Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Hacking Literature: Reading Analog Texts in a Digital Age(2014) Dinin, Aaron; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evangelists of the digital age, in the immediacy of its adolescence, often describe digital technologies as "revolutionary" (e.g. "the digital revolution") and as having a world-changing impact on human cultural interactions. However, by considering digital media from a temporally scaled vantage point spanning thousands of years, Hacking Literature proposes ways in which the digital age might also be introducing "world-saming" technologies that are as likely to reinstantiate cultural norms as they are to create new ones. Hacking Literature finds evidence for its arguments by considering examples of similar technological innovations prevalent in "revolutionary" technologies of information storage and dissemination: that of differently mediated literary texts. Using arguably iconic examples from Homer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Dickinson (an epic, a drama, a novel, and poetry), and creating analogies between those texts and, respectively, the Linux kernel, Internet security protocols, the history of the World Wide Web, and the world's most successful blogging engine, Hacking Literature describes ways in which literary media and digital media appear to undergo similar kinds of technological transformations. The project then analyzes these similarities to suggest possible opportunities for using software development concepts as entry points for literary analysis, as critical lenses for reading that meld technology and humanities.Item Beautiful Science: Victorian Women's Scientific Poetry and Prose(2014) Boswell, Michelle; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in literary studies and the history of science has demonstrated increasing interest in scientific writing by women. “Beautiful Science” investigates why form and genre are important interpretive tools—not static categories—for considering ways in which women entered Victorian scientific debates, how they accommodated scientific ideas for various audiences, and how formal tensions within their texts reveal broader intellectual frictions between secular and religious science in nineteenth-century Britain. Far from being marginal figures in scientific studies, the voices of these women were prominent, and their interpretations of contemporary theories shaped the reception of science among nonspecialists. Literary forms and genres—including parables, fairy tales, verse dramas, novels, and comic poems—brought with them a wide horizon of readerly expectations into conversations about science. Deploying these genres for a variety of purposes, women science writers could deliver new knowledge in familiar, recognizable literary ways. My first chapter uncovers Mary Somerville use of Byron's closet drama Cain both to explain an astronomical phenomenon, parallax, and to respond to the play's depiction of its protagonist's response to “sublime” astronomical distance. In chapter two, I demonstrate how Margaret Gatty and Arabella Buckley employ the genres of parable, beast fables, and fairy tales to negotiate the entangled debates of morality, religion, science, and education in the Victorian era. Chapter three suggests that reading George Eliot's early “Ilfracombe Journal,” her Westminister Review essays, and The Mill on the Floss within a tradition of Victorian natural history writing illuminates matters of form and exchange within both natural history narratives and the development of the mid-Victorian novel. Lastly, in chapter four I argue Constance Naden's comic “Evolutional Erotics” poems and her philosophical poems all suggest an engagement with scientific and philosophical discourse at the level of prosody, particularly in Naden's choices of rhyme. As a whole, “Beautiful Science” argues that an examination of form and genre within both the nineteenth-century literary publishing world and the discourses of scientific popularization reveal the mutual exchange between both realms, and that Victorian women's writing makes these changes most visible.