Arts and Humanities Commons^™

New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan Of China, And The New She-Tragedy, Elaine Mcgirr

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

This essay demonstrates a significant break in eighteenth-century tragedy from tales of fallen women begging (the audience) for forgiveness and redemption to a different kind of she-tragedy, in which the heroine is neither fallen nor sexually desired, but rather transcends nation and politics with the “natural” moral force of maternal love. I argue that this shift was made possible/legible by Susannah Cibber’s ill-health, which forced Arthur Murphy to reconceive The Orphan of China’s heroine and allowed a rival actress, Mary Ann Yates, to step into this new role and to establish a tragic ‘line’ defined in opposition to that of …

The Meaning Of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers In The Postcolonial Historical Novel, Hamish Dalley

Articles & Book Chapters

Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to …

Re-Reading The Map Of Middle-Earth: Fan Cartography's Engagement With Tolkien's Legendarium, Stentor Danielson

Journal of Tolkien Research

J.R.R. Tolkien provided an elaborate textual history for his writings about Middle-earth, but did not do so for his now-iconic maps. This paper examines how this difference, in concert with the general tendency of readers to treat maps as objective records of geography, has manifested in Tolkien's work and fan works based upon it. An examination of fan cartography shows a strong tendency to treat the published maps as records of geographical fact rather than historical documents from within Middle-earth.

Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent …

Letting Sleeping Abnormalities Lie: Lovecraft And The Futility Of Divination [Article], Carol S. Matthews

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

By way of divinatory dreams, astrology, geomancy, or other means, the Lovecraft quester discovers that universe is more deeply frightening than anything he could possibly have imagined. Lovecraft’s lack of faith in divination practices, not because of their inefficacy, but rather due to his conviction that humans lack the essential capacity to understand their lowly place in the universe, is ironically not shared by many of his admirers and followers, who have created magical and divination systems galore since Lovecraft’s demise.

J.M. Coetzee’S Hall Of Mirrors: Elizabeth Costello And The Animal-Poet, Alec Ciferno

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

“Influence Of Locality” In Dickens, Austen, And Hardy: Placing Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Jessica Shapiro

English Honors Theses

Tim Cresswell explains in his book Place: A Short Introduction (2004) that “Place is how we make the world meaningful and the way we experience the world. Place, at a basic level, is space invested with meaning in the context of power” (19). In fiction, place influences how we experience a constructed narrative. In the nineteenth-century British novel, place becomes a part of the narrative, and the narrative, in turn, informs England’s geographical heritage making.

This exhibition explores how three nineteenth-century British authors—Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy—use the natural geography of Southern England in various ways to affect …

Meteorological Time In Dorothy Wordsworth's Rydal Journal, Amanda Ann Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis deals with Dorothy Wordsworth's Rydal Journal, a journal written between 1824 and 1835, when Dorothy Wordsworth was between ages 53 and 64. The most interesting entries in the Rydal Journal include descriptions of William's political views, famous callers at Rydal Mount, church sermons Dorothy heard, books she was reading, and her relationships and correspondence with many friends and family members. In terms of structure, Dorothy's journal entries are generally quite similar over the eleven years of these volumes. Perhaps most strikingly, the vast majority begin with a record of the day's weather. Sometimes, she broadly outlines the …

"Alas For The Red Dragon:" Redefining Welsh Identity Through Arthurian Legend, Claire Lober

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, Prophetiae Merlini, and Vita Merlini reimagine British history in an attempt to renegotiate the boundaries between English and Welsh culture. Through the figure of Merlin, Geoffrey co-opts key elements of Welsh culture as part of the larger Norman colonization effort. I argue that the effectiveness of Geoffrey’s colonization attempt lies in his embodiment of Welsh figures and his hybrid identity that allowed him to insert himself into the Welsh narrative and reconstruct it from within. I also argue that a reconsideration of Vita Merlini reveals a new dimension of Geoffrey’s colonial project. Merlin’s changing …

Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies, Ben Harley

Theses and Dissertations

“Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to …