Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Table Of Contents, John Countryman, Rand Brandes

Irish Studies South

No abstract provided.

William Blake: The Misunderstood Artist Of The 19th Century, Jeannie Campe

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The purpose of this project is to examine the artistic vision of William Blake as well as his impact on literature. William Blake was one of the most misunderstood artists of his time, which led to a life of isolation and poverty. Determined to follow his “Divine Image,” Blake remained unappreciated until his twilight years, although he was still virtually unknown except for a small group of followers. William Blake is important today because of his innovative work stemming from his frustration with standard poetic tradition and techniques. This project explores Blake’s collection of poems entitled Songs of Innocence and …

The [Ftaires!] To Remembrance: Language, Memory, And Visual Rhetoric In Chaucer's House Of Fame And Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Shannon Danae Kilgore

Honors Program Theses

Geoffrey Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame explores virtual technologies of memory and reading, which are similar to the themes explored in Danielewski's House of Leaves. "[ftaires!]", apart from referencing the anecdotal (and humorous) misspelling of "stairs" in House of Leaves, is one such linguistically and visually informed phenomenon that speaks directly to how we think about, and give remembrance to, our own digital and textual culture. This paper posits that graphic design, illustrations, and other textual cues (such as the [ftaires!] mispelling in House of Leaves] have a subtle yet powerful psychological influence on our reading and …

Beowulf: God, Men, And Monster, Emily Bartz

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem translated into Modern English in 2000 by Samus Heaney. My paper hypothesis that the central conflict of Beowulf is the struggle between the decentralising and supernatural ways of the ancients (Shield Sheafson, Gendel, and Grendel's Mother) and the centralising and corporeal values of modern heroes (Hrothgar, Beowulf, and Wiglaf). The poet traces a definitive move away from the ancient's pagan heroic values to his own Christian heroic values. However, as in the poet's contemporary culture, certain pagan traditions, such as familial fidelity, persist in Beowulf. The poet's audience, the Anglo-Saxons, honoured their pagan ancestors …

Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …

The Auchinleck Manuscript: A Study In Manuscript Production, Scribal Innovation, And Literary Value In The Early 14th Century, Tricia Kelly George

Doctoral Dissertations

The Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of Scotland Advocates 19.2.1) was written in London by six scribes and contains 44 extant texts. This manuscript is an early 14^th century English manuscript (c. 1331) best known for its many unique and first versions of texts, such as the first version of the Breton lay Sir Orfeo, a Breton adaptation of the Orpheus legend. It is also the first literary manuscript we have that is written almost entirely in English after the Norman Conquest. My research provides answers to some of the perennial questions raised by scholars concerning this manuscript: the …

Mcwilliams, Ellen. Women And Exile In Contemporary Irish Fiction, Maureen T. Reddy

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge

Master's Theses

This study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that the novel participates in a Gothic subversion of the archetypal hero’s journey. The novel employs Gothic devices to supplant heroic narremes. As the novel progresses, both Dorian (as a type of hero-character) and the narrative repeatedly deny or subvert the normative idea of heroism later reified in Joseph Campbell’s archetypal theory. While Campbell’s hero attempts to secure and universalize a heterosocial story, Wilde’s hero is recuperated through a reconfiguring of normative failure as queer success. What is ostensibly a failure of the normative hero to achieve his quest …

"Why Don't You Speak Ordinary English?" She Said Coldly: Linguistic Rebellion In "The Prussian Officer" And Lady Chatterley's Lover, Nicole R. Koroch

All NMU Master's Theses

Criticism of D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tends to focus on issues of sexual awakening, the natural world, and figurations of gender and power. However, little examination has been done on the instances of language as a rejection of authority through the character of Mellors, a returning soldier and a gamekeeper. In the novel, Mellors speaks both a “broad” vernacular as well as “proper” English and this linguistic variance reveals two significant aspects of Mellors’ character. Here, I will implement Jacques Derrida’s theory of differance to show that just as the “a” in differance, as a graphic …

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …

A Document In Death And Madness: A Cultural And Interdisciplinary Study Of Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings On The Death Of Opelia, Jennifer Leigh Tipton

Dissertations

In the nineteenth century the character of Ophelia transformed from a minor role in Hamlet into one of the great muses of the Romantic period. Ophelia’s rise to an archetype of feminine madness was not a result of Shakespeare’s pen alone, but of the accumulation of interpretations of her character from actresses, artists, critics, writers, musicians, and social attitudes toward women. This paper focuses on nineteenth-century interpretations of her death, specifically art song.

A brief survey of the nineteenth-century European cultural and social climate pertaining to Ophelia is included in the paper:

*Shakespeare in France and Germany

*Nineteenth-Century Actresses in …

Wit In The Early Modern Literary Marketplace, Danny Childers

Dissertations

The concept of wit undergoes a transformation in the sixteenth century from having associations with the intellect, with its cultural productions, and with classical study towards more direct associations with the writing trade and with clever wordplay. This transition, as I will demonstrate, relates specifically to tensions between humanist culture and the early modern literary marketplace. This dissertation begins by examining the early sixteenth century humanists' concept of wit and goes on to examine the presentation of the concept by four late sixteenth century writers—John Lyly (1553-1606), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Robert Greene (1560-1592), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). I argue that …

Eruptive Baroque Hysteria In English Neoclassical Literature, Royce Lee Best

Masters Theses

"Eruptive Baroque Hysteria in English Neoclassical Literature" explores the persistence and intrusion of early-seventeenth-century baroque aesthetics in otherwise bourgeois, neoclassical works of the English Restoration. These "baroque eruptive" moments, I argue, can be read as particular instances that articulate historically-specific anxieties felt by aristocrats, including the restructuring of the family unit and the dual appeal and abhorrence of continental Catholicism. The introduction discusses the poetry of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester; chapter 1 discusses William Wycherley's The Country Wife; chapter 2 discusses Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd; and the conclusion chapter probes into several early eighteenth-century works.

Detecting Arguments: The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Nineteenth--Century British Detective Fiction, Katherine Anders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation argues that within the mid- to late-nineteenth-century British detective novel, the abductive arguments used to build circumstantial evidence (indirect evidence), or "clues," form the method of the detective, but those arguments are not logically certain. In order to resolve the mystery of the detective novel, to discover how the crime was committed and who committed it, circumstantial evidence proves insufficiently conclusive, so confessions, a more logically conclusive (direct) form of evidence, begins to appear frequently in detective novels. Confessions conclusively confirm the events of the crime, the guilt of the criminal, and reveal the inner workings of the …

Beyond The Pages: The Significance Of The Social Self Proposed In Jane Austen's Persuasion, Veronica Grupico

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper focuses on Austen's novel Persuasion and how she rejects the Romantic notion of the self defined by individualism, which leads to the breakdown of society. Instead of the Romantic self, with its emphasis on self-examination, retrospection, and emotion, Austen advocates for an older notion of the self, a view based in eighteenth-century notions of social networks, mutual responsibility, and the moral function of emotion. Persuasion links Romanticism’s self, which was popular at the time that Austen was writing, with the breakdown of society, arguing that not just social stability but much-needed social vitality depends on the interdependence and …

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, And Queer Books, Frederick D. King

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books studies the multimedial art of decorated books of the British Aesthetic Movement (1880-1900). Incorporating textual scholarship and queer theory, the project considers how the language of sexual intercourse, as it was expressed through Aestheticism’s conception of Eros, influenced a textual intercourse between literary content and bibliographical design. Paying particular attention to the influence of book design, typography, and illustration, the decorated book is reread as a total work of art that is realised when diverse concepts of beauty and eroticism are bound together in a single edition of a book. The …

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In’T: Using Graphic Shakespeare Texts To Create Meaningful Engagement In The High School Classroom, Eric Kallenborn

All Student Theses

This thesis covers the attempt to successfully motivate and connect with high school students by giving them the option of reading a graphic form of Hamlet instead of the original text. This research was conducted to not only dispel the myth that comics and graphic novels are juvenile and adolescent but to also explain the benefits of such texts to educators and administrators.

For this research, 10^th graders were assigned Hamlet and were allowed to select the graphic text over the traditional text, allowing for student buy-in from the selection. Students also took part in a project that …

Review Of Joseph Conrad’S Critical Reception, Richard Ruppel

English Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception by John J. Peters.

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

Charleston Library Conference

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

Almagro & Claude [Supplemental Material], Wendy Fall

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.