This essay examines the ideology or value system implicit in Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series. Many of the images in the series, despite being fantastic or empirically unprecedented, are minor transformations of ...

This thesis approaches the work of American avant-garde composer John Cage from an unconventional perspective by utilizing rhetorical theory to examine the intellectual history informing his collected writings in the text ...

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, ...

Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the ...

Abstract It is now widely recognized that promotionalism permeates scholarly discourse. Yet a systematic account of rhetorical and linguistic means, which researchers across disciplines deploy to achieve this effect, is ...

MP3 blogs and their aggregators, which have risen to prominence over the past four years, are presenting an alternative way of promoting and discovering new music. I will argue that MP3 files greatly affect MP3 blogs in ...

This thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. In order to establish an editorial framework for the electronic scholarly edition of Dr. Ralph Barnes Grindrod's pamphlet Slaves of the Needle, I examine current issues in electronic textual editing. In the electronic scholarly edition, approximately twelve of the pamphlet's thirty-five pages are transcribed and encoded using TEI-based code. The second aspect of my master's thesis concerns the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century British literature. Slaves of the Needle provides a non-fiction counterpart to the fictional seamstresses of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Using Slaves of the Needle as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of mid-nineteenth-century characterizations of seamstresses, I show that authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were familiar with the working conditions of seamstresses. By conducting a close reading of certain representations of the seamstress in both fiction and non-fiction, I develop a theory of why the depiction of some aspects of the seamstress story are more accurate than others....

This thesis examines how context in Derridean signature theory is taboo and underutilized, and calls signature theory to embrace the contaminating mark of context. Signature theory, as proposed by Jacques Derrida and Peggy ...