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
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
Schoolboy Romance: Queer Identity and Same-Sex Desire in the Contemporary Boys' School Story, Jeremy Fairall
The Ecology of American Noir, Katrina Younes
Theses/Dissertations from 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
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
Theses/Dissertations from 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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