Digital Commons Network^™

(Special Section) The Hymn As Protest Song In England And Its Empire, 1819–1919, Oskar Cox Jensen

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hymns played a role in envoicing the politics of protest in England long before their integration in the established Church – and do so to this day. Yet it was nineteenth-century radical movements that embraced the hymn as in many ways the ideal musical form. From the bloody field of Peterloo to the secularising South Place Society, from the mass meetings of Chartists to the top-down productions of the Fabian socialists, the century resounded with this increasingly familiar music.

Many writers laid claim to the rhetoric of the hymn to advance causes from abolitionism to solidarity with Poles exiled to …

Review Of T. S. Eliot And The Christian Tradition, Stephen Barber

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Benjamin G. Lockerd, ed., T. S. Eliot and the Christian Tradition (Lanham, Maryland, 2014). viii + 358 pages. $49.99. ISBN: 9781611477139.

C. S. Lewis And George Herbert’S The Temple, Don W. King

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

This essay explores how George Herbert's The Temple serves as one of the most important “spiritual directors” in the poems, letters, and late prose of C. S. Lewis.

Jack Lewis And His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study Of Instructive Affinities, D. G. Kehl

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

When he was a student at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend expressing his great admiration of and enthusiasm for the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly The House of the Seven Gables and Transformation (British title of The Marble Faun). This study examines the parallels between these two kindred spirits and their works, focusing on their similar worldviews, their personal backgrounds and lifestyles, and the "Ultimates" they both pondered. It discusses common themes in their works, such as myth, scientism, and "the great power of blackness." Their respective attitudes toward these issues and others, such as faith, …

A Dangerous Neutrality: Howard Campbell In Mother Night, Kathryn Alderman

Outstanding Gateway Papers

In this review of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, the author determines whether the book should be required reading for English 101 classes. Students, in a generation of apolitical views and the common belonging in middle ground, are often assigned books that do not seem to grasp their attention needed to take anything away from the reading experience. Mother Night has many ways of grabbing and holding this attention while displaying the dangers of running away from history. The author concludes that Mother Night should be required for all English 101 classes.

Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

One of America’s greatest authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a time of rapid scientific, material, and intellectual advancement. However, unlike many of his peers who went all-in on utopian reform movements, Hawthorne took a cautious and reserved approach to progress even though he supported the idea abstractly. Using six tales written acrossHawthorne’s career, this work will examine what each has to say about Hawthorne’s belief in human nature and why he takes such a skeptical position against movements aiming to fundamentally reshape people and society. The tales from the 1830s, “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black …

Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to posit a dynamic theory of literary realism that accounts not only for the commonly understood “historical” realisms of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but for the more fluid realisms that arise in the modern and postmodern eras. Realisms of this sort are still understood to be expressions of particular, sociohistorical eras, but these expressions must be understood to be subject to material change in society. This paper breaks, then, with traditional Marxist conceptions of realism as the direct response to enlightenment thought and early capitalism, and instead argues for traceable eruptions of realism throughout …

Feelings Of Fallenness: Affect And Gender In Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A famous poem by Coventry Patmore articulated Victorian expectations for women: to be “the angel in the house.” The woman was the arbiter of morality, spiritual guide and helpmeet, and was worshiped almost as a goddess of purity— and goddesses need no legal protections. Chastity and submission were not only expected, but demanded of Victorian women. After all, these qualities were scientifically inherent in women (to the Victorian mind); the biological imperative of reproduction and maternity rendered women’s bodies a sacred space and prevented their minds from developing as a man’s could.The twin forces of Victorian patriarchal science and religion …

James Monroe Whitfield's "The Vision": Apocalypse And The Black Periodical Press, Magdalena Zapędowska

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

The pessimism of James Monroe Whitfield's long, only partially preserved poem "The Vision" is possibly without parallel in antebellum African American literature. Mobilizing African American and broader American culture's preoccupation with the end of the world, Whitfield turns to allegory and apocalyptic prophecy to represent the massive scale of human sacrifice in a nation founded on enslavement and colonial domination. "The Vision" theorizes the regimes of oppression shaping the antebellum social order through what I term an apocalyptic aesthetic of annihilation, which emerges from the interaction of the poem's thematic, affective, and formal components. This aesthetic is concerned with imminent …

Gothic Determinism: The Interplay Of Atavism And Hope In "The Old Nurse's Story" And "The Fall Of The House Of Usher", Madison Howland

English Senior Capstone

No abstract provided.

A Love Letter From Very Far Away, Jacqueline Vogtman

Nelle

pp. 87-102

Contemplative Correspondence And The Muscle Of Metaphor: An Interview With Rev. Karen Hering, Christopher Basgier

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Karen Hering, a Unitarian Universalist minister serving Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota, is author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within. In her book, Rev. Hering leads readers through the practice of contemplative correspondence, which she describes as “a spiritual practice of writing rooted in theology and story; drawn to the surface by questions, prompts, and ellipses; and most fully experienced when its words are accepted as invitations into conversations and relationships with others” (xx). A committed Unitarian Universalist myself, I first learned about Rev. Hering and her book from my own minister, Rev. Chris …

Contributors, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Contributors

A New Poem By Anna Letitia Barbauld, Scott Krawczyk, William Mccarthy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This short discovery article presents information pertaining to a previously unknown poem of four lines by Anna Letitia Barbauld. The poem is housed at Duke University in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Looking Beyond The Enlightenment Mother-Teacher: Anna Letitia Barbauld And The Eighteenth-Century Maternal Ideal, Kathryn J. Ready

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Based on her popular prose writing for children, liberal Dissenter Anna Letitia Barbauld has been cited as a prominent example of the Enlightenment mother-teacher associated with the influence of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, close reading of her poetry reveals a complex maternal ideal in operation that was in part that of the Enlightenment mother-teacher, in part a modified form of republican motherhood, a strategic composite drawn, on the one hand, from classical republican discourse, which promoted the woman’s role in fostering patriotism and liberty, and, on the other, from contemporary defences of commerce, which highlighted women’s civilizing and …

Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …

Julia, Macie Bridge

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Historical References And Literary Allusions In Ahab’S Wife, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

In Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel Ahab’s Wife, books and their details of remembered passages are embedded in consciousness, especially in times of crisis. Ahab’s Wife is at once a sure-fire page-turner worthy of status as book club selection as well as a deeper text, overtly paying homage to Melville’s dense narrative. Moreover, this novel invites at least one re-reading and becomes more appealing with further study. The richly allusive text is powerful not simply for its grand scope of female adventure--one that the New York Times asserted was overdone optimism--but for its layered and interwoven references to works …

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

Atmosphere And Religious Experience In American Transcendentalism, Thomas Sorensen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I propose a new intellectual history of how the aesthetic obtains religious value in the American literary tradition. According to the account that prevails from Perry Miller to Tracy Fessenden, the Transcendentalists collapse scripture and literature into a single secular category. I argue instead that the Transcendentalists redraw the distinction along aesthetic criteria. A text’s sacred status has little to do with who wrote it when, and everything to do with a particular aesthetic quality expressive of divine inspiration. Scholarship has neglected two concepts instrumental to this development: the religious sentiment and atmosphere. Unitarian and Calvinist norms held all religious …

"Gazing On Vacancy" : Charlotte Bronte's Critical Portrayal Of Church Life In Shirley, Emily Pataki Hamburger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study endeavors to explore how the novelist Charlotte Brontë preferred inner religious experience to institutional religious conformity in her own life and how she promoted her own unique spiritual style in her novel Shirley (1849). Bronte was brought up in a religious home in an era obsessed with religion. Christianity seemed to have a stranglehold over small and large societal matters in Yorkshire, England where Shirley is set, but yet something within the spiritual community was lacking. The Luddite revolutions occurring in Yorkshire are a backdrop to the interior revolutions taking place in the minds of the characters Caroline …

A “Defect Of Justice”: Congregationalism, The Calvinist Problem, And The Unitarian Solution In Sylvester Judd's Margaret, Benjamin M. Woods

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop …

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities In Elizabeth Gaskell’S Social Problem Novels, Hunter Nicole Duncan

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation rewrites the representations of disability, impairment, and illness throughout Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction. The project’s four chapters examine blindness in Mary Barton, pregnancy, deformity, and typhus fever in Ruth, tuberculosis and hysteria in North and South, and hysteria and disfigurement in Sylvia’s Lovers, in order to intervene with disability in its literary, historical, medical, and social contexts by uniting methodologies ranging from Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, feminist theory, and Victorian studies. By looking at the novel and rethinking it through Disability Studies, this dissertation joins contemporary theory with historical context, refreshing scholarly attention toward under-represented bodies and minds. This …

Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article recaps my symposium presentation, where I argue that feminist organizing strategies are central to healing our society and creating restorative justice from my perspective as a survivor of occupational injury, battering, and criminalization for self-defense. This includes the creation of Free Battered Texas Women. We prefer to think of ourselves as survivor-advocates who use a variety of tactics to empower ourselves, incarcerated battered women, and citizens. These strategies include pedagogy; poetry and other written forms; art; and legislative advocacy. I blend this grassroots activism with feminist disability theory, radical feminist theory, feminist ethnography, and feminist criminology.

The Enlightenment: John Messlier, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph: Today many exceptions seem obvious relevant to the historic advance of secularism from the Renaissance to the Reformation followed by the Enlightenment. However, a basic transition seems to have sustained itself over many decades in the modern recovery of religious disbelief ultimately derivative of pre-Socratic philosophy consolidated by Aristotle. For example, the two years of 1610-1611 seem to have set the stage for all three of the later historic epochs, the Renaissance followed by the Reformation and Enlightenment. The King James translation of the Bible in 1611 might have been a major achievement of the English Reformation just …

Ua37/44 Faculty Personal Papers Gordon Wilson, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Personal papers of Gordon Wilson.

Erotic Devotional Poetry: Resisting Neoplatonism In Protestant Christianity, Sarah M. Pruis

Honors Projects

A genre best known for its appearance in Eastern religions, erotic devotional poetry uses sensual imagery to access an experience of the divine. Historically, many Christian traditions, excluding the mystical ones, have pushed back against such literature, seeing it as an impure model that degrades divinity by association with the physical, especially in the specific physical ritual of sex. This stance is a hallmark of Protestant Christianity. The idea of a dichotomy and hierarchy between soul and body, though, comes not from theology but from the introduction theologians made between Western philosophy, particularly Platonic Dualism, and Christianity, which was then …

"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Juvenile Asylum, founded in 1851, was one of New York’s first institutional responses to the problems associated with the poor. It, and the theories of asylum that undergird the institution, still exist today in the form of Children’s Village. The location of Children’s Village, located just a few hundred yards from my home, prompted me to consider the distance between my family and the children who reside at Children’s Village; between my historical context and that of the children who resided at the New York Juvenile Asylum - and their parents who surrendered them there; and between …

"She Had Ceased To Offer Her Stories For Publication": Louise M. Thurston And The Unfinished Charley Roberts Series, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

One of the unsolved mysteries of series fiction is that of Louise M. Thurston, a promising author who wrote part of a series about siblings for Lee & Shepard -- then, apparently, just stopped writing. Thurston's brief career covers the four years between 1868-1872 and intersects with two significant trends in 19th-century children's publishing, the growth of Sunday-school libraries and the practice of issuing children's books in series. Her career illustrates in microcosm the markets for beginning writers, and its early termination raises questions about some of the problems they might have encountered. Entwined with Louise's history is that of …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …