Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

Not All R & R Is Good: Religiosity And Racism Within Charles Dickens’S And Wilkie Collins’S The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Emma Judd

Student Works

In their 1857 collaborative Christmas novella, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins present various instances of blatant and unabashed racism on the island of Silver-Store. From nearly the beginning, the story’s narrator, Gill Davis, notes, “I have stated myself to be a man of no learning, and, if I entertain prejudices, I hope allowance may be made. I will now confess to one. It may be a right one or it may be a wrong one; but, I never did like Natives, except in the form of oysters” (12). This racist attitude is not …

Just Do It: The Value Of Being A Doer In Wilkie Collins’S And Charles Dickens’S The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Kori Anne Dryer

Student Works

In Wilkie Collins’s and Charles Dickens’s 1857 novella The Perils of Certain English Prisoners and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels, the inhabitants of Silver-Store are presented with a unique definition of worth and value. The text discusses many types of value: intellectual value, physical value, productive value, etc. The collaborating authors present a pattern of having the white-male characters’ worth on the island of Silver-Store as action-based: that the doers of the society are seen as more valuable than those that are passive in the society. Gillian Ray-Barruel extrapolates on this unequal idea of social value …

English Prisoners In Their Unnatural Habitat: Conquering Nature In The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners By Wilkie Collins And Charles Dickens, Madeline Christensen

Student Works

Charles Dickens is most famous for writing about urban spaces and environments such as the city of London. However, as Joseph Carroll points out, there are numerous "prominent British depictions of wild nature" and these depictions of nature find their way into the "cultivated tracts of British domestic fiction" (305). It is this relationship, between the cultivated and uncultivated wilderness that Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins touch upon in their collaborative 1857 Christmas novella, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels. Collins and Dickens explore the relationship between humans and nature …

The Knights Of The River Rafts: Leadership Of The Common Citizens And Soldiers In Charles Dickens’S And Wilkie Collins’S The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Annika Carlson

Student Works

The 1850s are infamous for the political scene within the British Empire and her colonies. The Crimean War against Russia, a rebellion in India treated as a mutiny against the empire, and a shifted focus to international issues over domestic problems highlighted every mistake and misstep of the largely aristocratic government. Rumbles of discontentment arose from the working class within Britain as they watched governmental neglect produce massive repercussions at home and abroad. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins wrote their 1857 novella The Perils of Certain English Prisoners with these perceived political disasters and leadership failures in mind. Leslie Mitchell …

"They Simply Act": Muscular Christian And Domestic Soldiers In Charles Dickens's And Wilkie Collins's The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Kathryn Sumsion

Student Works

This paper discussion of Charles Dickens's and Wilkie Collins's use of domestic soldiers and muscular Christian soldiers in the 1857 Christmas novella,The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. It covers the frustration among Victorian society and especially the two authors regarding colonial government after the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. They bring the military forward as an alternative source of governing colonial power. Dickens characterizes ideal military power in the form of muscular Christian soldiers, while Collins favors domestic soldiers. In the end, both military roles are proved to be necessary in colonial governance.

Folklore-In-The-Making: Analyzing Shakespeare's The Tempest And Adaptations As Folklore, Heather Talbot

Student Works

This paper explores the similarities between folklore and Shakespeare's play,The Tempest. Not only is The Tempest an example of a folkloric story, this paper looks at how this play calls to attention the importance of story and the need for story to adapt in order to survive. Folklore is an oral tradition that is living, or continually adapting. Shakespeare's plays, while written are also performances which can be adapted through interpretations and by adapting to new genres. It is this adaptability which allows Shakespeare's works to continue to thrive and it is this adaptability which will determine how …

Music, Shakespeare, And Redefined Catharsis, Megan Jae Hatt

Student Works

The definition of catharsis has changed since the time of Aristotle. A person does not only experience catharsis out of pity or fear from theatric tragedies; they also experience it through laughter, love, and simply immersing themselves into the emotions presented by different forms of media. This essay reviews the catharsis one can experience through contemporary music and Shakespeare as they become submersed in the emotions and spectacle of each respective media. In this essay, I compare and contrast contemporary music and Shakespeare text and performance in order to relate them to this new definition of catharsis by including different …

Children As The Power Of Shakespeare, Samantha Rowley

Student Works

An dive into how children are used in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. While there has been some extensive research on numerous of Shakespeare’s minor characters, some of his other characters, the minors, have been focused on less. Because they fly under the radar, Shakespeare uses these “minor” characters in order to subtly manipulate his audience, using them as a source of pathos in much the same way adults use children to manipulate audiences while silencing the actual opinions of the children they claim to represent. However, though he may often use children for this effect due to their fragility, Shakespeare …

The Divinity That Shapes Our Ends: Theological Conundrums And Religious Scepticism In Hamlet, Kyler Merrill

Student Works

This paper proposes that Shakespeare deliberately incorporated speculative theology into Hamlet to stimulate religious scepticism. It explores the troubling implications of the ghost’s behaviour, cinematic adaptations of the murder testimony, and the characters’ moral failings in the purportedly Catholic cosmos of Elsinore.

Francis Gregg And Horror Feminism, Sarah Jensen

Modernist Short Story Project

For centuries, humankind has been fascinated with horror. From the cruel arenas where gladiators fought to the death in Ancient Rome, to todays Halloween blockbusters, there is no short history for a genre that can creep into any particular story, with just a few ingredients. I believe that horror captures attention through the storytelling mode of relatability. Horror asks of its readers and viewers “what would you do?” Horror is inherently scary because it triggers human empathy and fear for the characters. Experiencing a horror movie or listening to a true crime podcast today can be a validating experience as …

Modernism In Postwar Times: Life Through The Short Story, Daniel Sowards

Modernist Short Story Project

“The Mole” by Gerald Bullett, is a literary text that comments on postwar life and events that are ahead of its time. It was published in the British periodical, The London Mercury, in May of 1923 and was written post WWI in a time when literature was still reflecting the effects of the war. During the short story “The Mole,” there are many connections surrounding the Gubbins’ and war. In Voyant, where the mole is mentioned, Mrs. Gubbins is also mentioned. This reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Gubbins’ marriage is a war and her mole is a constant reminder …

Paralysis And Patriarchy: Moult’S “Stucco” And The Burden Of Responsibility, Elena Arana

Modernist Short Story Project

“Stucco” is a story about paralysis. A single man, around 50 years old, lives with and provides for his aging mother and spinster-sister. He is a blue collar factory employee who works six days a week, from dawn until dusk, humoring his family’s gossip around the dinner table each night in return for his weekend escapes to the country. When he finally gets the chance to retire, he pleads with his mother and sister to leave the city and move to the little cottage that he has always dreamed of owning. They refuse. He drops the subject. The end. “Stucco” …

“A Perfect Stranger”: The Domestic Power Struggle In “Samson And Delilah”, Shelby Shipley

Modernist Short Story Project

D.H Lawrence's short story “Samson and Delilah” was first published in vol. 21 no. 100 of The English Review, a modernist magazine that ran from 1908 to 1923 before it was absorbed into The National Review. According to the Modernist Journals Project, the magazine is described as “being more "modernist" than it actually was” however it was still “a major literary journal of the transitional period” (Modernist Journals Project). The English Review’s first editor, Ford Madox Hueffer, played an instrumental role in D.H Lawrence's literary career. In 1909, Impressed with Lawrence's talent, Heuffer published some of his poems in …

Grief And Color In A. E. Coppard’S “The Princess Of Kingdom Gone”, Sydney Sterrett

Modernist Short Story Project

Only about a year after the horrors of World War I, England was doing its best to reestablish itself as a seat of cultural and artistic value. Many journals and magazines ran new poetry and stories that were meant to relive war time or move on from it, but nearly everything seemed to be colored by the sights that the surviving young men had seen in the trenches. In November of 1919, A. E. Coppard published a short story in the Voices of Poetry and Prose magazine—a magazine that was meant to help readers recover from the war through new, …

Apples And Orchards, Exteriority And Interiority: An Examination Of The Agency Of Objects In “In The Orchard”, Natalia Green

Modernist Short Story Project

“In the Orchard” is a short story written by Virginia Woolf and published in the Criterion in April 1923. The Criterion was a journal that focused on publishing high-brow literature; it contained works from authors such as T.S. Eliot (who also edited the journal), George Saintsbury, and, of course, Virginia Woolf. Eliot created the Criterion with the purpose of publishing writing that contained the unconventional practices seen in modernist writing. Banerjee notes this motive when he states, “He [Eliot] also believed that it was through the journalistic channel that he could promote the kind of revolutionary poetry that he and …

All Is Fair In Love In “War”, Sabrina Thomas

Modernist Short Story Project

Love has always been a complicated concept. The battlefield of love is difficult, and heartbreaking to navigate. Members of the Bloomsbury Circle in the 1900s would have felt the complications that come along with love. The Bloomsbury Circle was a literary group known for its promiscuity along with some of its well-known members such as Virginia Woolf (Shone). Mary Hutchinson was an honorary part of the Bloomsbury Circle and entered into an affair with Clive Bell (Beechey). Her short story “War,” published in a 1917 edition of The Egoist follows a woman named Jane who is taking part in an …

Individual Femininity And The Modernist Epiphany, Megan Davies

Modernist Short Story Project

The 20^th century author Frank Swinnerton was well respected for writing “excellent, credible stories about contemporary people, usually living in or near London, [people who were] intelligent and aware of the times they were living in but concerned above all with their relationships as friends, enemies, lovers, or rivals in love” (Times). Despite Swinnerton’s relative renown, his biographies do not mention that he wrote short stories, so the discovery of his short stories in at least two 20^th century periodicals, The Open Window and Rhythm, sheds light on a largely ignored aspect of the author’s …

Middle Class Anxiety In “Wang-Ho And The Burial Robe”, Malcolm Lamb

Modernist Short Story Project

“Wang-Ho and the Burial Robe” was published by The London Mercury in 1918 and would later be included as the seventh story in Ernest Bramah’s 1922 fantasy anthology, Kai Lung’s Golden Hours. Though published in a well-respected journal alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon, “Wang-Ho and the Burial Robe” has little in common with the modernist trends of the early twentieth century. The story features no stream of consciousness, experimentation in new styles, epiphany, commentary on sexuality or gender, evocative imagery, reference to the Great War, or religious symbolism. In fact, it seems safe to suppose that …

Predicting The Future For A Victorian World: A Digital Exploration Of “Domestic Studies In The Year 2000 A.D.”, Kimberly Plater

Modernist Short Story Project

While “Domestic Studies in the Year 2000 A. D.” may be E. S. P. Haynes’s only piece of fiction, it captures two of his main ideologies in two very short stories. The stories adopt a dystopian view toward the future, looking ahead 87 years with two scenarios depicting average life in the year 2000. Both stories tackle decidedly controversial topics for the early twentieth century: individual freedoms and gender roles. The story found an appropriate home in the progressive periodical The New Freewoman, which heavily promoted the advancement of women, taking progressive stances on equality and feminism. Part one …

Detachment: An Analysis Of Nugent Barker’S “Mrs. Sayce’S Guy”, Caroline Bressler

Modernist Short Story Project

“Mrs. Sayce’s Guy,” by Nugent Barker is an inconclusive, mysterious ghost story centered around the events of the British national holiday, “Guy Fawkes Night,” which takes place on November 5^th. In particular, the story focuses on Mrs. Sayce as the main character; a sickly woman who finds herself in a conflicted family situation. Nugent Barker uses unlikely characters, such as the face, to give depth and mystery to his story. As a personified actor, the face is a performative aspect of what is happening psychologically, resulting in a story about consciousness, interiority, and a distrust of humanity and …

Hg Wells’ Anticipations : More “Perishable” Feminism, Kacey Sorenson

Modernist Short Story Project

In researching H.G. Wells’ evolving views on eugenics, race, anti-Semitism, and women, there was a noticeable absence of scholars referring to his last chapter of Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. Regardless of why it has been overlooked, the aim of this study is to use the last chapter of Anticipations specifically to emphasize and confirm what feminist scholars have extracted as Wells’ view of women: what he proudly owned as feminism was dismissed by his contemporaries as “very perishable” (Kirchwey 308).

Social Alienation And Expatriate Fiction, Courtney Larkin

Modernist Short Story Project

“The Velvet Glove,” a short story written by Henry James, was first published in The English Review in March 1909. At this time, the editor of The English Review was Ford Madox Hueffer, whose purpose in running the periodical was to seek out and spotlight the finest writers of the era and to showcase literary excellence. Indeed, Hueffer saw much potential in James, as well as in other writers whose works appeared in The English Review throughout the years: D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, William Butler Yeats, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound. …

Books Have Their Destinies, Calvin Carpenter

Modernist Short Story Project

Books Have Their Destinies

Habent Sua Fata Libelli by Maurice Baring was a fascinating work of literature from an author who specialized in Drama, and this work was no exception. Found in the London Mercury, the title can be translated from Latin as, “Books have their Destinies” which hints at the important role books will play for our main characters. Maurice Baring, who’s work saw only limited success, is far from a household name, although his contributions are still perhaps worth mentioning. His life had a rich history, as he served in the Royal Air Force during WWI. After his …

Steven Acroyd Goes To War: Expressions Of The War Experience In “The Victim”, Sydney Squires

Modernist Short Story Project

While “the image of the ‘shell-shocked soldier’ remains one of the most enduring of the First World War” (Keown, “Statements”), it is nearly impossible to find information about women’s trauma from World War I. While women were noncombatants, they were still heavily involved in warfare: they built the machines, drove the ambulances, and tried to keep their city from being bombed. However, after the war, their psychological trauma was not taken seriously. However, these war experiences still carried significant psychological weight for those who bore them. May Sinclair is one example of this: she was on the Belgian warfront for …

Meaninglessness In Tomlinson’S “The Fog”, Tate Wright

Modernist Short Story Project

As an aesthetic movement in British literature, modernism was marked by an unanticipated departure from traditional ways of interacting with the world. Modernism was composed of a series of virtues that emphasized individualism and experimentation as a way of subverting traditional expectations in literature, and the often discouraged stress on the individual sunk only deeper into the armature of modernist thinking with the outbreak of the Great War. World War I laid the grounds for the modernist intelligentsia to shift artistic focus to the self and inner consciousness, deliberately choosing to see the decay and alienation of the individual undergirding …

Finding A Foreign Home In Katherine Mansfield’S “The Daughters Of The Late Colonel”, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

The latter end of Katherine Mansfield’s life (1915-1923), a time considered by many to be the most fruitful years of her career, also marked a period of self-examination and introspection for the author. Much of this self-reflection focused on Mansfield’s long-standing frustration with her New Zealand heritage—which she had abandoned in favor of a bohemian life of writing and creativity—with an emerging desire for a more traditional sense of home and domestic life. Two letters written by Mansfield during this time reflect the dissonance caused by these desires. The first letter, written in 1915 to her husband, John Middleton Murray, …

Cynical Indictment Or Genuine Elevation? Ethel Smyth’S “An Adventure In A Train”, Chad Kang

Modernist Short Story Project

Ethel Smyth’s short story, “An Adventure in a Train,” was featured in the London Mercury in 1920. As the journal tried to “help bridge the gap in discussion of literary criticism that was made during the first world war… reconnecting the learned public to literary spheres,” anyone acquainted with the periodical would assume that Smyth’s “An Adventure” would contain literary richness and social commentary (Hipol). Interestingly, however, the plot of “An Adventure” is quite straightforward and lacks any vivid action that is usually associated with any “adventure” story. Indeed, the narrator gets on a train, talks to a middle-aged woman, …

H.M. Tomlinson’S “Barbarism” As Post-War Ptsd, Jessica Hogge

Modernist Short Story Project

On its surface, “Barbarism” by H.M. Tomlinson describes an English adventurer in the jungles of Malaysia. He returns to England to find it more barbaric than the uncivilized jungles he just left. However, by examining the story in light of H.M. Tomlinson’s history of anti-war sentiment, I see “Barbarism” as commentary on World War I. Specifically, I believe that the short story describes the consequences of war that a soldier experiences personally—PTSD (or “shell-shock”), guilt, and isolation. In “Barbarism” Tomlinson creates a tone of anxiety through his word choice, brings to light the complications of differentiating between cowardice and shell-shock, …

“The Experience Of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” As Proto-Baudrillardian Parable, Kyler Merrill

Modernist Short Story Project

Morley Roberts’s “The Experience of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” is an inferior potboiler, all too fit for The Strand, a middlebrow general interest periodical (Willis). It is repetitive, its characters are underdeveloped, and its jokes usually fall flat. Even the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates that “[c]ritics agree that he [Roberts] wrote far too much and too quickly, his popularity with the average reader being acquired at the cost of quality” (Coustillas). The present story exemplifies Roberts’s populism, but it warrants closer consideration for two special reasons: it mocks Victorian priggishness while extolling adventurous albeit patriarchal romanticism (unsurprising, given Morley …