARCHIPELAGO , Elizabeth Foulke

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

PREPARING FOR DEATH: CANNIBALISM, CONSUMPTION AND INCORPORATION IN WOMEN’S SHIPWRECK NARRATIVES , Danielle Cofer

FEMALE COMIC GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN VICTORIAN NOVELS: INVESTIGATING THE POSSIBILITIES OF LIMINALITY , Barbara A. Farnworth

READING THE READER: ANALYZING DEPICTIONS OF MALE READERS IN SERIAL VICTORIAN FICTION , Ashton Foley-Schramm

REORIENTING THE FEMALE GOTHIC: CURIOSITY AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE , Jenna Guitar

ECOLOGIES OF MATERIALITY AND AESTHETICS IN BRITISH MODERNIST WAR-TIME LITERATURE, 1890-1939 , Molly Volanth Hall

FICTIONS OF CAPTIVITY: RACIALIZING RELIGION IN EARLY U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE , Serap Hidir

BETWEEN SIBLINGS: HOW THE SIBLING METAPHOR REIMAGINES AFFECTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL , Beth Leonardo Silva

OPENING CEREMONY: A WRITING PRACTICE TOWARDS QUEER FUTURITY , Laura Marie Marciano

“THE SKIPPING KING”: MASCULINITY AND EFFEMINACY IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA , Danielle Johanna Sanfilippo

THE MARK OF THE VANISHING READER: INTRADIEGETIC INTERACTION IN MULTIMODAL NARRATIVE , Catherine Ann Winters

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

PRACTICING TRANSLINGUALISM: FACULTY CONCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES , Adrienne Jones Daly

TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA , Ryan Engley

CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE , Charles Kell

WELCOME TO THE CLUB: AN ARCHIVAL INQUIRY INTO THE DEWEY LABORATORY SCHOOL AS RHETORICAL EDUCATION , Krysten Manke

“THERE IS NO RACISM IN CUBA”: A FIELD STUDY OF THE “POST-RACE” RHETORIC OF MODERN CUBA , Clarissa J. Walker

CHARMED MODERNISMS: FANTASIES OF SOCIALITY AND DIFFERENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE , Kara Watts

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

THE NEW SINCERITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE , Matthew J. Balliro

Understanding Reading Sponsorship Through Analysis of First-Year Composition Students’ Literacy Narratives , Nancy A. Benson

Widening the Sphere: Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity , Anna J. Brecke

Demonstrating Feminist Metic Intelligence Through the Embodied Rhetorical Practices of Julia Child , Lindy E. Briggette

The Men That Sleep Built , Samuel Simas

Questing Feminism: Narrative Tensions and Magical Women in Modern Fantasy , Kimberly Wickham

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora , Beth O'Leary Anish

Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals and Activists , Jillian Belanger

Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America , Rachel Boccio

Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Art , William R. Bowden

Undergraduate Student Perspectives on Electronic Portfolio Assessment in College Composition Courses , Bridget Fullerton

Metadata and Relational Architecture: Advancing Arrangement, Agency, and Access with New Methodology , Jenna Morton-Aiken

Agency in Eating Disorders: American Literary and Visual Memoirs of Anorexia and Bulimia , Jenny Platz

To Start, Continue, and Conclude: Foregrounding Narrative Production in Serial Fiction Publishing , Gabriel E. Romaguera

"You Will Hold This Book in Your Hands": The Novel and Corporeality in the New Media Ecology , Jason Shrontz

Exploring the Use of NoRedInk as a Tool for Composition Instruction , Alyson Snowe

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

You Are What You Eat: Investigating Food Discourse and Digitally-Mediated Identities , Katelyn Leigh Burton

Exquisite Clutter: Material Culture and the Scottish Reinvention of the Adventure Narrative , Rebekah C. Greene

“A Peculiar Power of Perception”: Scottish Enlightenment Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic of Language , Rosaleen Greene-Smith Keefe

Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature , Brittany B. Hirth

The Color of Grammar and the Surface of Language: 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars , Sarah E. Kruse

Consent Puzzles: Narrative Ambiguities of Girls' Sexual Agency in Literature and Film from the 1990s , Michele Meek

John Dewey's Letters from Asia: Implications for Redefining "Openness" in Rhetoric and Composition , Karen Pierce Shea

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Automated Essay Evaluation and the Computational Paradigm: Machine Scoring Enters the Classroom , Catherine M. Barrett

Bringing the World Inside: British Modernism and Taste – Gustatory, Social, and Aesthetic , Michael David Becker

Permeable Boundaries: Globalizing Form in Contemporary American and British Literature , Nancy Caronia

AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION , Kim Caroline Evelyn

AN EXAMINATION OF ARGUMENTATION IN UNDERGRADUATE COMPOSITION TEXTBOOKS , Wendy Lee Grosskopf

Stories That Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration , Marcy Isabella

OFF THE HIP: A THERMODYNAMICS OF THE COOL , Rebecca Kanost

INSOMNIA AND IDENTITY: THE DISCURSIVE FUNCTION OF SLEEPLESSNESS IN MODERNIST LITERATURE , Sarah Kingston

TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY , Sarah Hattie Maitland

UNCONSCIOUS STATES: A NOVEL , Rachel May

Life vs. Unlife: Interspecies Solidarity and Companionism in Contemporary American Literature , Barnaby McLaughlin

TOWARD A PSYCHOSOCIAL UNDERSTANDING OF SUICIDE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF THE 1990’S , Sara E. Murphy

THE SENTINELLE AFFAIR: A STUDY IN MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES , Jason Peters

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Firefighters’ Multimodal Literacy Practices , Timothy R. Amidon

ARGUMENT, RHETORIC, AND TRANSCENDENCE: “THE ADHERENCE OF MINDS” WITHIN THE DISCOURSE OF SPIRITUALITY , Gavin Forrest Hurley

OPTING-IN ONLINE: PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC FORUM COMMUNITIES , Jennifer C. Lee

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

LIGHTNING-ROD MEN, MAGNETIC LIVES, BODIES ELECTRIC: ELECTROMAGNETIC CORPOREALITY IN EMERSON, MELVILLE, & WHITMAN , James Patrick Gorham

Women's Historiography in Late Medieval European Literature: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan , Eva M. Jones

SAVING PRINCE PEACH: A STUDY OF “GAYMERS” AND DIGITAL LGBT/GAMING RHETORICS , M. William MacKnight

Affective Reconfigurations: A New Politics of Difference , Laurie Rodrigues

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Manifestoes: A Study in Genre , Stevens Russell Amidon

Making the Grade: Academic Literacies and First-Generation College Students in a Highly Selective Liberal Arts College , Theresa Perri Ammirati

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

The Colors and Shadows of My Word(s) , Lydia A. Saravia

Theses/Dissertations from 1999 1999

Toni Morrison: Rethinking the Past in a Postcolonial Context , Hanan Abdullatif

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

(Re)Envisioned (Pre)History: Feminism, Goddess Politics, and Readership Analysis of The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses , Glenna M. Andrade

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Indicated Silences in American Novels , Catherine Adamowicz

Cynics, Spaces, and Subjects: Toward a Tactical Ethics of Rhetoric , Kristen Francis Kennedy

Theses/Dissertations from 1995 1995

Our Beloved Lizzie; Constructing an American Legend , Gabriela Schalow Adler

My Cambodian Son: Another Race: Another Culture , Patricia Russell

Theses/Dissertations from 1994 1994

An NEH Fellowship Examined: Social Networks and Composition History , Stephanie A. Almagno

The "Fine Line" of Otto Rank , Philip J. Hecht

Theses/Dissertations from 1993 1993

REWRITING THE BODY POLITIC: THE ART OF ILLNESS AND THE PRODUCTION OF DESIRE IN THE DIARIES AND JOURNALS OF ALICE JAMES AND ACHSA SPRAGUE , Susan Grant

Theses/Dissertations from 1992 1992

*Baby Shoe Tattoo*: A Film Script and Critical Preface , Anthony R. Amore Jr.

Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft , James A. Anderson

Lilacs in November , Marjorie L. Briody

The Jeovah Imperative: Images of Incest and Blood Sacrifice in Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" and Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" , Penelope Hope Goff

Theses/Dissertations from 1988 1988

Sub-Versions of History in Three Twentieth-Century Novels , Gabriella Schalow Adler

Joyce and the Dialogical: Literary Carnivalization in Ulysses , Stephanie A. Almagno

Home Before Morning: A Teleplay , Susan E. Apshaga

"Dear Uncle George" Ezra Pound's Letters to Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts , Philip J. Burns

Theses/Dissertations from 1984 1984

Style in Children's Literature: A Comparison of Passages from Books for Adults and for Children , Celia Catlett Anderson

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Department of English

thesis english literature

Recent Theses and Dissertations

Recent ph.d. dissertations.

  • Graham Barnhart, In The Field Well Past the Golden Hour
  • Madison Garber, A Dance in Memory: A Novel
  • Colleen Mayo, The Traitor, Julia Kind and Stories
  • Christa Reaves, Metamorphoses in Adaptation: Ovid, Shakespeare, and Modern Theatre
  • Joshua Zimmerer, Set Fire to the Rodeo: A Novel
  • Mohammed Alhamili, The Emergence of Arab Nation-State Nationalism as an Alternative to the Supranational Concept of Ummah
  • Anthony Buenning, Shakespeare and Early Modern Trauma
  • Jay Gentry, The World We Want to Leave Behind: White Supremacy in the Apocalyptic Genres Past, Present, and Future
  • Jonathan Duckworth, The Sometime Joy
  • Maricruz Gomez, Chicana Decolonial Feminism: An Interconnectedness of Being
  • Cassia Hameline, Stay for the Heron: Essays
  • Kat Moore, Have You Ever Had a Broken Heart?
  • Aza Pace, Her Terrible Splendor
  • Travis Scott Ray, Stories and "Burning Man"
  • Megan Arlett, Louisiana Saturday Nights
  • Anum Aziz, Mapping the Feminist Movement in Pakistani Literature: Towards a Feminist Future
  • Joshua Jones, Somehow Holier
  • Minadora Macheret, Dear Bone Mother
  • Takuya Matsuda, This Man is Your Friend: Knowing "Us" and "Them" in Ethnic American Literature of the Pacific Theater
  • Lauren Rogener, Cultures of Elite Theatre in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Masque: Four Incarnations
  • Andrew Smith, The Construction of the Fringe Extraterrestrial of Postmodernity
  • Carly Susser, Molt
  • Kevin West, Portal
  • Brett Armes, The Ends of Smaller Worlds
  • Rebecca Bernard, In the Way of Family
  • Natalie Clark, Defining and Teaching Courtliness with Animals and Clothing in the Lais of Marie de France
  • Brian Clifton, Wrong Feast
  • Andrew Koch, Some Names for Empty Space
  • Shannon Sawyer, True War Stories: Lies, Truth, and Recovery in the Non/Fiction of Vietnam
  • Katherine Schneider, Body Doubles: Materiality and Gender Non-Binarism in Victorian Supernatural Fiction
  • Stephanie Vastine, Queerness, Futurity, and Desire in American Literature: Improvising Identity in the Shadow of Empire
  • Aurelia von Tress, Revolutionaries and Prophets: Post-Oppositionality in Kathleen Alcalá's Sonoran Desert Trilogy
  • Sarah Warren, Oklahoma History
  • Ruby Al-Qasem, Resurrection Attempts: Essays
  • Stevie Edwards, Still House
  • Sanderia Faye, Eleven
  • Natalie Foster, Winter
  • Allyson Jones, Just Ask: A Memoir of My Father
  • Matthew Morton, Improvisation without Accompaniment and What Passes Here for Mountains
  • Sebastian Paramo, Where We Split
  • James Redmond, Because You Previously Liked or Played
  • Iqra Shagufta, Postmodernity and Pakistani Postmodern Literature
  • Daniel Stuart, Stalking Dickens: Predatory Disturbances in the Novels of Charles Dickens
  • Virginia Wood, Tigers Born in the Same Year
  • Conor Burke, Given That the Body Was Made
  • Justin Carter, Brazos
  • Cheri Paris Edwards, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine:Voices from the Other Side of the Color Line
  • Kimberly Garza, The Last Karankawas: Stories
  • Meghan Taylor Johnson, Poor Things: Objects, Ownership, and the Underclasses in American Literature, 1868-1935
  • Ross Wilcox, Union: A Novel
  • Spencer Hyde, Let It Run
  • Nick Lu, Constructing Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature and National Identity
  • Jessica Murray, Notes for the Manual Assembly
  • Clint Peters, The Divine Coming of the Light
  • Jeff Pickell, Jeff Pickell: New and Selected
  • Timothy Regetz, Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430
  • Charlie Ricciardelli, The Hoboken War Bride: A Novel
  • Brian Tatum, Rearranging an Infinite Universe: Literary Misprision and Manipulations of Space and Time, 1750-1850
  • Heidi Cephus, Corporeal Judgment in Sheakpeare's Plays
  • Trista Edwards, Spectral Evidence
  • Anthony Cole Jeffrey, The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty in Early Modern English Literature
  • Tana Juko, Misrecognized and Misplaced: Race Performed in African American Literature, 1900-2015
  • Darcy Lewis, Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship
  • Nick McRae, Inscrutable House
  • Amber Pagel, "How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?": Cognitive Poetics and the Poetry of William Butler Yeats
  • Timothy Ponce, The Hybrid Hero of Early Modern English Literature: A Synthesis of Classical and Contemplative Heroism
  • Karl Zuehlke, Momentarium

Recent MA Theses

  • Xaviera Hernandez, Mexican Goodbye
  • Caleb Kunasek, The Colonial Subject in the Early British Novel: Revisiting Colonial Captivity in Robinson Crusoe
  • John Brandt, "Before This Memory Makes Sense": Essays
  • Joel Najera, Beyond the Hold: The Evolution of the Ship in African American Literature
  • Andrea Perez, Death Date
  • Sara Ulery, Rein of Renegades
  • Kaitlyn Brown, Exploitation, Justification and Overcoming through Voice: Exploring American Slavery and the Slave Narrative in "The Handmaid's Tale"
  • Cade Mason, "Engine Running": Essays
  • Martin Ramirez, "The Sandbox" and Other Short Stories
  • Olivia Trotter, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: How Society of Spectacle Bred the Mockingjay
  • Conor Flannery, Collected Stories
  • Zachary Kusch, A Century of Ash
  • Garrett Vesely, Mortal Ghosts
  • Laura Allen, Driving Lessons and Other Stories
  • WIlliam Ross Irvin, Life Holders
  • Hunter Jernigan, Running from My Youth: Essays
  • Benjamin Smith, "A Very Fine Piece of Writing": Parnell and the Joycean Text, 1905-1922
  • Morgan Inigo Smith, Flotsam: Men in Isolation
  • Leah Tieger, Animals Alive and Dead
  • Jaya Wagle, Homeland/Split
  • Jessica Beattie, Second Life, Second Chance
  • Caleb Braun, Developer
  • Lauren Pilcher, "A Kind of Ghost"
  • Sarah Ridley , That Every Christian May be Suited: Isaac Watts's Hymns in the Writings of Early Mohegan Writers, Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson
  • Cary Siegfried, "Failure to Yield": Essays
  • Amanda Yanowski , Off Main Street: Stories

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Brown University Theses and Dissertations

Brown University Library archives dissertations in accordance with the Brown Graduate School policy .

For dissertations published prior to 2008, please consult the following Dissertation LibGuide

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Items (1-20) out of 149 results

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"An Interesting Planet": The Ecotheology of Marilynne Robinson's Fiction

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"Cheap plywood and glue": American Theatrical Enclosure at the End of the Frontier

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  • Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2021
  • Concentration: English

'The Feel of Not to Feel It': British Romanticism, Melancholic Historiography, and the Degree Zero of Emotion

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'Unhackneyed Solitudes': Recycled Fragment as Lyric Voice in the Poetry of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath

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A Complicated Faith

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  • Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2020
  • Concentration: English Nonfiction Writing

A Lily on Display: Compromised Privacy in The House of Mirth

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A New Normal: Family Stories of Mental Illness, Resilience, and Recovery

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Aesthetics in Place: Commercial Rhetoric and Local Identity in the British Atlantic, 1720-1820

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Affecting Labors: The Novel and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Production

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American Corps: Who Is One of Us?

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American Literature and the Religion of the Disinherited: Antisecularism and Modern Fiction

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An Education on Wandering

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Authentic Modernism: Ekphrasis and Objecthood in British and American Literature of the Early Twentieth Century

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Autobiography's Queer Forms: Modernist Self-Writing from Auden to H.D.

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Automatically Popular: Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-century British Fiction

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Bad Style: Feminism and the Ethics of Reading in 20th and 21st century Global Anglophone Literature

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Between Law and Justice: Legal Authority, Liberal Democracy, and Postwar Fiction

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Biopolitics, Professional Subjectivity, and Postcolonial Anglophone Literary Studies: Ishiguro, Coetzee, Ondaatje

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Bodies Unbound: Race, Gender, and Embodied Identity Politics in Recent Ethnic American Fiction

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Boundaryland

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Oxford theses

The Bodleian Libraries’ thesis collection holds every DPhil thesis deposited at the University of Oxford since the degree began in its present form in 1917. Our oldest theses date from the early 1920s. We also have substantial holdings of MLitt theses, for which deposit became compulsory in 1953, and MPhil theses.

Since 2007 it has been a mandatory requirement for students to deposit an electronic copy of their DPhil thesis in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) , in addition to the deposit of a paper copy – the copy of record. Since the COVID pandemic, the requirement of a paper copy has been removed and the ORA copy has become the copy of record. Hardcopy theses are now only deposited under exceptional circumstances. 

ORA provides full-text PDF copies of most recent DPhil theses, and some earlier BLitt/MLitt theses. Find out more about Oxford Digital Theses, and depositing with ORA .

Finding Oxford theses

The following theses are catalogued on SOLO (the University libraries’ resource discovery tool) :

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If you are searching using the shelfmark, please make sure you include the dots in your search (e.g. D.Phil.). Records will not be returned if they are left out.

Oxford University Research Archive (ORA)

ORA was established in 2007 as a permanent and secure online archive of research produced by members of the University of Oxford. It is now mandatory for students completing a research degree at the University to deposit an electronic copy of their thesis in this archive. 

Authors can select immediate release on ORA, or apply a 1-year or 3-year embargo period. The embargo period would enable them to publish all or part of their research elsewhere if they wish. 

Theses held in ORA are searchable via  SOLO , as well as external services such as EThOS and Google Scholar. For more information, visit the Oxford digital theses guide , and see below for guidance on searching in ORA.

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Type your keywords (title, name) into the main search box, and use quotes (“) to search for an exact phrase.

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  • file availability (whether a full text is available to download or not)

You can also increase the number of search results shown per page, and sort by relevance, date and file availability. You can select and export records to csv or email. 

Select hyperlinked text within the record details, such as “More by this author”, to run a secondary search on an author’s name. You can also select a hyperlinked keyword or subject. 

Other catalogues

Card catalogue  .

The Rare Books department of the Weston Library keeps an author card index of Oxford theses. This includes all non-scientific theses deposited between 1922 and 2016. Please ask Weston Library staff for assistance.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

You can use ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global  to find bibliographic details of Oxford theses not listed on SOLO. Ask staff in the Weston Library’s Charles Wendall David Reading Room for help finding these theses. 

Search for Oxford theses on ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global

Basic search.

The default Basic search page allows for general keyword searches across all indexes using "and", "and not", "and or" to link the keywords as appropriate. Click on the More Search Options tab for specific title, author, subject and institution (school) searches, and to browse indexes of authors, institutions and subjects. These indexes allow you to add the word or phrase recognised by the database to your search (ie University of Oxford (United Kingdom), not Oxford University).

Advanced search

The Advanced search tab (at the top of the page) enables keyword searching in specific indexes, including author, title, institution, department, adviser and language. If you are unsure of the exact details of thesis, you can use the search boxes on this page to find it by combining the key information you do have.

Search tools

In both the Basic and Advanced search pages you can also limit the search by date by using the boxes at the bottom. Use the Search Tools advice in both the Basic and Advanced pages to undertake more complex and specific searches. Within the list of results, once you have found the record that you are interested in, you can click on the link to obtain a full citation and abstract. You can use the back button on your browser to return to your list of citations.

The Browse search tab allows you to search by subject or by location (ie institution). These are given in an alphabetical list. You can click on a top-level subject to show subdivisions of the subject. You can click on a country location to show lists of institutions in that country. At each level, you can click on View Documents to show lists of individual theses for that subject division or from that location.

In Browse search, locations and subject divisions are automatically added to a basic search at the bottom of the page. You can search within a subject or location by title, author, institution, subject, date etc, by clicking on Refine Search at the top of the page or More Search Options at the bottom of the page.

Where are physical Oxford theses held?

The Bodleian Libraries hold all doctoral theses and most postgraduate (non-doctoral) theses for which a deposit requirement is stipulated by the University:

  • DPhil (doctoral) theses (1922 – 2021)
  • Bachelor of Divinity (BD) theses
  • BLitt/MLitt theses (Michaelmas Term 1953 – 2021)
  • BPhil and MPhil theses (Michaelmas Term 1977 – 2021)

Most Oxford theses are held in Bodleian Offsite Storage. Some theses are available in the libraries; these are listed below.

Law Library

Theses submitted to the Faculty of Law are held at the Bodleian Law Library .

Vere Harmsworth Library

Theses on the United States are held at the Vere Harmsworth Library .

Social Science Library

The Social Science Library holds dissertations and theses selected by the departments it supports. 

The list of departments and further information are available in the Dissertations and Theses section of the SSL webpages. 

Locations for Anthropology and Archaeology theses

The Balfour Library holds theses for the MPhil in Material and Visual Anthropology and some older theses in Prehistoric Archaeology.

The Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library holds theses for MPhil in Classical Archaeology and MPhil in European Archaeology.

Ordering Oxford theses

Theses held in Bodleian Offsite Storage are consulted in the Weston Library. The preferred location is the Charles Wendell David Reading Room ; they can also be ordered to the Sir Charles Mackerras Reading Room .

Find out more about requesting a digitised copy, copyright restrictions and copying from Oxford theses .

Home > FACULTIES > English > ENGLISH-ETD

English Department

English Theses and Dissertations

This collection contains theses and dissertations from the Department of English, collected from the Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Listening to "Silence": Alternative Modes of Communication in Korean and Korean American Women's Literature , Judy Joo-Ae Bae

Preternatural Laughter: Rhetorics of Animality in the Literature of Insanity, 1798-1882 , Melanie Byron

The Ecology of American Noir , Katrina Younes

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Poetics in Transit: Indigenous, Diasporic, and Settler Women’s Contemporary Writing in Canada , Christine Campana

Bodies of Silence and Space: Victimhood, Complicity, and Resistance in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale , Sana H. Mufti

Capacious Feminism: Intimacy and Otherness in Mina Loy's Poetry , Elise Ottavino

Romantic Citation and the Receding Future , Andrew Sargent

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Love-Worlds: Performance of Love as Decolonial Worldmaking in India and in Indigenous Theatre on Northern Turtle Island , Sheetala Bhat

Diaspora and Abjection of a Nowhere in Particular: Theorizing the Hyphen in Iranian-Canadian Narratives , Mahdiyeh Ezzatikarami

Nostalgic Metafiction: The Adventure Fiction of Stevenson, Kipling, and Conrad , Hanji Lee

Men under Microscopes: “Medical Gaze” and Homeostasis in Victorian Realist Literature , Nida Rashid

The Time Helix: Nonlinear Narrative Structures and the Paradox of Delayed Simultaneity , Jaclyn A. Reed

Representing Women and the 1947 Partition in Hindi Cinema and Television (1948-Present) , Nidhi Shrivastava

Buried Feelings, Standing Stones: Secularity, Animism, and Late-Victorian Pagan Revivalism , Jeff Swim

Speaking Chastity: Female Speech, Silence, and the Strategic Performance of Chaste Identity in Early Modern Drama and Women's Writing , Lisa Templin

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Unsettling Sympathy: Indigenous and Settler Conversations from the Great Lakes Region, 1820-1860 , Erin Akerman

Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 , Madison A. Bettle

Artificial Frontiers, Simulated Indigeneity: Western Big-Budget Open World Games and the Settler Colonial Imaginary , Adam Bowes

Bible Translations And Literary Responses: Re-reading Missionary Interventions In Africa Through Local Perspectives , Chinelo Ezenwa

Capital Distress: Productive Citizenship and Mental Health in Adolescent Literature , Jeremy TL Johnston

Refusing Interpretation: Waste Ecologies in Victorian Fiction and Prose , Nahmi Lee

Resonances: An Examination of Republication Through Four Case Studies , F S. Nakhaie

“The seal set on our nationhood”: Canadian Literary Responses to the South African War (1899-1902) , Alicia C. Robinet

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, and Death in Video Games , Meghan Blythe Adams

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness in Twentieth-Century North American Literature and Film , Sarah Blanchette

Duration and Depravity: Religious and Secular Temporality in Puritanism and the American Gothic , Taylor Kraayenbrink

Sacred Mnemonics in Late Medieval England: ars memoria in the Hagiography of Osbern Bokenham , Erica C. Leighton

Malory, Chivalric Medievalism, and New Imperialist Masculinity , Andrew LiVecchi

Land, Water, and Stars: Relationality in Anishinaabe and Diasporic Literature , Maral Moradipour

Atmosphere and Religious Experience in American Transcendentalism , Thomas Sorensen

Material Witness: Occult Affects in the Mystery Fiction of the Fin de Siècle , Thomas Matthew Stuart

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Semantic Shift in Old English and Old Saxon Identity Terms , David A. Carlton

Financial Frictions: Money and Materiality in American Literary Naturalism, 1890-1925 , Patricia Luedecke

Criminal Masculinities and the Newgate Novel , Taylor R. Richardson

Everywhere, Animals Appear: Species, Race, and the State in Literature from the Raj to Global India , Jason Sandhar

Antichrist in the Shadows: Biblical Allusion in Richard III and Macbeth , Curtis J. Simpson

Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry , Jonathan Stillman

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Agnotologies of Modernism: Knowing the Unknown in Lewis, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce , Jeremy Colangelo

Species Panic: Interspecies Erotics in Post-1900 American Literature , David Huebert

Unread: The (Un)published Texts of Romanticism , Marc D. Mazur

Narrative Immunities: The Logic of Infection and Defense in American Speculative Fiction , Riley R. McDonald

Buddhism in Progress: Ecstasy, Eternity, and Zen Sickness in the English Romantics , Logan M. Rohde

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Romantic Metasubjectivity: Rethinking the Romantic Subject Through Schelling and Jung , Gord Barentsen

The Hermetic Enigma of a Protean Poet: Gnosis and the Puritanical Error in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis , Luke Jennings

Literary Language Revitalization: nêhiyawêwin, Indigenous Poetics, and Indigenous Languages in Canada , Emily L. Kring

The Unknown Soldier in the 21st Century: War Commemoration in Contemporary Canadian Cultural Production , Andrew Edward Lubowitz

Islam's Low Mutterings at High Tide: Enslaved African Muslims in American Literature , Zeinab McHeimech

Appearing Live: Spectatorship, Affect, and Liveness in Contemporary British Performance , Meghan O'Hara

Spaces of Collapse: Psychological Deterioration, Subjectivity, and Spatiality in American Narratives , Andrew Papaspyrou

No Delicate Flower: Victorian Floral Symbolism’s Mediation of Social Issues in Selected Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and Isabella Bird Bishop , Christine Penhale

Waiting for God: John Milton’s Millenarianism Reconsidered , Rainerio George Ramos

Terrorism, Islamization, and Human Rights: How Post 9/11 Pakistani English Literature Speaks to the World , Shazia Sadaf

Crossing the Line: Censorship, Borders, and the Queer Poetics of Disclosure in English-Canadian Writing, 1967-2000 , Kevin T. Shaw

Imagining the Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, and Peripheral Communities in the Contemporary Urban Situation , Colton R. Sherman

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Rhetorical Ductus in Chaucerian Ekphrasis , Emily Laura Pez

"The Sense of An Ending": The Destabilizing Effect of Performance Closure in Shakespeare's Plays , Megan Lynn Selinger

Of the Last Verses in the Book: Old Age, Caregiving, and Early Modern Literature , Emily M. Sugerman

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Reading the Canadian Battlefield at Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, and Vimy , Rebecca Campbell

Turning to Food: Religious Contact and Conversion in Early Modern Drama , Fatima F. Ebrahim

Reading Boredom in Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti , Rebekah Ann Lamb

Creating Difference: The Legal Production of Race in American Slavery , Shaun N. Ramdin

About Telling: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Drama and Poetry , Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

The Aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism , Derek Shank

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

The Luminous Detail: The Evolution of Ezra Pound's Linguistic and Aesthetic Theories from 1910-1915 , John J. Allaster

"Rank Corpuscles": Soil and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Representations , Nina Patricia Budabin McQuown

The Romantic Posthuman and Posthumanities , Elizabeth Effinger

Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker and Canadian Short Story Writers , Nadine Fladd

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books , Frederick D. King

Graphic Drama: Reading Shakespeare in the Comics Medium , Russell H. McConnell

Diffuse Connections: Making Sense of Smell in Canadian Diasporic Women's Writing , Stephanie Oliver

“Companions of the Flame”: Concealment and Revelation in H.D.’s Trilogy , Cam Riddell

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects in American Poetry , Michael D. Sloane

EECOLOGY: (pata)physical taoism in e. e. cummings’s poetry , Nathan B. TeBokkel

Fatal Attraction: The Fetishized Image of the Fatal Woman as Gothic Double , Margaret Anne Young

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian and Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives , Michelle Coupal

Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy and Postwar American Poetry , Timothy A. DeJong

After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age , David S. Hickey

Dark Sympathy: Desiring the Other in Godwin, Coleridge, and Shelley , Jeffrey T. King

Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud , Pascale M. Manning

Uncommon Ecology: Reading the Romantic Oikos , Shalon Noble

"Radiant Imperfection": The Interconnected Writing Lives of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky , Kostantina Northrup

Preposterous America: The Language of Inversion in Thoreau, Melville, and Hawthorne , Rasmus R. Simonsen

Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer and Cognitive Transformation in British and Irish Modernism , Andrew C. Wenaus

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley , Jeffrey W. Miles

Architectures of the Veil: The Representation of the Veil and Zenanas in Pakistani Feminists' Texts , Amber Fatima Riaz

Miscegenation in the Marvelous: Race and Hybridity in the Fantasy Novels of Neil Gaiman and China Miéville , Nikolai Rodrigues

Broken Passages and Broken Promises: Reconstructing the Komagata Maru and Air India Cases , Alia Rehana Somani

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction , Thomas J. Barnes

Biological Inheritance and the Social Order in Late-Victorian Fiction and Science , Sherrin Berezowsky

Life Among the Machines: James Joyce's Ulysses and Early Twentieth-Century Technology , Patrick Casey

Social Money: Literary Engagements with Economics in Early Modern English Drama , Myungjin Choi

States of Insurgency: Dismemberment and Citizenship in the American 1848 , David J. Drysdale

Re-forging the smith: an interdisciplinary study of smithing motifs in Völuspá and Völundarkviða , Leif Einarson

Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching: The Ethics of Touch in Victorian Literature (1860-1900) , Ann M.C. Gagne

Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug in Modernism , Philip Glennie

Corporeal Returns: Theatrical Embodiment and Spectator Response in Early Modern Drama , Caroline R. Lamb

Seeking the Self in Pigment and Pixels: Postmodernism, Art, and the Subject , Selma Purac

Total Men!: Literature, Nationalism, and Mascuilinity in Early Canada , Aaron J. Schneider

Alternative Be/longing: Modernity and Material Culture in Bengali Cinema, 1947-1975 , Suvadip Sinha

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Graphomania: Composing Subjects in Late-Victorian Gothic Fiction and Technology , Gregory D. Brophy

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  • Literary Terms
  • Definition & Examples
  • When & How to Write a Thesis

I. What is a Thesis?

The thesis (pronounced thee -seez), also known as a thesis statement, is the sentence that introduces the main argument or point of view of a composition (formal essay, nonfiction piece, or narrative). It is the main claim that the author is making about that topic and serves to summarize and introduce that writing that will be discussed throughout the entire piece. For this reason, the thesis is typically found within the first introduction paragraph.

II. Examples of Theses

Here are a few examples of theses which may be found in the introductions of a variety of essays :

In “The Mending Wall,” Robert Frost uses imagery, metaphor, and dialogue to argue against the use of fences between neighbors.

In this example, the thesis introduces the main subject (Frost’s poem “The Mending Wall”), aspects of the subject which will be examined (imagery, metaphor, and dialogue) and the writer’s argument (fences should not be used).

While Facebook connects some, overall, the social networking site is negative in that it isolates users, causes jealousy, and becomes an addiction.

This thesis introduces an argumentative essay which argues against the use of Facebook due to three of its negative effects.

During the college application process, I discovered my willingness to work hard to achieve my dreams and just what those dreams were.

In this more personal example, the thesis statement introduces a narrative essay which will focus on personal development in realizing one’s goals and how to achieve them.

III. The Importance of Using a Thesis

Theses are absolutely necessary components in essays because they introduce what an essay will be about. Without a thesis, the essay lacks clear organization and direction. Theses allow writers to organize their ideas by clearly stating them, and they allow readers to be aware from the beginning of a composition’s subject, argument, and course. Thesis statements must precisely express an argument within the introductory paragraph of the piece in order to guide the reader from the very beginning.

IV. Examples of Theses in Literature

For examples of theses in literature, consider these thesis statements from essays about topics in literature:

In William Shakespeare’s “ Sonnet 46,” both physicality and emotion together form powerful romantic love.

This thesis statement clearly states the work and its author as well as the main argument: physicality and emotion create romantic love.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne symbolically shows Hester Prynne’s developing identity through the use of the letter A: she moves from adulteress to able community member to angel.

In this example, the work and author are introduced as well as the main argument and supporting points: Prynne’s identity is shown through the letter A in three ways: adulteress, able community member, and angel.

John Keats’ poem “To Autumn” utilizes rhythm, rhyme, and imagery to examine autumn’s simultaneous birth and decay.

This thesis statement introduces the poem and its author along with an argument about the nature of autumn. This argument will be supported by an examination of rhythm, rhyme, and imagery.

V. Examples of Theses in Pop Culture

Sometimes, pop culture attempts to make arguments similar to those of research papers and essays. Here are a few examples of theses in pop culture:

FOOD INC TEASER TRAILER - "More than a terrific movie -- it's an important movie." - Ent Weekly

America’s food industry is making a killing and it’s making us sick, but you have the power to turn the tables.

The documentary Food Inc. examines this thesis with evidence throughout the film including video evidence, interviews with experts, and scientific research.

Blackfish Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Documentary Movie HD

Orca whales should not be kept in captivity, as it is psychologically traumatizing and has caused them to kill their own trainers.

Blackfish uses footage, interviews, and history to argue for the thesis that orca whales should not be held in captivity.

VI. Related Terms

Just as a thesis is introduced in the beginning of a composition, the hypothesis is considered a starting point as well. Whereas a thesis introduces the main point of an essay, the hypothesis introduces a proposed explanation which is being investigated through scientific or mathematical research. Thesis statements present arguments based on evidence which is presented throughout the paper, whereas hypotheses are being tested by scientists and mathematicians who may disprove or prove them through experimentation. Here is an example of a hypothesis versus a thesis:

Hypothesis:

Students skip school more often as summer vacation approaches.

This hypothesis could be tested by examining attendance records and interviewing students. It may or may not be true.

Students skip school due to sickness, boredom with classes, and the urge to rebel.

This thesis presents an argument which will be examined and supported in the paper with detailed evidence and research.

Introduction

A paper’s introduction is its first paragraph which is used to introduce the paper’s main aim and points used to support that aim throughout the paper. The thesis statement is the most important part of the introduction which states all of this information in one concise statement. Typically, introduction paragraphs require a thesis statement which ties together the entire introduction and introduces the rest of the paper.

VII. Conclusion

Theses are necessary components of well-organized and convincing essays, nonfiction pieces, narratives , and documentaries. They allow writers to organize and support arguments to be developed throughout a composition, and they allow readers to understand from the beginning what the aim of the composition is.

List of Terms

  • Alliteration
  • Amplification
  • Anachronism
  • Anthropomorphism
  • Antonomasia
  • APA Citation
  • Aposiopesis
  • Autobiography
  • Bildungsroman
  • Characterization
  • Circumlocution
  • Cliffhanger
  • Comic Relief
  • Connotation
  • Deus ex machina
  • Deuteragonist
  • Doppelganger
  • Double Entendre
  • Dramatic irony
  • Equivocation
  • Extended Metaphor
  • Figures of Speech
  • Flash-forward
  • Foreshadowing
  • Intertextuality
  • Juxtaposition
  • Literary Device
  • Malapropism
  • Onomatopoeia
  • Parallelism
  • Pathetic Fallacy
  • Personification
  • Point of View
  • Polysyndeton
  • Protagonist
  • Red Herring
  • Rhetorical Device
  • Rhetorical Question
  • Science Fiction
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
  • Synesthesia
  • Turning Point
  • Understatement
  • Urban Legend
  • Verisimilitude
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Department of English

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Graduate Thesis Examples

The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. View our more recent titles below.

Our Recent Titles:

  • “The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in  Sula  and  Recitatif ” (2024 Anyabwile)
  • “The Great (Genre) Escape” (2024 Perrin)
  • “Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Cranford ” (2024 Perry)
  • “‘Don’t Question the Experts’: Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice” (2024 Thompson)
  • “Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins’s  The Hunger Games  Trilogy and Prequel  The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ” (2024 Wooten)
  • “Parts of the Story: An Illustrated Short Story Collection” (2023 Beal)
  • “‘What lady wouldn’t wish to join causes with women who stood up for other women?’: Heroines’ Rivalries and Friendships in Popular Romance Novels” (2023 Bradford)
  • “Breaking Away: Some Essays on Influence” (2023 Ferrer)
  • “Posting to Engage: A Study of the Effects of Recovery-Oriented Rhetoric on Community Building for Individuals with Eating Disorders and Associated Symptoms on Instagram” (2023 Horton)
  • “Being Born: A Memoir of Self-Making in Four Parts” (2023 Langford)
  • “‘Widen the Lens and See’: Poetry, Photography, and the Act of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (2023 Marlow)
  • “Engaging Secondary Students Through Secondary Worlds: An Approach to Teaching Tolkien at the High School Level” (2022 Casey)
  • “The Religious and the Secular Mythology in  Idylls of the King ” (2022 Kirkendall)
  • “‘…A Hideous Monster’: Social Repression and Rebellion in Gregory Corso’s ‘The American Way’” (2022 LeBey)
  • “Individualism, Materialism, and Sacrifice in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’” (2022 Nalbandian)
  • “Burying the Carnival” (2022 Overdurf)
  • “Attending to Time in Narratives of Enslavement: Temporal Alterities and Lived Experiences of Time in Toni Morrison’s  Beloved ” (2021 Bischoff)
  • “‘Beasts who walk alone’: Narrating Queer Abjection in Djuna Barnes’s  Nightwood  and Jordy Rosenberg’s  Confessions of the Fox ” (2021 McGuirk)
  • “Reach Out and Touch Faith: Haptic Reciprocity in Milton’s  Paradise Lost ” (2021 Ricks)
  • “Gender Matters: Amante’s Gender Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’” (2021 Willis)
  • “Braddon’s Body of Bigamy: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis” (2021 Waxman)
  • “‘Memory is all that Matters;’ Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process” (2020 Caicedo)
  • “Old Wives’ Tales: Mothers & Daughters, Wives & Witches (Stories)” (2020 Champagne)
  • “‘Numbed and Mortified’: Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in  King Lear  and  Titus Andronicus : (2020 Harrington)
  • “‘More Forms and Stranger’: Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp (2020 Kennedy)
  • “A Discourse and Statistical Approach to Intersections of Gender and Race in Melville’s  Typee ” (2020 Post)
  • “Prophetic Un-speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in  Paradise Lost  and S alve Deus Rex Judaeorum ” (2019 Darrow)
  • “‘The Frame of her Eternal Dream’: From  Thel  to Dreamscapes of Influence” (2019 Gallo)
  • “‘The Murmure and the Cherles Rebellying’: Poetic and Economic Interpretations of the Great Revolt of 1381” (2019 Noell)
  • “Dialogic Convergences of Spatiality, Racial Identity, and the American Cultural Imagination” (2019 Humphrey)
  • “Troubling Vice: Stigma and Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Ambitious Villains” (2019 Simonson)
  • “Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction” (2018 Huggins)
  • “‘Harmonized by the earth’: Land, Landscape, and Place in Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights ” (2018 Bevin)
  • “(Re)membering the Subject: Nomadic Becoming in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature” (2018 Voelkner)
  • “Werewolves: The Outsider on the Inside in Icelandic and French Medieval Literature” (2018 Modugno)
  • “Towards Self-Defined Expressions of Black Anger in Claudia Rankine’s  Citizen  and Percival Everett’s  Erasure ” (2018 Razak)
  • “Echoes Inhabit the Garden: The Music of Poetry and Place in T.S. Eliot” (2018 Goldsmith)
  • “‘Is this what motherhood is?’: Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in Black Women’s Novels, 1953-2011” (2018 Gotfredson)
  • “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in  Moby-Dick ,  The Confidence Man , and  Clarel ” (2018 Marcy)
  • “Speaking of the Body: The Maternal Body, Race, and Language in the Plays of Cherrie Moraga, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner” (2018 King)
  • “Passing as Jewish: The Material Consequences of Race and the Property of Whiteness in Late Twentieth-Century Passing Novels” (2017 Mullis)
  • “Eliot through Tolkien: Estrangement, Verse Drama, and the Christian Path in the Modern Era” (2017 Reynolds)
  • “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Urban Space in Postcolonial British Literature” (2017 Rahmat)
  • “Models of Claim, Resistance, and Activism in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Frances Burney” (2017 Smith)
  • “English Literature’s Father of Authorial Androgyny: The Innovative Perspective of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath” (2017 Ingold)
  •  “’Verbal Hygiene’ on the Radio: An Exploration into Perceptions of Female Voices on Public Radio and How They Reflect Language and Gender Ideologies within American Culture” (2017 Barrett)
  • “Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie’s  Shame  and Bapsi Sidhwa’s  Cracking India”  (2016 Mellon)
  • “Metaformal Trends in Contemporary American Poetry” (2016 Muller)
  • “Power Through Privilege: Surveying Perspectives on the Humanities in Higher Education in the Contemporary American Campus Novel” (2016 Klein)
  • “‘I always cure you when I come’: The Caregiver Figure in the Novels of Jane Austen” (2016 McKenzie)
  • “English Imperial Selfhood and Semiperipheral Witchcraft in  The Faerie Queene, Daemonologie,  and  The Tempest”  (2016 Davis)
  • “With Slabs, Bones, and Poles: De/Constructing Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward’s  Salvage the Bones , Natasha Trethewey’s  Beyond Katrina , and Selah Saterstrom’s  Slab”  (2016 Lang)
  • “The Ghost of That Ineluctable Past”: Trauma and Memory in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy” (2016 Berry)
  • “Breaking Through Walls and Pages: Female Reading and Education in the 18th Century British Novel” (2015 Majewski)
  • “The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy” (2015 Weisse)
  • “Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels” (2015 Porter)
  • “Placing the Body: A Study of Postcolonialism and Environment in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid” (2015 Hutcherson)
  • “Wandering Bodies: The Disruption of Identities in Jamaica Kincaid’s  Lucy  and Edwidge Danticat’s  The Farming of Bones ” (2015 Martin)
  • “Mythogenesis as a Reconfiguration of Space in an ‘Alternate World’: The Legacy of Origin and Diaspora in Experimental Writing” (2015 Pittenger)
  • “Cunning Authors and Bad Readers: Gendered Authorship in ‘Love in Excess’” (2015 Bruening)
  • “‘The Thing Became Real’: New Materialisms and Race in the Fiction of Nella Larsen” (2015 Parkinson)
  • “‘Projections of the Not-Me’: Redemptive Possibilities of the Gothic within Wuthering Heights and Beloved” (2015 Glasser)
  • “Distortions, Collections, and Mobility: South Asian Poets and the Space for Female Subjectivity” (2015 Wilkey)
  • “From Text to Tech: Theorizing Changing Experimental Narrative Structures” (2015 Ortega)
  • “A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut” (2015 Hubbard)

thesis english literature

Recent PhD Dissertations

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See here for a full list of dissertations since 1904 .

thesis english literature

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Literary Criticism

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  • thesis examples

SAMPLE THESIS STATEMENTS

These sample thesis statements are provided as guides, not as required forms or prescriptions.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The thesis may focus on an analysis of one of the elements of fiction, drama, poetry or nonfiction as expressed in the work: character, plot, structure, idea, theme, symbol, style, imagery, tone, etc.

In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty creates a fictional character in Phoenix Jackson whose determination, faith, and cunning illustrate the indomitable human spirit.

Note that the work, author, and character to be analyzed are identified in this thesis statement. The thesis relies on a strong verb (creates). It also identifies the element of fiction that the writer will explore (character) and the characteristics the writer will analyze and discuss (determination, faith, cunning).

Further Examples:

The character of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet serves as a foil to young Juliet, delights us with her warmth and earthy wit, and helps realize the tragic catastrophe.

The works of ecstatic love poets Rumi, Hafiz, and Kabir use symbols such as a lover’s longing and the Tavern of Ruin to illustrate the human soul’s desire to connect with God.

The thesis may focus on illustrating how a work reflects the particular genre’s forms, the characteristics of a philosophy of literature, or the ideas of a particular school of thought.

“The Third and Final Continent” exhibits characteristics recurrent in writings by immigrants: tradition, adaptation, and identity.

Note how the thesis statement classifies the form of the work (writings by immigrants) and identifies the characteristics of that form of writing (tradition, adaptation, and identity) that the essay will discuss.

Further examples:

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame reflects characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd in its minimalist stage setting, its seemingly meaningless dialogue, and its apocalyptic or nihilist vision.

A close look at many details in “The Story of an Hour” reveals how language, institutions, and expected demeanor suppress the natural desires and aspirations of women.

The thesis may draw parallels between some element in the work and real-life situations or subject matter: historical events, the author’s life, medical diagnoses, etc.

In Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case,” Paul exhibits suicidal behavior that a caring adult might have recognized and remedied had that adult had the scientific knowledge we have today.

This thesis suggests that the essay will identify characteristics of suicide that Paul exhibits in the story. The writer will have to research medical and psychology texts to determine the typical characteristics of suicidal behavior and to illustrate how Paul’s behavior mirrors those characteristics.

Through the experience of one man, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, accurately depicts the historical record of slave life in its descriptions of the often brutal and quixotic relationship between master and slave and of the fragmentation of slave families.

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” one can draw parallels between the narrator’s situation and the author’s life experiences as a mother, writer, and feminist.

SAMPLE PATTERNS FOR THESES ON LITERARY WORKS

1. In (title of work), (author) (illustrates, shows) (aspect) (adjective). 

Example: In “Barn Burning,” William Faulkner shows the characters Sardie and Abner Snopes struggling for their identity.

2. In (title of work), (author) uses (one aspect) to (define, strengthen, illustrate) the (element of work).

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses foreshadowing to strengthen the plot.

3. In (title of work), (author) uses (an important part of work) as a unifying device for (one element), (another element), and (another element). The number of elements can vary from one to four.

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses the sea as a unifying device for setting, structure and theme.

4. (Author) develops the character of (character’s name) in (literary work) through what he/she does, what he/she says, what other people say to or about him/her.

Example: Langston Hughes develops the character of Semple in “Ways and Means”…

5. In (title of work), (author) uses (literary device) to (accomplish, develop, illustrate, strengthen) (element of work).

Example: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe uses the symbolism of the stranger, the clock, and the seventh room to develop the theme of death.

6. (Author) (shows, develops, illustrates) the theme of __________ in the (play, poem, story).

Example: Flannery O’Connor illustrates the theme of the effect of the selfishness of the grandmother upon the family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

7. (Author) develops his character(s) in (title of work) through his/her use of language.

Example: John Updike develops his characters in “A & P” through his use of figurative language.

Perimeter College, Georgia State University,  http://depts.gpc.edu/~gpcltc/handouts/communications/literarythesis.pdf

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Addyman, Mary (2016) 'All bundled together in endless confusion’ : museums, collecting and material practices in late Victorian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Adjei, Cassie (2015) Duality, genre and the "Modern Mulatto" : bresponse and representation in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Alhathlool, Khalid (2013) "Attachment to the soil and aspiration toward departure" : tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation & identity in Amin Maalouf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Angelov, Dimitar (2008) Language, selfhood and otherness in the works of D. H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Akel, Regina (2007) The journals of Maria Graham (1785-1842). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ashby, Kevin John (1998) Disciplines of the king : Arthurianism, historiography, poetics and surveillance in Tennyson's Idylls of the king (1859). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Attridge, Steve (1993) The soldier in late Victorian society : images and ambiguities. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Andermahr, Sonya (1993) Difference, identification and desire : contemporary lesbian genre fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Armitt, Lucie (1992) Pushing back the limits: the fantastic as transgression in contemporary women's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Al-Issa, Ahmad (1989) Polyphony and the anxiety of influence in the fiction of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Aston, Elaine (1987) Outside the doll's house : a study in images of women in English and French theatre, 1848-1914. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Audette, Florestine (1979) Religious elements in Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bondré, Natasha (2020) Reading ‘Emperor Oil’ in the expanded Caribbean : petroleum, ecology and Caribbean literature in the twentieth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bailey, Thomasin Mary (2020) Authority and influence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bibizadeh, Roxanne Ellen (2019) Freedom and unfreedom in the literature of the Iranian and Arab diaspora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Borg Cardona, Karen (2018) The failed quest in contemporary world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breidenbach, Birgit (2017) Stimmung and modernity: the aesthetic philosophy of mood in Dostoevsky, Beckett and Bernhard. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bhattacharya, Sourit (2017) The crisis of modernity : realism and the postcolonial Indian novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brljak, Vladmir (2015) Allegory and modernity in English literature c. 1575-1675. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bumrungsalee, Intira (2013) Translating culture in films : subtitling in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bahrawi, Nazry (2013) Sacred impulses, sacrilegious worlds : postsecular intimations in Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barnard, Donald Edwin (2012) A critical edition of Derek Walcott's Omeros. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brown, La Tasha Amelia (2011) The diasporic black Caribbean experience : nostalgia, memory and identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bugeja, Norbert (2010) Rethinking the liminal : threshold conciousness in four Mashriqi memoirs. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Beer, Lewis (2010) Fortune and desire in Guillaume de Machaut. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Byatt, Jim (2009) Taboo and transgression : reconfiguring the monstrous in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brigley, Zoë (2007) Exile and ecology: the poetic practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Biswell, Andrew (2002) Conflict and confluence: Anthony Burgess as novelist and journalist. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brock, Claire (2002) The feminization of fame from Rousseau to de Staël. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breen, Peter Thomas (1993) Place and displacement in the works of Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bakshi, Parminder Kaur (1992) Distant desire : the theme of friendship in E.M. Forster's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Becket, Fiona (1992) Metaphor and "metaphysic" : the sense of language in D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barker, Jill (1992) Characterizations of otherness in the sixteenth century moral plays and their morality actecedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bendjeddou, Mohamed Yazid (1985) Two literary responses to American society in the early modern era : a comparison of selected novels by Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair in relation to their portrayal of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the problem of labour, 1900-1929. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Belsey, Catherine (1973) Patterns of conflict in the English morality plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Buckley, Brian R. (1972) Lawrence's novels : themes and precedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Castle, Nora (2022) Food futures : food, foodways, and environmental crisis in contemporary science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cao, Siyu (2020) Performing post-Britishness : a quest for independence in the contemporary literature of England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Champion, Giulia (2020) The empire bites back : literary cannibalism in the extractiono(s)cene. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campion, Louise G. E. (2019) Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the chamber: the language and imagery of domestic space in late medieval religious literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cohut, Maria-Silvia (2018) Before and beyond the glass: women and their mirrors in the literature and art of nineteenth-century Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Choksey, Lara (2017) 'Life itself' in Doris Lessing's space fiction : evolution, epigenetics and culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Charlwood, Catherine (2017) Models of memory : cognition and cultural memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Chen, Chi-Fang (2016) A study of political humour in British literature in the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Collins, Nicholas J. (2015) Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Christie, James, (Researcher in English) (2013) Fredric Jameson and the art of Modernism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cowaloosur, Vedita (2013) "The home and the world" : representations of English and bhashas in contemporary Indian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cornford, Thomas (2012) The English theatre studios of Michael Chekhov and Michel Saint-Denis, 1935-1965. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carta, Giorgia (2012) The other half of the story : the interaction between indigenous and translated literature for children in Italy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cirstea, Arina-Nicoleta (2010) Urban imaginaries : mapping space and self in the writing of Doris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carlin, Gerald (1994) Art and authority : a comparative study of the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Concepción, Díez-Medrano (1993) Women's condition in D.H. Lawrence's shorter fiction : a study of representative narrative processes in selected texts. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campbell, Irene (1992) Frank Swinnerton : the life and works of a bookman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Coe, Jonathan (1986) Satire and sympathy : some consequences of intrusive narration in Tom Jones and other comic novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Curtis, Francis Brett (1979) Shelley and the idea of epic : a study, with particular reference to three pre-1818 narratives. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Clews, David (1972) The Dickens - Thackeray debate. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daroy, Alys (2022) Biophilic Shakespeare : towards an ecology of form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dakkak, Nadeen (2020) “An immense cargo of wanderers seeking their own destruction” : migration to the Arab Gulf states in Arabic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dashwood, Rita J. (2018) Women in residence: Forms of belonging in Jane Austen. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daniel, Robert W. (2018) The manuscript poetry of Thomas St Nicholas and the writing of ‘scripturalism’ in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dean, Dominic (2016) The child and authority in contemporary literature and critical culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Davis, Christopher P. (Researcher in literature) (2016) Reading, writing and understanding the postcolonial. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Degirmencioglu, Nesrin (2013) Uneven cities : the dialectic of urban modernity and literary form in Dos Passos, Tanpınar, Auster and Pamuk. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

DiMeo, Michelle Marie (2009) Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Deckard, Sharae Grace (2007) Exploited Edens: paradise discourse in colonial and postcolonial literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dauncey, Sarah (2003) The uses of silence : a twentieth-century preoccupation in the light of fictional examples, 1900-1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dent, Shirley (2000) Iniquitous symmetries: aestheticism and secularism in the reception of William Blake's works in books and periodicals during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dixon, John Spencer (1991) Representations of the East in English and French travel writing 1798-1882 : with particular reference to Egypt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dusinberre, Juliet (1969) Attitudes to women in Jacobean drama. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Emmett, Christine (2020) Inequality, moralism and legitimacy in South African literature : re-reading apartheid from Millin to Wicomb. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

El-Masry, Heba Fawzy (2017) A comparative study of Arthur John Arberry’s and Desmond O’Grady’s translations of the seven Mu‘allaqāt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Eardley, Alice (2008) An edition of Lady Hester Pulter's Book of 'Emblemes'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Erdogan, Armagan (2002) Encountering the foreign : the educative effect of the foreign in George Eliot's novels of English life. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Efstratiou, Dimitris (2001) Disintegration of essence and subjectivity : the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Earnshaw, Brian (1982) Translations from the German and their reception in Britain, 1760-1800. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Farnsworth, Fiona Emily (2020) Contemporary literary foodways between Sub-Saharan Africa and the USA. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fletcher, Andrew (2019) Shakespeare and the fiction of theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza (2015) Howard Barker's drama of aporias : from a phenomenology of the body to an ontology of the flesh. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fowler, Benjamin Brynmor (2015) (Re)directing the text : politics & perception in the work Katie Mitchell & Thomas Ostermeier. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frank, Lucy Elizabeth (2003) Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fernández de Pinedo, Eva (2002) From the Virgin of Guadalupe to El Santo : new motifs and directions in contemporary Chicano/a writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frith, Gill (1988) The intimacy which is knowledge : female friendship in the novels of women writers. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Funk, Gisela (1988) The sealed room : Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin : a study in the genesis of fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Flower, Celeste (1985) A study of aspects of the 'Romances amorosos' of Luis de Góngora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fairclough, Peter (1976) Humour in the novel 1800-1850 : the moral vision and the autonomous imagination. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gyawali, Amulya (2023) The invention of nature: state-building and environment-making in the extended Himalaya. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gill, Jagvinder (2010) Re-oriented Britain : how British Asian travellers and settlers have utilised and reversed Orientalist discourse 1770-2010. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gott, Henry Michael (2010) Ascetic modernism in Eliot and Flaubert. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Goodman, Gemma (2010) Cornwall : an alternative construction of place. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gunne, Sorcha (2010) ‘A mirror with two sides’ : liminal narratives and spaces of gender violence and communitas in South African writing, 1960–present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Graham, James (James John George) (2006) Writing the land : representations of 'the land' and nationalism in Anglophone literature from South Africa and Zimbabwe 1969-2002. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ganobcsik-Williams, Gruffudd Aled (2001) The sweat of the brain: representations of intellectual labour in the writings of Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gallagher, Ron (1986) Science fiction and language : language and the imagination in post-war science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Greenslade, William (1982) The concept of degeneration, 1880-1910, with particular reference to the work of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and H. G. Wells. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Garnett, George Rhys (1977) The search for the self in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Green, Robert (1977) The novels of Ford Madox Ford. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Heath, Thomas (2022) Actor training in the flow state : towards a rhetoric for play in contemporary actor training. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hugo, Esthie Esmaré (2022) Gothic ecologies : world-literature and commodity frontiers from the plantation to the present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hillion, Marianne (2021) Between the epic and the ordinary : locating the politics of contemporary Indian urban writing in English (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hatfull, Ronan (2018) ‘The other RSC’: the history and legacy of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hudson, Julie Patricia (2017) The environment on stage: scenery or shapeshifter? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Huang, Bo-Yuan (2014) China on the periphery : transitions of Chinese "Orientalism" from Oliver Goldsmith to Thomas De Quincey. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hassen, Rim (2012) English translations of the Quran by women : different or derived? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hentea, Marius (2010) Social reality and narrative form in the fiction of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hartwig, David W. (2010) The place of Shakespeare : performing King Lear and The tempest in an endangered world. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Holroyd, Sophia Jane (2002) Embroidered rhetoric: the social, religious and political functions of elite women's needlework, c.1560-1630. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hampton-Reeves, Stuart (1997) Henry VI in performance : history, culture and Shakespeare reproduced. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hapgood, Lynne (1990) "Circe among cities" : images of London and the languages of social concern, 1880-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Higgins, Ian (1989) The sentiments of a Church-of-England man : a study of Swift's politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Head, Dominic (1989) The modernist short story : theory and practice in five authors. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hadfield, Duncan John (1982) Real and imaginary golf-courses : systems of order in Malcolm Lowry's Under the volcano. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hancock, Ann (1981) The life of Henry Yorke and the writing of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hunter, Shelagh (1981) Transformations of pastoral : studies in the idyllic fiction of Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hermans, Theo (1977) Aspects of the structure of Modernist poetry, 1908-1918 : a structural and comparative study of the poetic writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Georg Heym, T.E. Hulme, Max Jacob, Ezra Pound, Pierre Reverdy, and Georg Trakl. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Intepe, Demet (2020) Environmental justice and writers as activists in multi-ethnic U.S. literatures, film, and theater. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ivanova, Rossitza Pentcheva (2006) Cross-cultural and tribal-centred politics in American Indian studies: assessing a current split in American Indian literary scholarship and re-interpreting Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Inan, Dilek (2000) The city and landscapes beyond Harold Pinter's rooms. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Imoru, Nike M. (1994) A theatre of black women : constructions of black female subjectivity in the dramatic texts of African-American women playwrights in the 1920s and 1970s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ibrahim, Hasnah binti Haji (1992) Oh Babel! : the problems of translating Malay verse into English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Iliopoulos, Spyridon (1985) 'Out of a medium's mouth' : Yeats's art in relation to mediumship, spiritualism and psychical research. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Janssen, Catharina Gertruda Maria (2021) ‘Future scholars, future poets’ : the contemporary reception of Sir William Jones’s translations of oriental literature, 1770-1835. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jackson, Joseph Horgan (2011) Devolving black British theory : race and contemporary Scottish literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, Jonathan D. (2003) Orphans : childhood alienation and the idea of the self in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, David Francis (1987) Swift's use of the literature of travel in the composition of "Gulliver's travels". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khattak, Aiman (2022) The bio-political empire sovereignty, race and war in Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaur, Gurpreet (2017) Beyond the binary : postcolonial ecofeminism in Indian women's writing in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Gohar Karim (2013) Narrating Pakistan transnationally : identity, politics and terrorism in Anglophone Pakistani literature after "9/11". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Paul Chi Hun (2013) The notion of nature in Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of ecotheology. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kritsis, Konstantinos (2013) Exploring theatre translation : the translator of the stage in the case of a Stanislavskian actor. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirwan, Peter (2011) Shakespeare and the idea of apocrypha : negotiating the boundaries of the dramatic canon. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kenward, Claire (2011) 'Memory wrapped round a corpse' : a cultural history of English Hecubas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kurata, Kenichi (2010) Vicissitudes of desire in George Eliot’s fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kahn, Kristian Thomas (2009) The boy figure and male same-sex desire in Britain from Walter Pater to E.M. Forster. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaisary, Philip James (2008) The literary impact of the Haitian Revolution. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kamali, Leila Francesca (2007) Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Rina (2007) Beyond mourning and melancholia : women and Ireland as Beckett's lost others. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kawanami, Ayako (2006) The art of dissembling in three Elizabethan writers: John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Shakespeare. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Komporaly, Jozefina (2001) Configurations of mothering in post-war British women's playwriting. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Key, Jonathan Benjamin (1999) Paranoia and irony in the Anglophone dectective narrative and the novels of Umberto Eco. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kavanagh, Kevin Sean (1997) Raymond Williams and the limits of cultural materialism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kastelein, Barbara (1994) Popular/post-feminism and popular literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Nosheen (1986) Women's poetry of the First World War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirk, Peter Nigel (1983) The voice of authority : Evelyn Waugh's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kerr, Douglas (1978) A comparison of some French and English literary responses to the 1914-1918 War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liu, Li (2023) ‘What do texts want?’: the want and liminality of working-class females in mid-victorian bourgeois paternalistic literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawrence, Andrea Joan (2023) Iberian studies through the lens of combined and uneven development : the world-system in literature, translation and multicultural exchange. PhD thesis, University of Warwick ; Monash University.

Love, Angus (2020) Alain Badiou’s twisted contemporaneity : inaesthetics and the contemporary. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Laug, Katja (2019) Mementoes of the broken body: Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Littau, Karin (2018) Sub-versions of reading. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Loh, Waiyee (2016) Empire of culture : contemporary British and Japanese imaginings of Victorian Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Leonard, Alice (2014) Error in Shakespeare : Shakespeare in error. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lewis, Jennifer (2014) Variations around a theme : the place of Eatonville in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liao, Chia-hui (2011) A critical study of the reception and translation of the poetry of Wang Wei in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ludlow, Elizabeth (2008) 'We can but spell a surface history': the biblical typology of Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawlor, Clark (1993) The classical and the grotesque in the work of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawley, Paul Anthony, Ph.D. (1978) The paradox of self-annihilating expression : representations of ontological instability in the drama of Samuel Beckett. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mukim, Mantra (2022) Lyric failure : Samuel Beckett and poetic form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mak, Wing Haang (2018) Kinaesthetic bodies in contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Martín-Castaño, Mónica (2017) Translating Disney songs from The Little Mermaid (1989) to Tarzan (1999) : an analysis of translation strategies used to dub and subtitle songs into Spanish. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murgia, Claudio (2016) [Beyond] posthuman violence : epic rewritings of ethics in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McGowan, Jack (2016) Slam the book: the role of performance in contemporary UK poetics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Maughan, Christopher J. (2015) Activism Ltd : environmental activism and contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Morrissey, Joseph J. (2013) Gentry women and work and leisure 1770-1820. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mearns, Gabrielle (2012) Appropriate fields of action : nineteenth-century representations of the female philanthropist and the parochial sphere. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Marques dos Santos, Ana Teresa Brisio (2012) Translation, radio and drama during the Estado Novo. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mathieson, Charlotte Eleanor (2010) Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McIntosh, Malachi (2010) "Home" : emigration, identity and modern Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murray, Chris M. (2009) The tragic Coleridge : the philosophy of sacrifice in the life and works. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muzica, Evghenii (2006) 'A place where three roads meet': Sophocles's Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet after Freud. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

MacCartey, Kelli (2004) "different sentiments & different connections supports them" : sensibility, community, and diversity in British women's Romantic-period poetry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Sarah (2003) Death, inheritance and the family : a study of literary responses to inheritance in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Mary Virginia (2003) Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha' : a feminist and deconstructive approach. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muto, Hiroshi (2001) The 'disembodied voice' in fin-de-siècle British literature : its genealogy and significances. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mason, Emma (2000) Religious intellectuals : the poetic gravity of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mounsey, Chris (1992) William Blake's The Four Zoas : a reassessment of its implied metaphysics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Matthews, Julia (1991) Characterization and structure in the development of Tudor comedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Middleton, Tim (1991) The operation of discourse as a motive for critical practice : a Bakhtinian perspective. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (1985) Feminine writing and the problem of the self : an examination of Virginia Woolf's novels in the light of recent critical and psychoanalytic theories. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Munns, Jessica (1980) A critical study of Thomas Otway's plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nichols, K. Madolyn (2014) The women who leave : Irish women writing on emigration. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nardi, Valeria (2012) Translation in advertising : marketing cars in Italy and the UK since the 1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Neculai, Catalina (2008) ‘Some fanatical New York promoting’: literary economies of urban regime transformation in New York City, 1970s-1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Niebrzydowski, Sue (1998) Verry matrymony : representations of the Virgin Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, as wives in medieval England, 1200-1540. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nicholson, John Andrew Lamont (1983) Poetry and action in Byron's development. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Oloff, Kerstin Dagmar (2007) Modernity and the novel in the expanded Caribbean : Wilson Harris, Patrick Chamoiseau and Carlos Fuentes. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Brien, George (1979) Life on the land : the interrelationship between identity and community in the Irish fiction of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton and Charles Lever. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Toole, Bridget (1974) The poet and the city : the city as a theme in English poetry of the nineteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pitt Scott, Harry (2022) Energy futures : finance and petroculture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Phillips, Leah Beth (2016) Myth (un)making : the adolescent female body in mythopoeic YA fantasy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poltrack, Emma (2015) The history and working practices of the Propeller Theatre Company (1997-2011). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Putz, Adam (2010) Shakespeares wake : appropriation and cultural politics in Dublin, 1867-1922. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Piasecki, Bohdan A. (2010) Anthologies of contemporary Polish poetry in English translation : paratexts, narratives, and the manipulation of national literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Parkes, Simon John (2009) Home from the wars: the Romantic revenant-veteran of the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poyner, Jane (2003) The fictions of J. M. Coetzee: master of his craft? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poulson, Sally (2000) Reversed perspectives : a re-examination of the later novels of William Wilkie Collins. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pearl, Monica B. (1999) Alien tears : mourning, melancholia, and identity in AIDS literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Potts, Tracey (1997) Can the Imperialist read? Race and feminist literary theory. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Petrone Fresco, Gabriella (1991) Shakespeare's reception in 18th century Italy : the case of Hamlet. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Qiao, Qingquan (2018) China in Britain in the interwar period : Bertrand Russell, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Shih-I Hsiung. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Quinn, Patrick J. (1988) Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon : from early poetry to autobiography. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rivers, Anna (2023) Reality, relationality, spectrality : the mystic poetry of Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti and Mathilde Blind. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudd, Lindy Jane Settle (2023) Lessons from Shakespeare : examining early modern pedagogy as ‘pattern, precedent and lively warrant’ for the modern national curriculum. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Richards, Julian (2022) “This Man Is Great” : Glen Byam Shaw directs Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951-1959. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rybczak, Emil (2020) A bibliographical enquiry into Thomas Johnson's A Collection of the Best English Plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Divya Ramakrishna (2019) New alphabet in sight: representation and the reframing of Dalit identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rumbold, Matthew (2017) Epic relation : the sacred, history and late modernist aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robertson, Lisa C. (2016) New and novel homes : women writing London's housing, 1880-1918. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rzepa, Joanna M. (2014) Literary and theological modernisms : Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Józef Wittlin. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudland, Sophie (2013) Faith, feeling and gender in the writing of Hartley, Wollstonecraft and Blake. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reddick, Yvonne J. (2012) The genius of the stream : Ted Hughes and fluvial influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Sumana (2011) The rise of the 'liminal Briton' : literary and artistic productions of black and Asian women in the Midlands. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rahwan, Yamen Rahmoun (2010) Constellations of allegory : Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter and J.M. Coetzee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reuter, Anne-Marie (2009) Fictions of authority : enchanters, teachers and mentors in selected fiction of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Roynon, Tessa Kate (2006) Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Regan, Lisa (2005) 'Men who are men and women who are women': fascism, psychology and feminist resistance in the work of Winifred Holtby. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rogers, Natasha (2004) The representation of trauma in narrative : a study of six late twentieth century novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Lynn Alison (2003) 'No nine days wonder': embedded Protestant narratives in early modern prose murder pamphlets 1573-1700. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Nicholas (2002) Tragedy and otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reeves, Kate (2000) Laughter and madness in post-war American fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Julia Caroline (2000) The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ruben, Mel (1998) Grace under pressure : re-reading Giselle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robbins, Catherine Ruth (1996) Decadence and sexual politics in three fin-de-siècle writers : Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Eleonora (1991) Strategies for identity : the fiction of Margaret Atwood. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sangangamsakun, Thirayut (2021) Trans-Victorian : rewriting Victorian fiction in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shin, Jung Ju (2020) (Re)turn of the abject: representation of Asian (American) masculinity in the West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shorland, Sophie (2019) ‘Blazing stars’: early modern celebrity culture, 1580-1626. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Schauss, Martin (2018) Like a Thing Forsaken: Beckett, Sebald and the Politics of Materiality. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scherer, Madeleine (2018) A global schema: the Graeco-Roman underworld in Ireland and the Caribbean. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stock, Robert P. (2018) Do you hear what I hear? : inferring voice in celebrity translation in the theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stones, Andrew (2018) Lines of flight: Gilles Deleuze and the becoming of world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Starr, Robert (2017) 'Nailed to the rolls of honour, crucified' : Irish literary responses to the Great War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shafer, Joseph R. (2017) Resistances in bodily form: post-1945 American Poetry and D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Katherine Jo (2016) Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Santos, Emanuelle Rodrigues dos (2016) Late postcoloniality : state, violence and wealth in the literatures of early 21st century Portuguese-speaking Africa. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Selleri, Andrea (2013) The author as a critical category, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheeha, Iman (2013) Staging the servant : an examination of the roles of household servants in early modern domestic tragedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Skomorokhova, Svetlana (2012) "Arising from the depths" (Kupala) : a study of Belarusian literature in English translation. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Christian, (Researcher in English) (2012) Shakespeare's influence on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt school critical theorists. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scarth, Katherine Ada (2012) Near London and Brighton : suburbs in fiction, 1780s-1820s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Francesca M. (2011) The fuzzy theory and women writers in the late eighteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Victoria Ellen (2011) If walls had mouths : representations of the Anglo-Fante household and the domestic slave in nineteenth-century Cape Coast (Ghana). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Senior, Emily (2010) Communicating disease : the Caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheils, Barry (2010) Playing at being : style, ethics, and W.B. Yeats. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Spratley, Peter F. (2008) Wordsworth's sonnet corpus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Charlotte (2005) Shakespeare and the idea of the book. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sim, Wai-chew (2002) Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sedgwick, James Martin (2001) Emily Dickinson's grotesque: ambivalent interactions with uncertainty. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Swain, Stella (1992) The uses of madness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction : the relation between narrative strategy and disturbed states of consciousness. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shuttleworth, Antony (1991) The poetics of impurity : Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Salgado, Kshanike Minoli (1991) Towards a definition of Indian literary feminism : an analysis of the novels of Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Surma, Anne (1991) Disputing authorities : the longer fiction of Rebecca West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shaaban, Bouthaina (1981) Shelley's influence on the Chartist poets, with particular emphasis on Ernest Charles Jones and Thomas Cooper. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tan Xing Long, Ian (2020) Poetry as appropriative proximity : Wallace Stevens, Martin Heidegger and the language of being. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ttoouli, George (2017) Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Thomas, Sita Chandra (2017) ‘In search of a new national story’: Issues of cultural diversity in the casting and performance of Shakespeare in Britain 2012–2016. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor-Brown, Emilie (2016) Miasmas, mosquitoes, and microscopes: parasitology and the British literary imagination, 1885-1935. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tsang, Michael Yat Him (2015) At interregnum : Hong Kong and its English writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Juliette (2003) Foreign music: linguistic estrangement and its textual effects in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Terry, Jennifer Ann (2003) "Shuttles in the rocking loom of history": dislocation in Toni Morrison's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turner, Rachael Lucy (2000) Myth, biography and the female role in the plays of Pam Gems. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Townsend, Joanna Kate (1999) Speaking the body, representing the self : hysterical rhetoric on stage. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Jenny Bourne (1987) Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychology : cultural significance and fictional form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turton, Glyn (1984) Turgenev and the context of English literature, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Udomlamun, Nanthanoot (2013) Materiality and memory in contemporary diasporic and postcolonial fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verlander, Freya (2020) (Skin)aesthetics: a study of skin(s) in spectatorship. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Vince, Máté (2013) From 'aequivocatio' to the 'Jesuitical equivocation' : changing concepts of ambiguity in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Voyiatzaki, Evi (2000) The body in the text : James Joyce's Ulysses and the modern Greek novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verma, Rajiva (1972) Concepts of myth and ritual, and criticism of Shakespeare, 1880-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wolfgang, William Floyd (2020) Grassroots Shakespeare: amateur and community-based Shakespeare performance in the United States of America. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wills, James (2020) Fictions of justice : literary lawyers in the American South, 1946-1966. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wu, Aurelia D. (2019) The cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde in modern China and beyond (1909–2019). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Watt, Gary (2018) Performance rhetoric in Shakespeare and law. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weaver, Camilla (2017) Reading seeing: visuality in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Whitehouse, Paul C. (2016) Violence and frontier in twentieth century Native American literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Laura Clare (2015) Works of taste and fancy : the woman and the child reader in nineteenth century literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Williams, Alun Rhys (2014) Architects of impurity : a study of the political imagination in contemporary fantastic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wako, Miho (2012) Figured in lively paint : Eastern decorative art, English aestheticism, and consumer culture 1862-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

West, John Peter (2011) Dryden and enthusiasm. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

White, Troy Nelson (2010) The Gothic threshold of Sabine Baring-Gould : a study of the Gothic fiction of a Victorian squarson. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webb, Andrew (Andrew S.) (2010) ‘His country...not the country he had fought for’ : British literatures and world lit. theory : the case of Edward Thomas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wells, Sherah Kristen (2009) 'Another world,/its walls are thin': psychosis and Catholicism in the texts of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wallbank, Adrian J. (2008) Political, religious, and philosophical mentoring of the Romantic period : the dialogue genre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Madeleine Alice (2008) Victorian familial enigmas: inheritance and influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Westall, Claire Louise (2007) What should we know of cricket who only England know? : cricket and its heroes in English and Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wong, Hiu Wing (2006) "Talk-stories" in the fictions of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weller, Saranne Esther Elizabeth (2001) 'Written with a Mrs Stowe's feeling' : Uncle Tom's cabin and the paradigms of Southern authorship in the anti-Tom tradition, 1852-1902. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wang, Nian En (1992) The xing : a comparative approach to Chinese theories of the literary symbolic. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webster, Duncan (1984) Representing the economy and the economies of representation : readings in the fiction and criticism of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wheale, John William (1983) Redemption in the work of Francis Stuart. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Jaewon (2022) Post-millennial American and British finance-crisis fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yiannitsaros, Christopher (2016) Deadly domesticity : Agatha Christie's 'middlebrow' Gothic, 1930-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Sun Kyoung (2011) (Re)-constructing Homer : English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey between 1850 and 1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yun, Hunam (2010) Appropriations of Irish drama by modern Korean nationalist theatre : a focus on the influence of Sean O’Casey in a colonial context. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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English (MA) Theses

Below is a selection of dissertations from the English program in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that have been voluntarily included in Chapman University Digital Commons. Additional dissertations from years prior to 2019 are available through the Leatherby Libraries' print collection or in Proquest's Dissertations and Theses database.

Theses from 2024 2024

Interior Chinatown: Chinatown as a Performative Space , Audrey Fong

"Old Cod": The Power of Storytelling in Conor McPherson's The Weir , Sarah Johnson

The Beginning of the End: The Cultivation of Transchronological Perceptuality in Arcadia and “Story of Your Life” , Sawyer Kelly

“No One to Show Us the Way:” Assessing the Contemporary Relevance of the Gay Male Bildungsroman , Matthew Lemas

Posthumanism in Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, and Reality/ies through Fiction , Eileen Kelley Pierce

Catastrophic Progress: A Queer Materialist Analysis of the 2023 Trans/Bud Light Controversy , Brianna Radke

Banned Books and Educational Censorship: The Necessity of Keeping Queer Books in Schools , Rebecca Rhodes

The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism and Gentrification in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina and Corina , Miranda Roberts

Navigating Identity Through Education in Literature and in the Classroom , Sofia Sakzlyan

Nobody Inside: Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": An Analysis on Whole/Incomplete Bodies, "The Maggie Thing"and Sick and Dancing Mothers , Emily Velasquez

Theses from 2023 2023

“Everything and Nothing”: Exhibiting Irishness at the Chicago World Fair of 1893 , Jessica Bocinski

Beyond Allegory: Postcolonial Debates in Science Fiction , Su Chen

Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird and Queer Temporalities in Lovecraft Country and Detransition, Baby , Eurydice Dye

The Dictator Novel in YA Latinx Fantasy , Catherine Gallegos

Humanization of the Refugee as the Modern Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West , Ani Gazazyan

“Henrietta and Harriet:” Considering the Marginalized Best Friend in Burney’s Cecilia and Austen’s Emma , Elena Goodenberger

Rising Costs of Universities and the Impact on Teaching Effectiveness and Student Outcomes , Patrick Hanna

Failure Facing Pedagogy in First-Year Rhetoric and Composition Classrooms , Karuna Minh Hin

Steps Toward Healing from the Possessive Other: The Vital Role of Fantastical Literature in Trauma Theory , Rebekah Izard

Mirroring Financial Speculation and Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility and Guilt as Re-imagination of Human Value , Ian Koh

Oceans of Literature - The Little Mermaid , Makena Metz

What Makes a Woman "Pious and Good": The Function of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales , Hannah Montante

From the Master’s Maternity to Redemptive Nurturing: Liberating Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy , Isabelle Stillman

“Beauty and the Beast” and the Representation of the Female: How Fairy Tales Reinforce and Influence Our Current Understanding of Gender Roles , Elizabeth N. Tran

The Significance of Maintaining Character Integrity in Literary Retellings , Sara Turner

Mrs. Dalloway as a Window for Understanding Life , Kristen Venegas

The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formation of Latinidad , Constance von Igel de Mello

Dorian Gray: The Myth , Peggy Sue Wood

Theses from 2022 2022

Potential For a Pedagogical Level-Up: Teaching First-Year Composition Through Rhetoric of Gaming , Cayman Beeman

Personhood and Objecthood: Examining the Speaker’s Interiority and Double Consciousness in Citizen: An American Lyric , Winnie Chak

Innately American, Black America’s Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis of Black Death & Identity , Montéz Jennings

Examining Wonder Woman through a Feminist Voice: How Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Adaptation Upheaved her Creation, Representation, and 80 Year Legacy , Tatiana Madrid

“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello ’s Bianca , Phoebe Merten

Lack of Affirmative Consent: Trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” , Ansalee Morrison

Traumas and Recovery in Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket , Vesper North

Poverty, Social Isolation, Uselessness, and Loneliness: The Fears and Anxieties of 19th-Century British Governesses , Lydia Pejovic

Speaking Up For Generic Asians in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown , Orel Shilon

The Brain Scan as Ideograph , Paige Welsh

Changing the Definition of the Orient Through Hollywood , Amanda Yaghmai

Theses from 2021 2021

The Dystopian Impulse and Media Consumption: Redefining Utopia Via the Narrative Economics of the New Media Age , Turki Alghamdi

Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy and Communal Benefits of Narrative Innovation , Aysel Atamdede

Feminist Rhetorics: Theory and Practice of Strategic Silence , Paolena Comouche

Surveillance: The Digital Dark Side , Brittyn Davis

Fanfiction As: Searching for Significance in the Academic Realm , Megan Friess

Realism & Language: How Luis Alberto Urrea Uses Bilingualism to Elevate His Works of Realism , Ashley Gomez

"A Mind of Metal and Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism in Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings , Christopher Hines

“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions for Continuation Schools , Samantha Mbodwam

Decolonizing the Body , Daniel Miess

Black Panther Shatters Social Binaries to Explore Postcolonial Themes: How Ancestry, Identity, Revenge, and the Third Space Impact the Ability to Navigate Change and Create New Forms of Cultural Hybridity , Deborah Paquin

Anti-Racist Pedagogy: A Practical Means of Building Bonds Between Marginalized Students and Instructors in the Composition Classroom , Santa-Victoria Pérez

Fear Then and Now: The Vampire as a Reflection of Society , Mackenzie Phelps

Monstrous and Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes in Wilde’s Salomé , Nayana Rajnish

Journeying to a Third Space of Sovereignty: Explorations of Land, Cultural Hybridity, and Sovereignty in Ceremony and There There , Jillian Eve Sanchez

Through the Female Perspective: An Analysis of Male Characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey , Natalia Sanchez

The Tiered Workshop: The Effects of Using a Paced Workshop in a Composition Classroom , Madison Shockley

Aztlán Potentialities: Queer Male Chicanx Affect and Temporalities , Ethan Trejo

Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison and Contrast of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Azuela's The Underdogs , Sarah N. Valadez

Theses from 2020 2020

Stephen Dedalus and the Mind as Hypertext in Ulysses , Ariel Banayan

Lessons from Hybridity: A Look into the Coupling of Image and Text in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory , Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric , and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic , Elizabeth Chen

Dawn of the Undead Classroom: Pop-Culture in the First-Year Composition Classroom , Sierra A. Ellison

Moving Beyond Grades: A Shift in Assessing First-Year Composition , Matthew Goldman

Murmurs of Revolution: Mythical Subversion in Dostoevsky , Connor Guetersloh

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration of the Voiceless Women in Victorian England through Three Plays of Oscar Wilde , Marco Randazzo

The Ubume Challenge: A Digital Environmental Humanities Project , Sam Risak

Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race in the Classroom , Natalie Salagean

Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fukú, Masks, and Implicit Forgiveness in the Works of Junot Díaz , Jacob VanWormer

‘Amore Captus:’ Turning Bedtricks in the Arthurian Canon , Candice Yacono

Theses from 2019 2019

The Contradictory Faces of “Sisterhood”: A Case-Study on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Its Theatrical Adaptation by James Willing and Leonard Rae, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Its Miniseries Adaptation on HBO , Lama Alsulaiman

Terrence McNally’s Universalizing Model: The Role of Disability in Andre’s Mother; Lips Together, Teeth Apart ; and Love! Valour! Compassion! , Alexa Burnstine

A Way to Persist: Storytelling and Its Effect on Trauma in Gábor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus , Duncan Capriotti

Language: A Bridge or Barrier to Social Groups , Adina Corke

Haole Like Me: Identity Construction and Politics in Hawaii , Savanah Janssen

Black Women’s Bodies as the Site of Malignity: Interrogating (Mis)representations of Black Women in 16th and 17th Century British Literature , Tonika Reed

The Efficacy of Varying Small Group Workshops in the Composition Classroom , Daniel Strasberger

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms of Capital” in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us , Allie Harrison Vernon

Theses from 2018 2018

Player-Response: On the Nature of Interactive Narratives as Literature , Lee Feldman

Theses from 2017 2017

The Rhetoric of Disability: an Analysis of the Language of University Disability Service Centers , Katie Ratermann

Theses from 2016 2016

The Ritualization of Violence in The Magic Toyshop , Victor Chalfant

Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard , Mark Hausmann

Readers in Pursuit of Popular Justice: Unraveling Conflicting Frameworks in Lolita , Innesa Ranchpar

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  • Dissertation & Thesis Outline | Example & Free Templates

Dissertation & Thesis Outline | Example & Free Templates

Published on June 7, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on November 21, 2023.

A thesis or dissertation outline is one of the most critical early steps in your writing process . It helps you to lay out and organize your ideas and can provide you with a roadmap for deciding the specifics of your dissertation topic and showcasing its relevance to your field.

Generally, an outline contains information on the different sections included in your thesis or dissertation , such as:

  • Your anticipated title
  • Your abstract
  • Your chapters (sometimes subdivided into further topics like literature review, research methods, avenues for future research, etc.)

In the final product, you can also provide a chapter outline for your readers. This is a short paragraph at the end of your introduction to inform readers about the organizational structure of your thesis or dissertation. This chapter outline is also known as a reading guide or summary outline.

Table of contents

How to outline your thesis or dissertation, dissertation and thesis outline templates, chapter outline example, sample sentences for your chapter outline, sample verbs for variation in your chapter outline, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis and dissertation outlines.

While there are some inter-institutional differences, many outlines proceed in a fairly similar fashion.

  • Working Title
  • “Elevator pitch” of your work (often written last).
  • Introduce your area of study, sharing details about your research question, problem statement , and hypotheses . Situate your research within an existing paradigm or conceptual or theoretical framework .
  • Subdivide as you see fit into main topics and sub-topics.
  • Describe your research methods (e.g., your scope , population , and data collection ).
  • Present your research findings and share about your data analysis methods.
  • Answer the research question in a concise way.
  • Interpret your findings, discuss potential limitations of your own research and speculate about future implications or related opportunities.

For a more detailed overview of chapters and other elements, be sure to check out our article on the structure of a dissertation or download our template .

To help you get started, we’ve created a full thesis or dissertation template in Word or Google Docs format. It’s easy adapt it to your own requirements.

 Download Word template    Download Google Docs template

Chapter outline example American English

It can be easy to fall into a pattern of overusing the same words or sentence constructions, which can make your work monotonous and repetitive for your readers. Consider utilizing some of the alternative constructions presented below.

Example 1: Passive construction

The passive voice is a common choice for outlines and overviews because the context makes it clear who is carrying out the action (e.g., you are conducting the research ). However, overuse of the passive voice can make your text vague and imprecise.

Example 2: IS-AV construction

You can also present your information using the “IS-AV” (inanimate subject with an active verb ) construction.

A chapter is an inanimate object, so it is not capable of taking an action itself (e.g., presenting or discussing). However, the meaning of the sentence is still easily understandable, so the IS-AV construction can be a good way to add variety to your text.

Example 3: The “I” construction

Another option is to use the “I” construction, which is often recommended by style manuals (e.g., APA Style and Chicago style ). However, depending on your field of study, this construction is not always considered professional or academic. Ask your supervisor if you’re not sure.

Example 4: Mix-and-match

To truly make the most of these options, consider mixing and matching the passive voice , IS-AV construction , and “I” construction .This can help the flow of your argument and improve the readability of your text.

As you draft the chapter outline, you may also find yourself frequently repeating the same words, such as “discuss,” “present,” “prove,” or “show.” Consider branching out to add richness and nuance to your writing. Here are some examples of synonyms you can use.

Address Describe Imply Refute
Argue Determine Indicate Report
Claim Emphasize Mention Reveal
Clarify Examine Point out Speculate
Compare Explain Posit Summarize
Concern Formulate Present Target
Counter Focus on Propose Treat
Define Give Provide insight into Underpin
Demonstrate Highlight Recommend Use

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When you mention different chapters within your text, it’s considered best to use Roman numerals for most citation styles. However, the most important thing here is to remain consistent whenever using numbers in your dissertation .

The title page of your thesis or dissertation goes first, before all other content or lists that you may choose to include.

A thesis or dissertation outline is one of the most critical first steps in your writing process. It helps you to lay out and organize your ideas and can provide you with a roadmap for deciding what kind of research you’d like to undertake.

  • Your chapters (sometimes subdivided into further topics like literature review , research methods , avenues for future research, etc.)

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

George, T. (2023, November 21). Dissertation & Thesis Outline | Example & Free Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved September 3, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/dissertation-thesis-outline/

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    Dissertation & Thesis Outline | Example & Free Templates. Published on June 7, 2022 by Tegan George.Revised on November 21, 2023. A thesis or dissertation outline is one of the most critical early steps in your writing process.It helps you to lay out and organize your ideas and can provide you with a roadmap for deciding the specifics of your dissertation topic and showcasing its relevance to ...