Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1922, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1924, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1961, Theatre

Committee: F. Lee Miesle (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1960, English

Committee: Howard O. Brogan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature; Music

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1960, English

Committee: Howard O. Brogan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature; Music

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1952, English

Committee: Robert R. Hubach (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Committee: Roxann Wheeler (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Aeronomy; Aerospace Engineering; American Literature; Astronomy; British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Engineering; European History; European Studies; Experiments; Folklore; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Language; Literature; Mechanical Engineering; Museums; Philosophy of Science; Physics; Science History; Technology; Theater; Theater History; World History

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

While critics and authors alike have deemed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary rake figure as a “monster” and a “devil,” scholars have rarely drawn the same connections between monsters to rakes. Even as critics have decidedly characterized iconic monsters like Victor Frankenstein and Dracula as rapists or seducers, they oftentimes do not make the distinction that these literary monsters originated from the image of the rake. However, the rake and the monster share overarching characteristics, particularly in the inherent qualities their respective authors attribute to them, which shape the way they treat women and offspring. A side-by-side comparison between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rakes of romantic British literature and the nineteenth-century monsters of British Gothic literature exposes similarities in composition and characterization coupled with underlying patriarchal authority. From these similarities, I assert that the literary rake depicted throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature evolves into the literary monster depicted in nineteenth-century Gothic novels. This monster reveals the true barbarianism of the rake by transforming his physiognomy from that of a wealthy aristocrat to that of a grotesque breeder of threatening monsters, underscoring the threat of patriarchal authority which rakes continually convey over their female counterparts and debunking the eighteenth-century misinterpretation “that a reformed rake makes the best husband” (Richardson 36).

Committee: Rachel Carnell Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Frederick Karem Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gary Dyer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1973, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, English

Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) has been dismissed by scholars since it first became a subject of literary critique in the 1960s. The Last Man comments on a biographical sketch of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a conflicted lineage and Romantic inheritance, a millennial conflict about the need to look forward and backward simultaneously, and a single author's desire to locate her writing in a long classical literary history. Shelley's text is at once a categorical failure of the Gothic genre, and it exemplifies post-apocalyptic, or dystopian, literature. Scholars often criticize Shelley's book through the lens of feminist theory and on the basis of historical—both political and personal—contexts. In my thesis, “Mary Shelley's The Last Man: A Critical Analysis Of Anxiety And Authorship,” I recuperate the literary importance of The Last Man in the context of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and the Gothic genre by showing how Shelley's novel foregrounds various forms of personal and culturally embedded anxiety. Although readers often see Shelley's anxiety as a psychological or social weakness, it is central to my thesis to show how anxiety is at the core of her work. Shelley's anxieties as demonstrated in her texts exemplify an innovative approach to not only comment on her personal and political struggles, but they also distance her from her contemporaries, therefore allowing her to create a new literary genre. By critically analyzing the anxiety of illness, national isolation, and authorship through psychoanalytic theory and juxtaposing them with an underdeveloped feminist approach, I suggest that Mary Shelley's The Last Man is influential in the continuously growing genre of post-apocalyptic literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Committee: Erin Labbie PhD (Advisor); Allan Emery PhD (Other) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2016, English-Literature

British Gothic literature of the early nineteenth-century offers multitudes of representations of `monstrous' females, often depicted as subversive, transgressive, seductive, and even supernatural. Making use of Gothic tropes, monstrous forms and actions, doubling, fractured or fragmented imagination, scenery of ruin and decay, as well as grotesque bodies, Gothic texts presented anxiety in ways that struck terror into readers' hearts. Of the central anxieties presented in these Gothic texts, monstrous females remain a lesser-examined figure. In an attempt to determine the importance of the commonly used trope of a `monstrous' female in nineteenth-century Gothic literary and cultural imagination, I will include examinations of central female figures in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as well as Catherine Smith's novel The Caledonian Bandit; or, the Heir of Duncaethal (1811), alongside ballads by Anne Bannerman from her Poems (1800) and Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) in order to trace gendered social anxieties across literary and cultural borders. By resurrecting these monstrous females, some perhaps for the first time, I hope show the importance and value of this monstrous female as a marker of changing social bounds. Rather than allowing these females to become relegated to the fringes of their stories, or to be left in a state of dereliction or abandonment, I wish to put them in conversation with each other and grant them access to ongoing literary conversations.

Committee: Heather Braun Dr. (Advisor); Hillary Nunn Dr. (Committee Member); Joseph Ceccio Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Folklore; Gender Studies; Literature

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2015, English

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, is best known for bringing monsters to life. My thesis examines and discusses the nature of the educational inception of Victor Frankenstein's Monster. Frankenstein is a novel where a literate education functions as an illusion of humanization. Frankenstein's Monster embodies a Rosseauian model of natural, innate goodness. Because of his tendency to pity humans, the Monster desires becoming a member of human society. The monster misbelieves education is his pathway of humanization. Shelley's text reveals the limitations of that model of development through the Monster's literacy. Through an unfiltered sympathy for everything he reads, the monster undermines his ability to think critically about key issues. By imploring audiences to "listen to my tale," the Monster begs for sympathy through eloquent storytelling and education. Shelley's novel models in structure what the monster lacks in his literacy, a healthy, critical skepticism of the emotional power and influence literature has on its readers. Ultimately, the novel's Monster and the novel itself demonstrate the life-giving abilities and meaning-creating potential of an audience of readers.

Committee: Melissa Gregory (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Language Arts; Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1991, English

When Mary Shelley referred to her first novel, Frankenstein, as "my hideous progeny," she could not have comprehended the full significance of her words. For while her phrase eloquently compares her creation of the text with Victor Frankenstein's creation of the monster, we, reading the novel today, are witness to the "hideous progeny" to which her own text has given rise. Version after version has sprung forth, focusing on different aspects of her story, leading to such productions as the famous 1931 Boris Karloff film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1973) and the recent Edward Scissorhands. In the past fifteen or twenty years, however, Frankenstein has been reborn not simply in new versions but to a new life altogether, in the illumination of feminist criticism. While the Frankenstein story has yielded a rich tradition in the world of science-fiction and fantasies of horror, the text takes on a new dimension when we consider the significance of the fact that it was written by a woman. For, fundamentally, Frankenstein is the story of a man who creates a world in which women are unnecessary. The very function of the body that gives women a place in this world, in Mary Shelley's world, is appropriated by a man. Shelley emphasizes the significance of this project as a step towards rendering women unnecessary III two distinct ways. First and foremost is her characterization of Victor Frankenstein--his unhealthy attitudes toward women, his resistance to understanding women's biology, his refusal to create a female monster. Yet she also frames his story in that of Robert Walton, whose only tie with a woman is with his sister, and who, with a group of men, strives to overpower nature and establish a new society at the North Pole. What Shelley creates, then, is a text that speaks to issues of men's control of women, the use of science to control nature, and the role of human biology in all of this.Throughout history, the issue of reproduction has played an integral role in (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Olmsted (Advisor); David Young (Other) Subjects: Literature; Motion Pictures

PHD, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

While studies of fantastic literature have often focused on their structural and genre characteristics, less attention has been paid to the manner in which they address social issues and concerns. Drawing on theoretical, taxonomic, and historical approaches, this study argues that 19th-century England represented a key period of transformation during which fantastic literature evolved away from its folkloristic, mythic, and satirical origins and toward the modern genres of science fiction, feminist fantasy, and literary horror. The thesis examines the subversive and transformative function of the fantastic in nineteenth-century British literature, particularly how the novel Frankenstein (1831), the poem “Goblin Market” (1862), and the novel Dracula (1897) make deliberate uses of the materials of fantastic literature to engage in social and cultural commentary on key issues of their time, and by so doing to mark a significant transformation in the way fantastic materials can be used in narrative. Frankenstein took the materials of the Gothic and effectively transformed them into science fiction, not only through its exploration of the morality of scientific research, but more crucially through its critique of systems of education and the nature of learning. “Goblin Market” transformed the materials of fairy tales into a morally complex critique of gender relations and the importance of women's agency, which paved the way for an entire tradition of such redactions among later feminist writers. Dracula draws on cruder antecedents of vampire tales and the novel of sensation to create the first modern literary horror novel, while addressing key emerging anxieties of nationalism and personal identity. Although historical connections are drawn between these three key works, written at different points during the nineteenth century, it does not argue that they constitute a single identifiable movement, but rather that each provided a template for how later writer (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kathe Davis Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Margaret Shaw Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Mark Bracher Dr. (Committee Member); Pamela Grimm Dr. (Committee Member); Donald Hassler Dr. (Committee Member); Linda Williams Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

This dissertation argues that love is the central concept through which to think about and understand British poetry of the Romantic period. Scholars have typically treated love in terms of romantic relationships or adoptions of Platonic eros, but love has not been understood to be as significant as other major Romantic concepts such as nature, imagination, and ideology. This study establishes love as central to Romanticism. The Introduction outlines the various philosophical, scientific, and poetic conceptions of love available in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as defines the conception of love at work in Romantic poetry. The rest of the dissertation demonstrates through formalist-historicist readings how this conception of love works in various primary texts of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Matthew Arnold. The critical discourses with which this dissertation engages include Romantic New Historicisms and New Formalisms, Ecocriticism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, affect theory, and work on form, aesthetics, ethics, and poetics.

Committee: David Riede (Advisor); Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member); Marlene Longenecker (Committee Member); Clare Simmons (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2013, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The image and behavior of Shelley's infamous creature is similar to that of the mythical Incubus demon. By presenting Victor's hideous progeny as a reproduction of the Incubus myth, Shelley seems to provide her nineteenth-century reader with the image of demons, who for many, already haunted their nightmares. Shelley would likely have been familiar with the Incubus myth. Her fascination with her dead mother led her to the artist Henry Fuseli, whose painting "The Nightmare" depicts the Incubus Demon. Shelley wrote during a time in which medical scholars such as Dr. Bond and Dr. Waller explored a malady that they named after the demon-lover legend. Shelley often depicts her creature, standing over and suffocating his sleeping victim in the same manner as the Incubus demon. This subtle allusion to the Incubus myth indicates that Shelley's nineteenth-century reader was well versed in the demon lover tradition.

Committee: Gary Dyer PhD (Committee Chair); Rachel Carnell PhD (Committee Member); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature