English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Reparative Forms: Poetry and Psychology from the Fin de Siècle to WWI(2021) O'Neil, Lindsey; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Reparative Forms: Poetry and Psychology from the Fin de Siècle to WWI” identifies an as yet-unrecognized body of poetry written by women and colonial subjects that shows those authors’ engagements with early psychological writing. The years between the fin de siècle and the First World War saw the rebirth of psychology as a distinct discipline in contrast to its previous life as a vaguely scientific subset of philosophy. Across these decades, psychological discourse first engaged with and then finally overtook philosophy and poetry as the predominant framework for exploring the inner workings of the human mind. In tracing this history and the specific contributions of women’s poetry at the turn of the century, my dissertation actively engages in interdisciplinary work, incorporating the histories of science and medicine, Indigenous studies, and colonial studies. Women and colonial subjects employed the idioms of white male psychologists in order to represent both belonging to and estrangement from national identity. These writings constitute a greater British communal psychology whose characteristics scholarship has yet to account for. While some women and colonial subjects were bold iconoclasts, many more existed in an open-ended negotiation between their alliance to the nation and their alliance to themselves. While none of the texts resolve the conflicts and inconsistencies of poetry steeped in systems of sexism, imperialism, and nationalism, the framework of psychology is an important tool in order to navigate and make sense of the incomplete story of British nationalism. Questions of who can create, join, or destroy communities resonate with our current political and cultural moment. My dissertation traces a historical narrative that helps to make sense of our present moment in which the sovereignty of Britain is being renegotiated. More broadly, the anxiety surrounding the gradual decline of the British Empire and the literary reactions to this decline anticipate our current global political climate, including Euroscepticism, racially charged suspicions of immigrants, an increased emphasis on cultural integration, and a reinvigoration of nationalist rhetoric.Item Ritual(2021) Parsons, Hunter; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ritual is a collection of poems exploring ways in which loss and fear of losing shape one’s relationship to the self. This collection focuses on themes of women’s reproductive health and family roles, investigating how obsessions with both familial dysfunction and physical illness contribute to different experiences of loss and grieving. This collection is a series of intimate narratives interrogating what it means to be a woman, a daughter, and a sister.Item Invisible Fence(2021) Beilenson, Hannah; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Invisible Fence is a collection of original poems structured in three sections. Each section explores a period of personal growth after an anorexia diagnosis and documents the means by which one can arrive at wonder. Formally, some of the poems demonstrate the limits of lineation, some illustrate how sound complements syntax to inform meaning, and others prioritize the emotional resonance of the image. The collection details the continual process of growing up.Item While Opening a Family Album(2021) Rojas, Claudia; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of 30 poems center vulnerability in response to the everyday interactions and concerns of a female speaker. Personal trauma is contextualized through dreams, memory, and history. These poems explore love of the self, family, and community. Issues of immigration, gender, and race frame the speaker’s experiences. While these poems are based on real life, some poems transform the real into fictionalized stories. These poems are written through various written forms: free verse, prose, fixed form. English is the primary language used with Spanish words or phrases used on occasion.Item Tending(2018) Reid, Caitlin; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tending is a poetry collection concerned with the mutability of landscapes, stories, and relationships. In a mix of free-verse sonnets, found language, and discovered forms, these narrative poems listen for the old songs and everyday birds that drift through urban and pastoral settings to flood the speaker with memory.Item Falling Out of the Sky(2016) Morris, Ruth Elizabeth; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Falling Out of the Sky” is a collection of poems, both formal and free verse, that explores an intimate familial landscape. In particular, these poems raise the question of what it means to be human through examinations of family mythology and its changes as bodies and memories become unreliable with time.Item Scrapbook(2016) Kuyatt, Megan; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in Scrapbook are rooted in memory and the act of remembering. While the poems explore different personas and landscapes, they continually return to the poet’s childhood home: a falling apart 50s rancher, where the domestic and mundane are always accompanied by the bizarre. While the mother tries to make order out of these experiences, the poet becomes the quiet observer, journaling and collecting memories her mother would prefer to silence. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, Patricia Smith and Shuntaro Tanikawa, these poems tell stories through colloquial language that understates the strange details of everyday life.Item Common Ground(2015) Allen, Amanda Marie; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection explores the different ways silence acts as a form of communication, recognizing both the power and failure of the unspoken. At once critical and empathetic, the speaker of these poems finds connection between the self and a self-destructive father whose influence carries into future relationships. The poems navigate moments of anger, forgiveness and guilt, ultimately allowing each to happen simultaneously.Item Mystic, Georgia(2014) Lavender, Joshua; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mystic, Georgia interrogates connections to nature, society, imagination, and the self. Telling a story of childhood set in the village for which the collection is named, the first part examines family, identity, and memory. The second part explores landscape and witnesses the transformation of childhood's "strange voice" to the "song" of adulthood, and the ensuing part deepens this transformation, contemplating the strangeness of poetic acts. In the fourth part, attention turns to the complexities of society and a disquieting materiality. The collection culminates in a journey out of self-doubt and into the nature of want. Night and dark, storytelling, and the moment's ephemerality are deeply figured motifs in Mystic, Georgia, which strives for a coherent vision of an intractably blurred world.Item Myland Farms(2014) Skudrna, Radford; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection radiate from the emotional atmosphere of familial life. Foregrounded in the landscape of my grandfather's flower nursery, these poems convert particular energies of experience into the heat of universal understanding. When the metaphysical greenhouse collapses, however, the necessary warmth of language is both absorbed into and released from the surface of the page. In this sense, the poems themselves burgeon new life, each line another root beneath our feet.
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