Digital Commons Network^™

The Hidden Date In Yeats’S ‘Easter 1916’, Thomas Dilworth

English Publications

[This essay is a revised version of one with the same title published in Explicator 67:4 (Summer 2000), 236-7, copyright T.D]

Coda: Storytelling As A Cultural Context In Vona Groarke’S Hereafter, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Hereafter: The Telling Life Of Ellen O’Hara: An Interview With Vona Groarke, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

The Ghost Of John Nisbet: Hugh Macdiarmid’S First Published Work, Alan Riach

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the first published item, a short play, signed with the name 'Hugh M'acDiamid', and sets in its biographical and historical context just after the First World War and in the literary context of 1922 and international modernism, in 1922, viewing it as 'an encapsulation of its moment, and most importantly as an elegiac tribute to a friend,' arguing that 'Performing "Nisbet" as a play intimates the drama of fractured modernist selfhood implicit in the written text,' and concluding that it should be seen 'in the whole national context of Scotland finding a way towards a reconstruction of itself, a …

Macdiarmid The Spaceman: Extraterrestrial Space In Hugh Macdiarmid’S Poetry From Sangschaw To A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, Michael H. Whitworth

Studies in Scottish Literature

Looking at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), this article considers MacDiarmid’s use of science, particularly astronomy, in the 1920s. It traces known and possible sources for his scientific knowledge in books and periodicals, especially The New Age. It examines the image of light travelling through space, found in popular astronomy works by Felix Eberty and Camille Flammarion. It also compares his conception of the earth as a moving object in space with that found in poems by Thomas Hardy.

‘To “Meddle Wi’ The Thistle”’: C. M. Grieve’S Scottish Chapbook, The Little Magazine, And The Dilemmas Of Scottish Modernism, Scott Lyall

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines C. M. Grieve’s (Hugh MacDiarmid’s) most important journal enterprise, The Scottish Chapbook, which critics have assumed marks the beginning of a modernist Scottish renaissance. Against this view, this article argues that the range of contributions to the Chapbook were generally not modernist in their formal characteristics, many recalling the Victorian or fin-de-siècle periods. While the Chapbook’s brief lifespan (1922–23) was typical for modernist little magazines, the dilemmas encountered by Grieve’s periodical – restricted finances, lack of avant-garde contributors – are explained here as a side-effect of ‘localist modernism’, a concept defined by Eric B. White.

“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts Like Gulliver’S Travels In The Time Of Chatgpt?, Richard J. Haslam

Critical Humanities

The quoted phrase in the essay title comes from a passage in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels in which a Grand Academy of Lagado professor demonstrates a “wonderful Machine” that can generate scores of books “without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The essay explore the challenge for teaching classic humanities texts like Gulliver that the (perhaps not so) “wonderful Machine” called ChatGPT poses. Student Owen Terry’s Chronicle essay (May 12, 2023) identifies two crucial aspects of that challenge: “We don’t fully lean into AI and teach how to best use it, and we don’t fully prohibit it to keep …

Feminist Phenomenology And First-Person Narrative: Understanding Gender And Social Conflict In Anna Burns’ Milkman, Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur Professor

Comparative Woman

In her magnum opus Milkman (2018), Anna Burns employs a subversive and artfully crafted first-person narrative, deftly exposing the arduous and tumultuous struggles encountered by individuals who dare to defy the confines of traditional gender roles. Through a relentless and unflinching narrative, the novel fearlessly confronts the harrowing manifestations of psychological torment, the insidious spectre of relentless stalking, and the manipulative machinations of gaslighting, all the while fervently interrogating the notion of a fixed and immutable gender identity. In a relentless odyssey toward self-realization, the protagonist's journey unfurls against a backdrop of traumatic events and the unyielding pressures imposed by …

Treating Traum(A): Examples In The Tanakh That Mirror Events During The Life Of Bonhoeffer And Crimes Of The Ian Rankin Novel Knots And Crosses, Geraldine Mitchell

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) contains a wealth of stories reflecting life in the ancient world including struggles and wars that prove(d) traumatic. It is shown time and again that history repeats itself, and the stories of the Bible reappear in the modern world, both real and (crime) fictional. In this paper, traumatic experiences associated with the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as the fictional character DI John Rebus created by the crime writer Ian Rankin, are linked with similar incidents recorded in the Tanakh. The first novel in the Rebus series, Knots and Crosses, also forms the basis …

Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown

Masters Theses

In this thesis, the author addresses the colonial roots of the secondary writing classroom and the origin of standard academic English which enables strict standardized testing and writing assessment requirements that in-turn incite linguistic violence towards emerging bilingual students. The author frames her study within the framework of April Baker-Bell and Asao B. Inoue through a reflective/reflexive study of her teaching in a ninth grade writing classroom in a primarily Hispanic school district in South Texas, which is assessed by the state of Texas through STAAR. This study seeks to identify instances of linguistic violence being perpetuated in the writing …

Echoes Of The Spanish Civil War In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Alexander Retakh

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Spanish Civil War had a profound effect on the literature of the 1930s and 40s; however, it has been almost neglected in Tolkien studies. This article examines both Tolkien's potential views of the Civil War and their effect on his writings of the late 1930s such as the emerging story of Numenor. The dearth of primary sources can be rectified by studying the position on the War taken by other British Catholic intellectuals. Very likely Tolkien viewed the Civil War primarily as a religious conflict and was shaken by the highly publicized cases of anti-clerical violence. The combination of …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

Law And Its Limits: Ethical Issues In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, David S. Caudill

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The law and literature movement is frequently associated with the use of literary images of law as a point of reflection upon the ethical obligations of lawyers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—the story of a young scientist whose unorthodox experiments end up creating the famed “monster”—is not, at first glance, a likely candidate for that enterprise. However, Dr. Frankenstein’s ambition and ruthless pursuit of knowledge has become a contemporary image of science out of control and the need for ethical limitations on scientific progress. Consequently, the novel raises currently important issues of regulating science and technology. Given the lawyer’s ethical obligation …

Satire In Swift And Voltaire: Towards A Humanist Dialectic, Ola Kittaneh, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

This article examines how the Enlightenment writers Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s attitudes and works resonate with our modern writers’ concepts on the role of the humanist intellectual. Informed by Edward Said’s recent theoretical concepts on the humanist intellectual, the article compares the way the two writers use the power of satire to achieve a humanist end that focuses on the pitfalls of identitarian thinking which often leads to national or religious fanaticism. There is certainly a need for Swift and Voltaire to be repositioned in relation with the broad contours of modern writers’ notions of the intellectual. By reading the …

C.S. Lewis’S Inferno: Did The Two Queens Wish To Leave Hell?, Kyoko Yuasa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

C.S. Lewis depicts “inferno” not only as the otherworldly vision of Hell, but also as how you would choose your life in the present. In Beyond the Shadowlands, Wayne Martindale discussed, in separate chapters, how Jadis and Orual chose Hell. This presentation will add to his research a comparison of the two queens’ choice of “living in the self” and refusal to abandon themselves. In The Great Divorce and The Silver Chair, a protagonist moves out of the present world into a dimension of Inferno or Elysium, while Jadis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Orual …

Gerontology In Bryony Lavery’S A Wedding Story (2000) And Sebastian Barry’S Hinterland (2002), Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Old age is perceived as a narrative of decline, recently, an alternative perspective was introduced known as positive aging or Gerotranscendance. This paper examines ageing in Bryony Lavery’s A Wedding Story (2000) and Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002) through the theory of gerontology. Gerontology in British and Irish modern theatre, according to Giovanna Tallone (2020) and Heather Ingman (2018), is a new category in literary studies and theory. The paper aims to examine the challenges of retaining agency in old age in comparison to the notion of aging as a process of inner harmony further proving that despite the process of …

Mythprint Vol. 3 No. 5, Glen Goodknight

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

“We Could Do With A Bit More Queerness In These Parts”: An Analysis Of The Queer Against The Peculiar, The Odd, And The Strange In The Lord Of The Rings, Yvette Kisor

Journal of Tolkien Research

As developed in The Lord of the Rings, “queer” is a special term, one uniquely associated with the Hobbits, and Tolkien crafts a very specific set of resonances that embed it in provincial mistrust, a sense of real outside threat, and places within the ancient natural world that appear foundationally opposed to the ordinary realm of civilization. While Tolkien cannot be said to use the word “queer” in its more modern sense of “homosexual” or nonnormative sexual and/or gender identity, he included an owning and even embracing of the term that follows a similar pattern.

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …

C. S. Lewis And The Occult Temptation, Thomas Garrett Isham

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Twice in his life C. S. Lewis encountered—and greatly admired—authors involved in occult theory and practice.1 The first such figure was William Butler Yeats, the second, more than two decades later, Charles Williams. Lewis reacted to their occult preoccupations in quite different ways, even while acknowledging his continuing fascination with the subject.

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

The Story Of A Half Sovereign, Albert James Lewis

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

An imaginative tale, reminiscent of Dickens, by C. S. Lewis's father, Albert J. Lewis.

"A Dreadful Thing": C.S. Lewis And The Experinces Of War, Timothy J. Demy

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

From a Christian perspective, war entails the death and killing of people who are all created in the image of God and therefore have inherent dignity and incalculable worth. And yet, even after experiencing war at firsthand, C. S. Lewis believed that war is sometimes justifiable and necessary.

Like others of his generation, Lewis was deeply affected by the experience of war. He lived through the First and Second World Wars, serving as an officer on the Western Front between November 1917 and April 1918. His brother Warren (“Warnie”) was a career officer serving in the British army in both …

Blood On The Snow, Soot On The Carpet: Belief As Pedagogy In Terry Pratchett’S Hogfather, Michael A. Moir Jr.

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, children largely refuse to conform to the ideas that adults form about them as a class. While the adults of the Discworld seem to regard childhood as a time of innocence and wonder, the children who inhabit Pratchett’s universe show themselves to be violent, cynical, manipulative, and naturally skeptical of any phenomena which they cannot directly sense. As such, when the beloved seasonal figure of the Hogfather, a former Winter Solstice deity transformed over time into a gift-giving fat man with a taste for sherry and pork-pies, is assaulted by entities who want to make …

Robert Burns’ Poetic Style Through His Poetry, Songs, And Correspondence, Abigail Druckenmiller

Senior Theses

This thesis explores connections and contradictions within the songs, correspondence, and poems of Scotland’s bard, Robert Burns. A selection of works from each of these categories is presented to compare the ways Burns writes verse, lyrics, and letters. Through this thesis, I analyzed his work looking at subject matter, use of the Scots dialect, structure, and poetic devices in order to offer holistic commentary on Burns’ style in a way that includes his letters more heavily than most other Burns scholarship. Overall, I thought Burns remained a consistent man of conviction and societal criticism throughout my findings, as well as …

The One Ring Of King Solomon, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien source criticism has long been looking for the source of the One Ring in the wrong places. Neither the historical ispiration from World War II and the Atomic Bomb nor the proposed literary influences such as the Ring of the Nibelungs, Wagner's Ring, or the several examples of invisibility rings found in world literature may suffice to explain the complexity of Tolkien's unique creation. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said so easily with regards to another possible source once we survey the richness of the related legends: it is the fabled signet ring of King Solomon.

The Trauma Of Partition In Michael Longley’S Poetry Of The Irish Troubles And Murīd Al-Barghūthī’S Palestinian Exilic Poetry, Asmaa Youssef

Journal of the Faculty of Arts (JFA)

Violence, migration, and displacement shape postcolonial societies; they help in dividing colonised countries into geographical partitions. The political and communal aspects of the partition have individual and collective influences, particularly when it comes to the splitting of both Ireland and Palestine. The colonial partitions in Ireland in the wake of World War I and Palestine at the end of World War II offers an extensive study of the social and cultural heritage of state divisions, where the trauma of partition constitutes political events up until today. This paper concentrates on the political and cultural legacies of partition in Ireland and …

Vol. 42, No. 4 - Whole No. 277, Eleanor M. Farrell

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.