English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing English Theses and Dissertations by Author "Bohls, Elizabeth"

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    Making Status Legible: Self-Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century
    (University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Morrison, Leslie; Bohls, Elizabeth
    This project analyzes discourses of social legibility in eighteenth-century self-writing to argue that status-based conceptions of identity continued to influence perceptions of the self in society. Studies of the eighteenth century have been dominated by a "rise of the middle class" narrative that tends to underestimate the resilience and continued relevance of conceptions of rank as an essentialized or innate quality. However, social legibility--the idea that status was encoded on the body through clothing, manners, beauty, grace, and countenance--continue to function, particularly in the self-writing of this period. By examining these epistolary novels, fictional memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and letters, this project clarifies how people imagined social hierarchy operating at the level of the body. The ways people recognize, enact, theorize, and represent status help us better understand how identity was reconceived between the Restoration in 1600 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
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    Rhetoric of Resistance: Social Justice in the Work of Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin
    (University of Oregon, 2017-09-27) Crane, Jessica; Bohls, Elizabeth
    This dissertation examines the rhetoric employed by Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin who devise a top-down/bottom-up dialectic of social-justice writing which can be read as grassroots advocacy. The authors write with two constant goals in mind: from the top down, they decry systemic forms of injustice; and from the bottom up, they make the experiences of victims visible. Scholarship on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, and Things as They are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, has often focused on assessing the degree to which each text concerns itself with democratic equal rights. By contrast, this project explicates how the writers collectively define social injustice for the late eighteenth century. The writers simultaneously voice their indignation against those moral and socio-economic wrongs; deconstruct assumptions of natural inferiority and social disrespect; demand extensive change to social foundations; assert the humanity of women, workers, and slaves; and empathize with other oppressed populations across their traditionally conceived genres of vindication, slave narrative, and novel. Ultimately, my work incorporates a lexicon of political philosophy, political theory, and grassroots advocacy into literary studies to show how Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin not only recognize corresponding patterns of oppression but also utilize strikingly similar literary devices and rhetorical strategies by which to combat injustice. All three authors share the same fundamental aim— to transform the dismal existence of the oppressed groups they represent.