SUNY Maritime Department of Humanities

 

Recent Submissions

  • Epic Heroism in A Tale of Two Cities
    Teague, Erin (The MacMillan Institute, 2022-01-31)
    This essay posits that Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities serves as a modern epic, highlighting enduring themes of heroism, sacrifice, and redemption. Using Louise Cowan’s expanded definition of the epic, the analysis frames Sydney Carton’s journey as that of an archetypal hero whose transformation reflects a profound mythic resonance. Beyond a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities offers an epic quest narrative, where Carton’s evolving compassion and self-sacrifice suggest a path toward spiritual renewal. The essay examines how allegorical figures such as Lucie and the nameless seamstress amplify Carton’s final act of selflessness, demonstrating the redemptive power of empathy. Set against the turmoil of the French Revolution, Dickens’ work calls readers to recognize resilience through kindness and to engage with the heroic potential of ordinary individuals.

  • More Matter for a May Morning: Evil May Day, 1517
    Holmes, Chris (2017-04)
    My seminar paper surveys accounts of Evil May Day from 1517 to The Play of Sir Thomas More (1603-04). It begins by analyzing contemporary accounts and chronicle histories. It then moves on to consider the ways in which the event has been understood by biographers as a seminal moment in the life of Thomas More. Shifting from the historical to the literary, it gestures towards the ways in which Utopia anticipates and attempts to make impossible events like Evil May Day, in large part because of Utopia's radical reimagining of the early modern calendar.. My general position is that time-reckoning is contested throughout the early modern period, and that it is both more malleable than traditionalists would allow, and more sticky than reformers would prefer. Evil May Day is an unusually potent symbol for social conflict and social cohesion, and an anniversary which lingered in early modern imaginations.

  • A Short History of New York's Two Major Parties
    Markoe, Karen (State University of New York Press, 1989)

  • The "Electric Eve": Galvanizing Women in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art and Technology
    Wosk, Julie (JAI Press Inc, 1993)

  • The Impact of Technology on Art and Art on Technology: A College Course Design
    Wosk, Julie (State University of New York, 1984)

  • Robert Caro and His Critics: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
    Markoe, Karen (Heart of Lakes Publishing, 1988)

  • Morrissaga: Sigurd the Volsung
    Spatt, Hartley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)

  • Nostromo's Chronology: The Shaping of History
    Spatt, Hartley (Texas Tech Press, 1976)

  • Mary Shelley's Last Men: The Truth of Dreams
    Spatt, Hartley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)