Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …

Feathers And Hair, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Plucking chickens the kosher way is quite an art. According to the laws of kashrut) a chicken should not be cooked or even brought close to a source of heat until it is kashered-bled, salted, and rinsed. The use of fire to sear feathers or hot water to loosen quills is absolutely forbidden. Poultry processors today use the force of air to pluck feathers for kosher markets; but when I lived in Iran, during the '60s and '70s, this job had to be done manually.

We Are Not Friends, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

There is something about the way the phone rings that lets you know it's Them - a kind of glitter in the chime, a certain je ne sais quoi to the cadence, which seems to skip a beat as if it can't believe that They are calling. You pick up, heart throbbing, getting ready to move your mouth, a sly frisson of sweat striking your palms.

"They asked me to call," Their assistant says. "They want you at the house next Thursday. And then you'll all go somewhere. A plane will be involved. You'll want to bring a passport. Until …

Great Expectations, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens’s later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and …

The Shop Windows Were Full Of Sparkling Chains: Consumer Desire And Woolf’S Night And Day, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

“You know the horror of buying clothes” (L2 232), wrote Virginia Woolf to her sister in 1918. This statement takes us to the heart of early critical assumptions about Woolf and consumerism. Following good modernist principles, the argument ran, Woolf’s art was naturally above shopping, distinct from and even a reaction against consumer culture. More recently, critics such as Jennifer Wicke, Rachel Bowlby, and Reginald Abbott have unsettled this separation and have started to consider the complex relations among consumption, the market, and Woolf’s writing. Most of this attention, however, has focused either on selected essays or on Mrs. Dalloway …

Jefferson In Central Pennsylvania, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wuthering Heights, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), one of three sisters who literary productions caused a minor sensation when they began appearing in the late 1840s. Born to Patrick Brontë, a Yorkshire clergyman, and his wife Maria, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë were precocious readers and writers. The three sisters spent years writing for their own pleasure and amusement, then published a volume of poetry in 1846. Fearing that the volume’s reception would be biased if the authors were known to be women, the sisters adopted the names Ellis (Emily), Acton (Anne), and Currer (Charlotte) Brontë. Their …

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …

Hotel Room With My Brother, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Résumé, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I sat at the back of a pale classroom and watched my father teach. "Creative Inspiration," my father lectured, "is what you have as soon as you are born and the doctor slaps you on your bottom. That first cry, because you're hungry or tired or just glad to be breathing, is your first creative inspiration." I leaned back in my chair to ease the heat rising in my face. "Incidentally," my father said, grinning at the under graduates, "I've read the Sexual Harassment pamphlet, and I want you all to know I don't slap bottoms." [excerpt]

Lovelock, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

Presents a short story about Benjamin Scott, an ex-convict whose life turned a different course after a one-night stand with a retarded woman in Lovelock, Nevada. Promise of a job in San Francisco; Memories of traveling from state to state to get to his destination; Meeting Ana and her sister Lisa; Feelings of guilt for sleeping with Ana; Apologizing to the sisters; Decision to follow Ana to San Diego.

On Arrival, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Another Country, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

That summer we lived in an icebox of a house, where nothing worked. The gas stove was stuck in a chimney that had no fireplace, plaid linoleum covered the chipped and rotting floor, a cold wet wind blew through the cracks in the doors and windows, the light bulbs hummed and fluttered, the clock struck at odd and unwarranted times, and we weren't allowed to drink the water from the sink because it came from an impure place. [excerpt]

New Life, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.