Digital Commons Network^™

Maria Susanna Cummins' London Letters: April 1860, Heidi Lm Jacobs

Heidi LM Jacobs

Within scholarship on Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866), there are two recurrent phrases: "author of the best-selling novel The Lamplighter" and "little is known about her life." Despite the early contextualization of Cummins by various scholars, most of the recent critical work on Cummins has centered on her first and best-known novel, The Lamplighter (1854). Very little critical attention has been paid to Cummins's life, her career as a publishing author, her lesser known novels, her periodical publications, and her archived letters. Written in the weeks preceding the publication in the United States and Britain of her third novel, El …

What Did He Just Say? Did She Really Just Say That?: Vignettes Of Racism In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Claudia Rankine And The Poetry Of Protest, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Hogging The Limelight: The Queen's Wake And The Rise Of Celebrity Authorship, Jason Goldsmith

Jason Goldsmith

In the following essay, Goldsmith argues that The Queen's Wake is commentary on the literary name branding inaugurated by the periodical culture of Hogg's day. For Goldsmith, the "crisis of reception" staged in the poem--sixteenth-century provincial bards in a first encounter with royal spectacle--is not unlike the uneasy celebrity Hogg experienced as the Ettrick Shepherd of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Courtroom And Classroom Across The Curriculum: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Jason Goldsmith

Jason Goldsmith

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde draws on Robert Louis Stevensons intimate knowledge of Victorian legal culture knowledge Stevenson acquired while studying law at the University of Edinburgh. (Although he was called to the Scottish bar in 1875, he abandoned the legal profession and never practiced it.) Its trace can be found in the work's title, main characters, and narrative structure: the title suggests a legal action; Mr. Utterson is the legal representative of Henry Jekyll, who is himself both a doctor of law (LLD) and a doctor of Civil laws (DCL); and the final two chapters …

Fictional Journalists: News Work In American Novels, Bonnie Brennen

Bonnie Brennen

No abstract provided.

Recent Research And Publications On Plain Language, Russell Willerton

Russell Willerton

Profiles Of Plain-Language Practice, Russell Willerton

Russell Willerton

John Clare And The Art Of Politics, Jason Goldsmith

Jason Goldsmith

Jason Goldsmith's contribution to Volume 30 of the John Clare Society Journal. Article focuses on Clares poem, 'Don Juan' and its place in the University classroom.

Diversifying Shakespeare, Ruben Espinosa

Ruben Espinosa

Immersion In Esl Culture: Oral Output Through Acting, Chamkaur Gill

Chamkaur Gill

Many ESL learners exhibit diffidence in situations where they are required to speak in English. They retreat into their shells because of the threat of embarrassment and a loss of face which are consequences of making errors in grammar and pronunciation. One effective method of inducing them to speak is drama. By putting them in imaginary situations and creating make-believe identities, teachers can give them incentives to participate in oral interaction, thereby increasing the quantity of speech produced and providing increased practice in speaking in the target language. Classroom activities imbued with drama are often enjoyable and evidence indicates that …

Mary Of Nemmigen, With Its Dutch Analogue Mariken Van Nieumeghen, Clifford Davidson, Ton Broos, Martin Walsh

Clifford Davidson

Conquering A Wilderness: Destruction And Development On The Great Plains In Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

Jules Ami Sandoz came to America in 1881 at the age of 22. Following a three-year sojourn in northeastern Nebraska, he headed further west, settling in the recently surveyed region northwest of the Nebraska Sandhills. In Old Jules, the biography of her pioneer father, Mari Sandoz presented a character filled with conflicts and contradictions. Pitted against Jules's dynamic vision of community growth was his self-centered and destructive nature. Well aware of the more unsavory qualities exhibited by her father. Sandoz nonetheless maintained that he and others like him were necessary to the development of the West. This recognition did not …

Idleness Working: The Discourse Of Love's Labor From Ovid Through Chaucer And Gower, Gregory Sadlek

Gregory M Sadlek

Inspired by the critical theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Idleness Working is a groundbreaking study of key works in the Western literature of love from Classical Rome to the late Middle Ages. The study focuses on the evolution of the ideologically-saturated discourse of love's labor contained in these works and thus explores them in the context of ancient and medieval theories of labor and leisure, which themselves are seen to evolve through the course of Western history. What emerges from this study is a fresh appreciation and deepened understanding of such well-known classics of love literature as Ovid's Ars amatoria …

“Turning To The Stranger In Shakespeare’S Henry V”, Ruben Espinosa

Ruben Espinosa

This collection is currently under contract with MLA. With a twenty-first century American student demographic in mind, I aim to interrogate how attention to the negotiation of alterity in Henry V registers Shakespeare’s keen attention to the role of the immigrant/alien/stranger/other in the nation-building enterprise of the play, and also how it reveals the play’s rich cultural currency for today’s underrepresented students, whose own epistemological standpoints are informed by issues of immigration, xenophobia, and the imagined value of homogeneity.

Spenser And The Human, Ayesha Ramachandran, Melissa Sanchez

Ayesha Ramachandran

A special issue of Spenser Studies, guest edited with Melissa E. Sanchez. Forthcoming in 2016.

Beckett's Masculinity: New Interpretations Of Beckett In 21st C, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

From Murphy to Rockaby to Worstward Ho, Beckett’s Masculinity illustrates how Samuel Beckett’s work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett’s work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. Beckett’s Masculinity shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century …

Britain Colonized: Hollywood's Appropriation Of British Literature, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Britain Colonized analyzes how and why filmmakers use clichéd Hollywood formulas and American cultural standards when adapting British literature. The films discussed in this book are evidence of the way one nation remakes another, often in the image of itself or what it needs the Other to be (as the British Empire once did). Reterritorialization on the part of Hollywood manifests American cultural and capitalist hegemony over the English speaking world. Britain Colonized identifies the phenomena portending the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.

A Sublime Event: Gordon Craig's Uber-Marionette In Samuel Beckett's Late Drama, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Samuel Beckett: A Casebook On Modern Dramatists, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Garland reference library of the humanities - Casebooks on modern dramatists ; vol. 25

The Irish Novel At The End Of The Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, And Power, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This text interprets a wide range of Irish novels of the 1990s, focusing on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. It looks at how identities do, or don't, conform to familiar notions of sexuality, gender and culture and goes on to say that Irish identity is a matter of economics.

Address, Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis

Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees--beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage …

Advocating For Mother Earth In The Undergraduate Classroom: Uniting Twenty-First Century Technologies, Local Resources, Art, And Activism To Explore Our Place In Nature, Christina Triezenberg, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

Christina Triezenberg

Despite the growing evidence of humanity’s impact on the natural world and the urgent need to shape citizens who understand the impact that their choices and actions have on their local and global environments, colleges and universities throughout the United States have been slow to add environmental education as a core component of their undergraduate curricula. Harnessing our shared interest in environment issues and the humanities, we designed and taught an experimental course in environmental literature for the honors program at Western Michigan University that we hope will become a template of what is possible in postsecondary environmental education. Using …

Creating Theatre In Hong Kong : Transforming Students’ Perceptions Of English Learning, Michelle Reyes Raquel, Sivanes Phillipson

Dr. RAQUEL Michelle, Reyes

This study explored the influence of socially constructed learning concepts of 23 tertiary Hong Kong ESL students in a theatre production. To facilitate this exploration, this paper identified the socially constructed learning concepts that influenced second language learning of Chinese students in a Hong Kong tertiary institution, and investigated whether these concepts were enhanced in any way in this unique learning environment. Reflective journals, pre and postproduction in-depth interviews and questionnaires were used to collect data before, during and after the theatre production. The two directors and four students (two from the cast and two from the production team) completed …

"Some Perilous Stuff": What The Religious Reviewers Really Said About The Scarlet Letter, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

"The Livery Of Religion": Reconciling Swift's Argument And Project, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

Discusses Jonathan Swift's essays `An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity' and `Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners' with their focus on Christianity and the values of the society. Christian hypocrisy; Power and influence of the Church; Reader's perception of Swift's work.

Hawthorne And The Christian Review: Three New Discoveries, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader, Michael Elliott, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial …

Writers In Retrospect: The Rise Of American Literary History, 1875-1910, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills"—from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators—and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910. In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities—including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, …

Esl Students In The Public Speaking Classroom: A Guide For Instructors, 2nd Edition., Robbin Crabtree, David Sapp

David Alan Sapp

As American universities become increasingly diverse, instructors must know how to teach all their students effectively. ESL Students in the Public Speaking Classroom contains practical advice and specific techniques from experts Robbin Crabtree and David Sapp, help instructors to both understand linguistic diversity in the classroom, and to leverage it as a teaching asset. This guide contains helpful classroom activities at the end of each chapter, along with two new chapters (on technology and community-engaged public speaking) and an extensive annotated bibliography for further reading.