Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: Time, Domesticity And Print Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Katherine Malone

English Faculty Publications

This is review of Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjaer was published on the website Review 19.

A.S. Byatt And The ‘Perpetual Traveller’: A Reading Practice For New British Fiction, Nicole Flynn

English Faculty Publications

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel Possession, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that reader approaches them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the …

Defoe’S The Complete English Tradesman And The Prostitute Narrative: Minding The Shop In Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Sally Salisbury, And Roxana, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

Written in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble collapse of 1720, Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman (1726) associates economic survival with the concept of mastery, or “minding the shop.” This concept had been explored in prostitute narratives published earlier in the decade, including Anodyne Tanner’s The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), and Defoe’s Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). When one reads The Complete English Tradesman in relation to these narratives, the figure of the female sex worker emerges …

Review: Marge Saiser's Losing The Ring In The River (University Of New Mexico Press), Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

I opened up Marge Saiser's latest book of poetry, Losing the Ring in the River, with great anticipation. Familiar with her other books, Lost in Seward County and Bones of a Very Fine Hand, I expected exquisitely etched images and finely tuned phrases, and I wasn't disappointed. In Losing the Ring in the River, Saiser depicts three generations of women, Clara, Emma, and Liz, in moments that clarified or defined their lives: Clara's astute reading of domestic life, especially her sharp divisions with her husband; Emma's chase of marital happiness and coping with disappointment; and finally, Liz's spark and break …

Juba’S “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’S “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity In Maria Edgeworth’S Belinda, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

In Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth forges parallel subplots between Juba, a former African slave residing in England, and Lady Delacour, a wealthy and dissipated London socialite, both of whom undergo a process of domestication during the course of the novel. The connection Edgeworth creates between these characters allows her to explore a version of womanhood that promotes domesticity by negotiating the boundary between domestic and public life; at the same time, however, it reveals the anxieties surrounding this understanding of womanhood. Edgeworth’s novel configures Lady Delacour as a plotting woman who bridges the public/private divide, revealing domesticity to be as …

Review: Twyla M. Hansen & Linda M. Hasselstrom's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

Poems of place emerge so intimately from an intersection of landscape and culture that they couldn't exist someplace else. i Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrorn's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Winner of the 2012 Nebraska Book Award, poetically embodies the Great Plains. These writers transport readers through high skies and over sprawling ranches and one-tavern towns, pinning stories and memories to creeks and kitchens, pies and opossums. Yet they resist "provincial" poetry; this book's emotional range-nostalgia, loss, joy, serenity-reflect broader human concerns. With its crisp subject matter, conversational writing styles, and exquisite renderings of place, Dirt Songs should …

Ode To The Beet, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

This poem appeared in Paddlefish No.5 (2011).

Amnesia, Lover, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

This poem appeared in Paddlefish No.5 (2011).

Review: Vivian Shipley All Of Your Messages Have Been Erased, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

In All of Your Messages Have Been Erased (Louisiana Literature Press, 2010) award-winning poet Vivian Shipley anchors readers deep in the emotional waters of devotion. And Shipley delves into the most complicated kindsdevotion to principle in the face of death, devotion to lover despite adultery, and devotion to one's own particular vision of the world. Shipley gives us Holly Stevens' fastidious protection of her father's memory and work, Paula Hitler's painful attachment to her brother, and Papusza's commitment to her Romani community even in exile, just to name a few. By bearing witness to "how firmly the heart roots before …

My Language Of Love Is Not Polish, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

This poem appeared in Paddlefish No.5 (2011).

Review: Three New Offerings From Red Dragonfly Press, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

Book Reviews of:
Quiver, by Sarah Busse,
31 Mornings in December, by Thom Tammaro,
Lida Songs, by Scott King (Thistlewords Press, an imprint of Red Dragonfly Press)

What She'd Say, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

This poem appeared in Paddlefish No. 3 (2009)

"I Thought Perhaps The Reaper Was Going To Do Something To You": The Serpent's Kiss And The Issue Of Reverse-Objectification, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

In this discussion, I examine the continual problem of female representation in the movie narrative. Movie narratives often rely on female characters situated in roles that find them objectified by males, allowing us to hypothesize--as the body of feminist film criticism has done since at least the mid- I970s--that she also becomes objectified by her viewing audience. Then calling for a sweeping change in the mindsets of both male and female filmmakers, Sharon Smith precisely points out the problems of female representation:

"The role of the woman in a film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating …

Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal …