Student theses

Recent theses published by our graduates

PhD theses completed in the last five years

Medieval

• Simple Readers (Mis)Reading Profound Matter in English: The Lollard Heresy of Reading and its Effects on English Vernacular Theological Writing in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Nicole Beare, 2012.

Early Modern/Renaissance

• Receipt Books and the Politics of Food in Early Modern English Women's Writing. Madeline Bassnett. May, 2008.
• Jonson's and Shakespeare's "Comedy of Affliction". Jonathan Goossen, 2011.
• Shakespeare and the Drama of Politic Strategems. Jackie Cameron, 2012.

Eighteenth Century

• "Spleen Spreads his Dominion": Cultural, Literary, and Medical Representations of Hysteria in the Eighteenth Century.  Heather Meek, 2007.

Nineteenth Century

• "Of Factory Girls and Serving Maids": The Literary Labours of Working-Class Women in Victorian Britain. Meagan Timney, 2010.
• British Identity and the Antirevolutionary Novel: Nineteenth-Century British Novels About the French Revolution. Patricia Cove, 2012.

Twentieth Century

• Interviews at Work: Reading the Paris Review Interviews, 1953-1978. Kelley Lewis. October, 2008.
• "We are Most Ourselves When we are Changing": Michael Winer, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, and the Literary Reconfiguration of Atlantic Canadian Regionalism.  Susanne Marshall, 2009.
  
• Habitable Cities: Modernism, Urban Space, and Everyday Life. Connor Byrne, 2010.
• "One Small Way:" Racism, Redress, and Reconciliation in Canadian Women's Fiction, 1980-2000. Rebecca Babcock, 2011.
• Writing Left: The Emergence of Modernism in English Canadian Literature. Bart Vatour, 2011.
• "I am not I": Late Modernism and Metafiction in Canadian Prose. Vanessa Lent, 2012.

MA theses completed in the last five years

Medieval

• "May Saracens be Saved":  The Conversion of the Saracens in Chaucer and Langland.  Christopher Bailey, 2007.
• The Court of Beast and Bough: Contesting the Medieval English Forest in the Early Robin Hood Ballads. Peter Chiykowski, 2011.

Early Modern/Renaissance

• Reading 'Circe's Court':  Politics and the Bed-trick from Boccaccio to Shakespeare.  Kirsten Inglis, 2007.
• "Come Son, Let's Away": The Dialogue of Mothers and Young Sons on the Early Modern Stage. Lynne Evans, 2008.
• Meter, Meaning, and Music in the Airs of Thomas Campion. Anna Lewton-Brain. October, 2009.
• Affectionate Friends: Friendship and Collaboration in the Renaissance and Romantic Era. James Stevenson, 2011.
• Forrests Full of Beats: Aristotelian Analyses of Antinomian Madness in King Lear and Timeon of Athens. Danen Poley, 2012.

Seventeenth Century

• All That is Gold Does Not Glitter: Plainness and Eloquence in Jonson, Donne, and Herbert. Joel Faber, 2011.

Eighteenth Century

• Of Swift and Men:  The Construction of Masculinity in Selected Works of Jonathan Swift.  Heather Clem, 2007.
• Adapting Tristam Shandy. Adria Young, 2011.

Nineteenth Century

• Drawing the Line: A Study of Aesthetics and Morality in Henry James's Literary Life Tales. Melissa Bachynski, 2008.
• "The Lurking Poison of Sensuality": French Novels and Sensation Fiction in Lady Audley's Secret and The Doctor's Wife. Kja Isaacson, 2008.
• Rudyard Kipling and the Poetics of Failure. Joshua Swidzinski, 2008.
• Fictional Characters and Factual Investigations: Entering the Working-Class World in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South. Sarah Russell, 2008.
• "Becky Sharp's Children": Criminal Heroines in Vanity Fair and the Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Alexandra Doeben, 2009.
• "The Music Vibrating in her Still": The Influence of Musical Agency on Individual and Social Identity in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda. Natalie Crenna, 2010.
• Charlotte Brontë and the Politics of Beauty. James D. Ross, 2010.
• Reading, Seduction, and Convention: Realism and Romance in Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, and The Voyage Out. Elissa Gurman, 2010.
• "The Music Vibrating in her Still": The Influence of Musical Agency on Individual and Social Identity in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda. Natalie Crenna, 2010.
• Idiots and Egoists: An Exploration of Moral Growth and Responsibility Among Children, the Childish, and the Child-like in the Works of George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Carrie Hildebrand, 2011.
• Uncanny or Marvelous?: The Fantastic and Somatoform Disorders in Wuthering Heights and Vilette. Kala Hirtle, 2011.
• The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's The Confidence Man and Billy Bud. Craig Stensrud, 2011.
• "For the Sake of the Rest": Education and Mutual Responsibility in Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Emily Williams (Groen), 2012.

Twentieth Century

• Soft Modernism and Amateur Readers: Reading Pleasure, Virignia Woolf, Orlando and The Waves. Danielle Gridley, 2008.
• Trouble at Home: The Anxieties of Belonging and Selfhood in the Fiction of Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin. Heather Levie, 2008.
• Urban Scrawl: The Intersection of Graffiti Writing and Identity Production in Performance Bond, What We All Long For, and A Complicated Kindness. Sarah Emery, 2008.
• Genre-Splicing: Epic and Novel Hybrids in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and American Gods. Christine Yao, 2008.
• In Black and White: Subverting the Racial Stereotypes of Historical Mainstream News Media in Black Canadian Literature. Carmen Reems, 2008.
• ‘I am a Settler/I am Uneasy’: Rethinking Citizenship, The Nation, and The ‘Good’ of Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Janet McGill, 2009.
  
• Revisioning Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: Androgyny, Queerness, and Feminism in Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton and Yann Martel’s Self.  Casey Stepaniuk, 2009.
• Anne Rice’s Use of Gothic Conventions in The Vampire Chronicles. Nicole Tanner, 2009.
• Media Images and the Subversion of Conclusive Historical Narratives in Historiographic Metafictional Depictions of the Rosenberg Executions and JFK Assassination.  Christian Ledwell, 2009.
• Auto/Biography in the Work of Michael Ondaatje. Matthew Kennedy, 2009.
• Lilith's Brood:  The Dissolution of the Human Subject and a Movement Towards Post Humanity. Johanne Jell, 2009.
• Imagining the Lives of Others: Revisioning Cosmopolitanism in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist.  Shauna Hall-Coates. October 2009.
• Falsity, Fronting, Future: Race in Everett's Erasure, Brand's What We All Long For, and Obama's Dreams From My Father. Charlene Davis, 2009.
• The Spatial Imaginations Of Klein, Cohen, and Richler. Chelsea Seale, 2009.
  
• Writing the Ethics of Water in Michael Ondaatje, Thomas King, and Anne Michaels. Laura Gallant, 2010.
• "Playthings in the Margins of Literature": Cultural Critique and Rewriting Ideologies in Supernatural and Star Wars Fanfiction. Christine Handley, 2010.
• Melville's Oriental Parsee: Reimagining Fedallah as Reader and Sign in Moby Dick. Lena Patterson, 2010.
• Representing the Library. Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris, 2010.
• Language, Translation, and the Inscription of the Female Body in the Works of Margaret Atwood. Crystal Vaughan, 2010.
• Prophecy and Vitality: The Reclaiming of E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood's Theories of Literary Affect as Critical Tools for the Analysis of Fiction. Emma Baasch, 2010.
• An Astonishing Symphony of Voices: Birdsong in the Poetry of Don McKay. Vasana Abeysekera, 2011.
• A Case Study of E. E. Cummings: The Past and Presence of Modernist Literary Criticism. Laura Bast, 2011.
• The Dynamic Imbrication of the Rhizome and the State Apparatus in the Development of Transnational Subjectives in Leila Abouela's The Translator and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Matt Gillard, 2011.
• Ornament for Serious Purpose: Mina Loy and Gaudy Consumer Culture. Dancy Mason, 2011.
• Stein's Self and the Search for Meaning in Criticism of Tender Buttons. Molly Pavlovski, 2011.
• Communicable Stories: HIV in Canadian Aboriginal Literature. Katherine Shwetz, 2011.
•  "Oh! – My Pen Drops From Me Here!" Bliss, Pleasure and Sexual Encounter in the Erotic Novel. Justine Johnson, 2011.
• Writing Palestine: Personal and National Identity in Exile. Elizabeth Varma, 2011.
• "A Piece of the Endless Body of the World": Gender, Identity, and the Coexistence of Binary Forces in Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Tracks, and Love Medicine. Emily Anderson, 2012.
• "You didn't give me words"-- Religious Subversion and Secular Philosophy in Cormac McCarthy. Adam Bowes, 2012.
• Literary Speculations: Postmodern Dystopia and the Future of Books. Emily Corrie, 2012.
• Staging Circular Suffering: Aboriginal Repertoires and Violence Against Women in Canada. Ainsley Doty, 2012.
• The Question as an Instrument of Nationalism: Interrogating the Nation in Eale Birney, Phyllis Webb, and Leonard Cohen. Virginia Houk, 2012.
• Mapping the Self: The Sense of Space, Place, Home, and Belonging in Contemporary Caribbean Canadian Poetry. Amanda Labelle, 2012.
• (In)Visible Generations: Anarchist Technologies and Embodied Resistance. Riley McDonald, 2012.
• The Bad and the Beautiful: Public Persona and Genre in Three Film Adaptations of William Faulkner. Deven Ruelland, 2012.
• "Lock Up Your Sons": Queering Young Adult Literature and Social Discourse. Rebekah Weadon, 2012.