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    Representations of American Identity and Political Expression in Popular Soccer Discourse
    (Wheaton College. (Norton, Mass.), 2023-05-20) Bennett, Christopher
    This thesis addresses the question of how American soccer identity is represented in popular discourse, in order to better understand the intersection of mediated sports, culture, and marketplace conflict. Grant Wahl’s archived digital publications for Sports Illustrated and best selling books The Beckham Experiment and Masters of Modern Soccer were rhetorically analyzed to identify explicit and implicit argumentative language in popular soccer conversations. Sut Jhally's theories of the commodification of sports are employed to understand how argumentative language functions to construct American identity in soccer spaces. This research finds that popular discourse produces, circulates, and consumes "American" as a negative brand in soccer, often associating it with hubris and incompetence and masking larger economic inequities.
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    Chaucer’s Missing Manuscripts.
    (Wheaton College. (Norton, Mass.), 2021-09) Green, Adrienne
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    Derivation and meaning: a computer-assisted investigation into etymological and semantic connections in English
    (Wheaton College. (Norton, Mass.), 2022-05-16) Kumar, Caiden Mitchell
    An important subfield within philology is etymology, the study of words and their origins. This thesis combines philology and etymology with computational techniques to quantify the large-scale relationships between words in the English language. Specifically, using English headwords, definitions, and etymology data from Wiktionary, graphs were constructed of English words and their relationships in etymology and meaning. These graphs were then examined to test for any correlation between etymological and semantic associations in the graphs. No clear correlation was found, meaning relationships in etymology are not a reliable guide to relationships in meaning in the English language.
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    Pregnancy and Childbirth in Victorian Literature.
    (Wheaton College. (Norton, Mass.), 2022) Merrill, Jordyn
    This honors thesis reviews the development of the fields of obstetrics and gynecology during the nineteenth century, and the subsequent changes that occurred in the cultural understanding of the female body. Women, once regarded as naturally hedonistic, were instead refigured as undesiring, supportive, and spiritual. Motherhood became their primary purpose. This mostly had an impact on middle-class mothers, who were depicted as saintly. Working-class women, on the other hand, assumed the bodily aspects middle-class women were expected to reject. In order to draw out this progression, I explore three novels that respond to the trope of the ideal mother.