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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
A.S. Byatt And The ‘Perpetual Traveller’: A Reading Practice For New British Fiction, Nicole Flynn
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 …
Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard
Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard
English Faculty Publications
It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …
Illustrations And Text: Storyworld Space And The Multimodality Of Serialized Narrative, Laura Daniel Buchholz
Illustrations And Text: Storyworld Space And The Multimodality Of Serialized Narrative, Laura Daniel Buchholz
English Faculty Publications
This essay examines the interaction between picture and text in the construction of the narrative spaces in George W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London (1844–45) and William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) . Building on previous discussions from Gabriel Zoran (1984) and David Herman ( Story Logic, 2002) concerning the process by which space is constructed in verbal/written texts, this essay examines how such theories function in conjunction with the illustrations that often accompanied Victorian serialized narratives in their original publication. Specifically, I consider the interaction between the verbal and visual channels in the construction of interior rooms presented in …
The Arrest Of Caleb Williams: Unnatural Crime, Constructive Violence, And Overwhelming Terror In Late Eighteenth-Century England, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
In the later eighteenth century, the twelve justices of the supreme English common law courts ruled repeatedly that blackmailing a man by threatening to accuse him of sodomitical practices constituted the capital offense of robbery; the judges focused on the overwhelming terror they claimed was unique to this threat. This legal doctrine is a covert presence in William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794). Ferdinando Falkland, fearing that his secret is about to be revealed by Caleb, accuses him of having 'robbed' him, and even though Falkland's secret is literally murder, the mutual persecution and mutual terrorizing that ensue evoke the …
The Transatlantic Pocahontas, Gary Dyer
The Transatlantic Pocahontas, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Discreetly Depicting "An Outrage": Graphic Illustration And "Daisy Miller"'S Reputation, Adam Sonstegard
Discreetly Depicting "An Outrage": Graphic Illustration And "Daisy Miller"'S Reputation, Adam Sonstegard
English Faculty Publications
Rendering the first illustrated edition of "Daisy Miller" in 1892, Harry Whitney McVickar had to reconcile the novella's scandalous reputation with the polite medium of graphic illustration. McVickar highlights insignificant scenery, shows solitary figures instead of social interaction or playful flirtation, and nearly omits the heroine. His depictions and omissions contain the characters' indiscretions, and ensure that aspiring flirts and would-be Winterbournes who view his images do not "get the wrong idea." Cinematic adaptations amplify Daisy's public displays and encourage Winterbourne's voyeurism, but "Daisy Miller"'s first graphic illustrations strove instead to redeem the reputation of James's "outrage on American girlhood."
More Borrowing From Bellegarde In Delarivier Manley's Queen Zarah And The Zarazians, Rachel Carnell
More Borrowing From Bellegarde In Delarivier Manley's Queen Zarah And The Zarazians, Rachel Carnell
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Reading As A Criminal In Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gary Dyer
Reading As A Criminal In Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard
Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard
English Faculty Publications
Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.
Irresolute Ravishers And The Sexual Economy Of Chivalry In The Romantic Novel, Gary Dyer
Irresolute Ravishers And The Sexual Economy Of Chivalry In The Romantic Novel, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Psychology Of Uncertainty: (Re)Inscribing Indeterminacy In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin
The Psychology Of Uncertainty: (Re)Inscribing Indeterminacy In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer
Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The 'Vanity Fair' Of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women, And The East In The Ladies’ Bazaar, Gary Dyer
The 'Vanity Fair' Of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women, And The East In The Ladies’ Bazaar, Gary Dyer
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.