The access to the collection of English Theses is restricted to RWU English faculty members for curriculum purposes and is not open to the public. Please get in touch with the English Department to obtain a password for viewing or downloading a thesis.
Submissions from 2008
Sustaining Storytelling Tradition: Narrative Choice in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction, Ashley Pappas
American Beauty: Walt Whitman in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Neil Phillips
Beloved: A Post-Modernistic Mother-Daughter Ghost Story, Linda Pratson
"The Knight of the Lion and The Hunt of the Unicorn: Pagan and Christian Synergy in Medieval Arts”, Kelly Ridge
Tongues and Tradition: Cultural Identity through Narrative Voice in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction, Zemina Sharon
Factors That Shape a Child’s Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: Parenting First, Cultural Influence Second, Shunsuke Shiga
“No Fair! Why Does He Get to Rule? He Ate the Fruit Too’: Inverted Gender Roles as Cultural Commentary in Aucassin et Nicolete, Shocki Stephanie
Submissions from 2007
"Blake's Joy and Sorrow: Intertwining, Contrary Emotions of the Human Soul in Songs", Nicole Cochrane
“Holy Thursday“ and the Hypocrisy of False Charity, Christal DaSilva
William Blake’s “The Lamb“ and “The Tyger“: Innocent and Experienced Visions of the Moral and the Aesthetic, Anne Eckstrom
“weep weep“: Blake’s Cry for the Chimney Sweepers, Carrie Fair
William Blake: An Early Feminist, Allison Frascatore
The Ambiguity of the Angel Archetype in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Erin Landers
Peaches in the Mid-Day Hour: A Process of Spiritual Discovery in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Anthony MacDonald
About a Boy? Archetypal and Structural Ambiguity in Blake’s “The Little Black Boy“, Colleen Olsen
Clues from the “Caves of every beast“: Lions as Exemplars of William Blake’s Vision of Spiritual Potential, Frances Parise
Moral and Immoral Authoritarianism in William Blake’s Nurses’ Songs of Innocence and Experience, Lauren Perreca
Blake’s Gnosticism: Heretical Visions of Man, Christ, and God in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The Divine Image,“ and “The Human Abstract“, Alexander Ruggeri
Blake’s Condemnation of a Suppressed Society: “ London“, Paul Sousa
Submissions from 2006
These fragments I have shored against my ruins-. Time as a Reconstructed Unity in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Amy Christine Albrecht
falling in love, the noise of the typewriter, the smell of cooking: Disparate Experience and the Metaphysical Tradition in The Waste Land, Marissa L. Carrere
“I do not find The Hanged Man“: The Presence of the Myth of the Fisher King in T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, Elizabeth L. Courcelle
“'Tell us something Sir.’ And he told them 'DA’.“ Buddhism and Hinduism in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Daniel Michael Jensen
Songs of Lament: The Waste Lands Bird Imagery, Theresa Page
If there were only water amongst the rock: Earth and Water Imagery in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Laura Jean Rickmyre
I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing: The Theme of Loss in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Alison Robbins
Sibyl, what do you want?-. The Sibyl of Cumae and Themes of Entrapment, Solitude, and Stasis, Alexandra Waltien
Submissions from 2005
"That Pebble's Watery Echo": William Faulkner's View of History and Time informs his Narrative Style in Absalom, Absalom!, Elizabeth Ayer
"Symbols of the Woods in O'Connor's Short Fiction", Ross Baker
Domestic Abuse in A Streetcar Named Desire: Why Stella stays with Stanley, Shana Barrett
Myth and Folklore in Eudora Welty's Short Stories, Keri Blais
"Broken on the Rock of the World": Blanche in Tenessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Melissa Bourque
Jobs Build Character: Richard Wright and Anne Moody's Childhood Jobs Shape Their Southern Views, Amanda Burns
Thomas Sutpen and Faulkner's Southern Male, Andrew Dugan
"Nome, I ain't a good man:" Religious Symbolism portrays Flannery O'Connor's message of Christianity in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Amanda Johnson
The Effect of the Black Community on the Advancement of Richard Wright in His Autobiography Black Boy, Matthew Kimmel
"Ghosts of the Past": The Repetition of Sin in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Paul Landry
Richard Wright's Black Boy: Christianity verses Intellectualism, Merritt Lee
A Good Man Is Hard To Find,' but the Bad Ones Are Plentiful: Flannery O'Connor's Evil Man, Caroline Michaud
"Choking to death in Centreville": Anne Moody's Feminist Triumph in Coming of Age in Mississippi, Sarah Murrett
A Study of the Male Characters' Adherence to the Madonna/Whore Complex in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Jillian Vieira
"Evil Spirits": Incidental Consequences in Anne Moody's Autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi, Lindsay Worcester
Submissions from 2004
The Voice of a Twentieth Century "Field Slave": The Appeal of Malcolm X, Matthew Boissonneault
Freeing the Descendants of Ham: The Religious Struggle of James Baldwin, Jill Bolstridge
Angstrom's Air Ball: An Ex-Athlete's Dysfunction in John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Erin Bowen
"The God I don't Believe In:" Examining the Shifting Views of Religion in the Literature of the 1960's., Leah Chertok-Ackerman
"Under a Man's Thumb": Sexual Oppression and It's Devastating Consequences in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Callie Graham
Colonel Cathcart and Milo Minderbinder: Evil and the Military-Industrial Complex in Catch-22, Emily Harrison
A Hero's Homecoming? The Effects of Vietnam in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, Mattea Heller
