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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Middlebrow Readers And Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich’S A Lantern In Her Hand, And The Popular Fiction Market, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Along with repositioning Cather in a new reading context, this essay aims to bring Aldrich and her novel into literary history (and college classrooms) by putting her work into dialogue with Cather’s. I do not, however, elevate Aldrich to the status of elite artist, a move that she herself would disavow. Instead, I seek to revalue the middlebrow as a mode of authorship, circulation, and reading for the literary history of the American West and to place Ántonia and Lantern together on that oft-scorned terrain. When Aldrich is taken note of in Western literary history, she receives only glancing attention …

The Ideology Of Cather’S Catholic Progressivism: Death Comes For The Archbishop, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather’s fiction about the Catholic mission in the Hispanic Southwest, is a historical novel, but one that approaches its subject in an elusive, teasing manner. The text incorporates the new primitivism, carrying with it a tolerant receptivity to Indian culture, racial heterogeneity, and Catholicism--all of which are aspects of American culture that narrow definitions of American progress would have excluded. Nonetheless, Cather cannot finally combine, incorporate, or reconcile her own perspectives on progress, and her open text shades into an evasive text

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 …