Browsing by Author "Mosser, Daniel W."

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Layamon's Brut and the March of Wales: Merlin, his Prophecies, and the Lex Marchia
    Helbert, Daniel Glynn (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-08)
    This study explores Layamon's engenderment of cultural unification for the explicit purposes of an Anglo-Welsh cultural resistance to the Norman overlords in the March of Wales. In essence, I examine some of the most important cultural signifiers in medieval English and Welsh culture and the methods by which the poet adapts and grafts them together to form a culturally amalgamated text—neither explicitly English nor Welsh but yet simultaneously both - and the political implications of this amalgamation. Though Laymon's methodology emanates from multiple aspects of the text, I have concentrated here on what I feel are the most explicit manifestations of this theme: Merlin, his prophecies, and the Law of the March.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Love in Conflict:D.E. Stevenson, War-Time Romance Fiction, and The English Air
    Baker, Ingrid Liv (Virginia Tech, 2014-06-23)
    D.E. Stevenson was a 20th century Scottish novelist writing romance fiction before, during, and after World War II. By analyzing her life and dissecting the genre's formulaic properties, I will show how The English Air is representative of the ways some women coped with the eras of conflict of the two World Wars. In a critical analysis of the novel itself, I will show how Stevenson's attention to Anglo-German relations propels it beyond a light-hearted example of the genre as a whole, pushing against the prescribed requirements of what romance fiction must be. Though Stevenson has never before been studied through an academic lens, her novels were popular and successful, which suggests that this kind of fiction met the needs of readers during the early to mid-20th century, while coping with the devastation and uncertainty of war.