Digital Commons Network^™

Idiomatic Surrogacy And (Dis)Ability In Dombey And Son, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than …

Walt Whitman At The Aurora: A Model For Journalistic Attribution, Kevin Mcmullen, Stefan Schöberlein

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is …

Scholars Day Program Of Events 2018, Carl Goodson Honors Program

Scholars Day

No abstract provided.

The Relevance And Resiliency Of The Humanities, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes …

When Choice Is An Illusion: Suppression Of Women In William Styron's "Holocaust" Novel, William Sewell

Research & Publications

This article examines how Styron shapes Sophie's Choice through Southern Gothic literary techniques. In particular, we will explore the development of Sophie, who throughout the story served as the Gothic archetype of the "damsel in distress." She is a heroine who lacks agency,a character with "a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued– frequently." Ultimately, the harsh suppression of female identity entrenched in Gothic literature contributes to the "unimaginable pain" that forces female characters like Sophie to make their "choice." Finally, we will examine how Sophie, controlled throughout her life, really does not have a real "choice" when …

Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the …

The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

Cumulative Index Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture (1999-), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

“All Data Is Credit Data,” Or, On Close Reading As A Reciprocal Process In Digital Knowledge Environments, John Hunter

Faculty Journal Articles

The new knowledge environments of the digital age are oen described as places where we are all closely read, with our buying habits, location, and identities available to advertisers, online merchants, the government, and others through our use of the Internet. This is represented as a loss of privacy in which these entities learn about our activities and desires, using means that were unavailable in the pre-digital era. This article argues that the reciprocal nature of digital networks means 1) that the privacy issues that we face online are not radically different from those of the pre-Internet era, and 2) …

Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …

Meir B. Elijah Of Norwich And The Margins Of Memory, Miriamne Ara Krummel

English Faculty Publications

"Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory" is a study of Meir of Norwich's use of acrostics to record his English Jewish identity. In the face of the 1290 Expulsion, which follows upon many episodes of anti-Jewish violence and antipathy, Meir attempts to have his name recorded in perpetuity. This essay details some of those moments of violence in order to give voice to Meir's world and to clarify Meir's desire to be remembered.

Balancing Public And Private Lives In The Letters Of Lucretia Coffin Mott And Florence Kelley, Beverly Wilson Palmer

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Despite their obvious differences, Lucretia Coffin Mott and Florence Kelley share some striking similarities. As prominent women reformers, they embraced three passionate concerns. First, they battled injustice to women. Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) helped organize the historic Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 and constantly spoke out for women’s rights, not only at the ballot box but in marriage, courts of law, and the workplace. Florence Kelley (1859–1932) likewise fought for both political and economic equality for women. She worked for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, and throughout her career as director …

Bias And The Teachable Moment: Revisiting A Teacher Narrative, Darren Crovitz

Faculty Articles

Such responsibility may be vital for English teachers, especially, as we strive to establish communities of writers and spaces for critical thinking and conversation. When I sat down to write about this experience, I saw it as an opportunity to discuss a taboo situation and its positive aftermath, with the aim of demonstrating how it might be possible to use such events as points of departure in creating engaging writing assignments.

Douglass Liaisons: The Female Correspondents Of Frederick Douglass, 1842-52, Leigh Fought

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

For the past twenty years, historians have recognized the role that '1' women played in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. Works by Gerda Lerner, Nancy Hewitt,jean Fagan Yellin, Clare Taylor, and Maria Diedrich, among others, have demonstrated that women spoke, organized, promoted, and wrote on behalf of the movement to end slavery. Yet, the published volumes of the Frederick Douglass Papers have obscured that fact. Although women supported and often saved Douglass throughout his career, their voices have been conspicuously absent from the seven volumes of the Douglass Papers. With the impending publication of the first correspondence volume, which covers the …

Recent Editions--Summer 2003

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This quarterly bibliography of current documentary editions published on subjects in the fields of American and British history, literature, and culture is generally restricted to scholarly first editions of English language works.

The Beleaguered Widowof West Bilney: Review Of The Remembrances Of Elizabeth Freke. Edited By Raymond A. Anselment. Camden Fifth Series., Aki Chandra Li Beam

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The manuscripts of Elizabeth Freke's reminiscences are contained in two commonplace books held by the British Ubrary. The larger "white vellum" volume, which includes the earlier reminiscence, also contains letters, recipes, snatches of poetry and history, a survey of the West Bilney estate, and some inventories. The second "brown wallpaper" volume, begun some ten years after the first, also contains copies of rental agreements, land deeds, and financial transactions. These two manuscripts were donated to the British Ubrary in 1941 by Lady Mary Carbury, a descendant by marriage of Elizabeth Freke. Early in the twentieth century, Carbury published the only …

Documentary Editing, Volume 24, Number 4, December 2002.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

The Other Millennium: Review Of Yesterdays Future: The Twentieth Century Begins. Michael E. Stevens, Ed., George W. Geib

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The widespread public interest and accompanying media hype surrounding the millennium celebrations of December 31, 1999, produced several interesting projects among historians and documentary editors. One of those is this slender volume, published in 1999 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Yesterday's Future uses the pen and eye of the print media of a century ago to look at one state's responses to the coming of a new century. Intended as part of a series, "Voices of the Wisconsin Past," the book is a selection of nearly one hundred reports and opinions offered to Wisconsin newspaper readers a hundred …

Documentary Editing, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2001.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

Documentary Editing, Volume 22, Number 4, December 2000.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald, James L.W. West Iii

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Anyone who has written historical notes for a scholarly edition has learned to spot "glossable" references in contemporary texts. Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, for example, will s0meday need annotations about the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s and about Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stempel, contestants whose lives were ruined by the disclosures. Don DeLillo's Underworld will require a description of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, along with some information about]. Edgar Hoover's cross-dressing and his liaison with Clyde Tolson. Lee Smith's novels will need identifications of Post Toasties and of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs (whose big hit song …

Documentary Editing, Volume 22, Number 3, September 2000.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

Recent Editions--December 1999

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This quarterly feature provides an annotated bibliography of current documentary editions published on subjects in the fields of American and English history, literature, and culture. It is generally restricted to first editions of English-language works edited from manuscript.

Documentary Editing, Volume 21, Number 3, September 1999.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography Of Theory And Criticism In Postcolonial Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Slaney Chadwick Ross

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Chaucer's Epic Statement And The Political Milieu Of The Late Fourteenth Century, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Sets Knight's Tale in the tradition of political verse, and argues that the tale encourages peace in the domestic and foreign affairs of Chaucer's England. The hortatory, heroic style of the tale presents Theseus as a peace-making ideal, pertinent to the French wars of the time. The juxtaposition of the Miller's Tale with the Knight's Tale encourages placid relations with the peasant class.

Several critics, both neoclassic and modern, have observed that) as to kind, the Knight's Tale is an epic fiction. Characteristically, the poems we call medieval epics are what Ezra Pound also says an epic must be in …

The Mcguffey Readers, Louise Lively

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The textbook, an important factor in public school education, is nowhere so wonderfully developed as in the United States. It occupies a more important position in our educational system than it does in the systems of many foreign countries. In fact, most of the teaching in our schools today revolves around the textbook - the cause of much criticism by many writers. They deplore the fact that both our teachers and pupils are dependent on textbooks.