Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What, Then, Is The Walk?: Reflecting On Pedestrianism In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Jasmine Redford

The Goose

Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) contains a surprising amount of social walking and leisurely walking parities undertaken by Anne Elliot and her upper-class compatriots. Viewed through an Austenian lens, a reflection of the walk highlights the similarities and differences between nineteenth-century and post-millennial walking for pleasure. What is the cultural history of nineteenth-century pedestrianism in England, and why was it so important in literature and polite society alike? What, then, is the walk? Why indulge in a stroll, a promenade, or a pastoral ramble? How does this sociocultural pedestrianism reinforce the distinction between the classes? Perhaps Austen’s walk, both an …

Fire And Snow: Climate Fiction From The Inklings To Game Of Thrones By Marc Dipaolo, Jamie Campbell Martin

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Review of Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones by Marc DiPaolo

Holy Estrangement: The Poetics Of Estrangement In John Donne's Divine Poems And Sermons, Anton Bergstrom

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines literary estrangement, that is the act and effect of making the familiar strange in a literary work, in the religious poems and sermons of the poet-preacher John Donne (1572–1631). My study uncovers and explores what Donne "estranges," how he achieves this, and for what purpose, as well as the practices and modes of thinking that shaped his poetics. In Donne's religious verse and prose, making the familiar and traditional tropes, images, doctrines, and events of Christianity strange forms active readers and revitalizes those elements, imbuing them with newfound interest, significance, and affective power.

My study offers a …

‘Not Shap’D For Sportive Tricks:’ Representations Of Disability In Film And Digital Broadcast Cinema Adaptations Of Early Modern Drama, Grace Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In films that feature disability, we see the recursive and discussion-limiting impulse to say “this representation is negative. Therefore, the representation should not be seen,” based on critical theories and methodologies outside the purview of film studies. Unfortunately, the overlay of an English, narratological, sociological, or medical methodology and terminology onto a film representation of disability is ultimately recursive and self-limiting; critical and advocate calls for accuracy to the lived experience of people with disabilities in on-screen representations decline to engage with the visual construction of cinematic representations of disability and the often fascinating cinematographic and thematic patterns that emerge …

Where The Weather Comes From, Morgan Vanek

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When Andreas Malm observed that “not even the weather belongs fully to the moment,” he was looking forward from 2016, considering the cumulative impact of present emissions on “generations not yet born.” The reverse is also true: present storms have their origins in past consumption. Up to this point, though, analysis of how human activity will intensify future weather has focused on change in a limited set of quantifiable conditions, like precipitation and temperature – and in this respect, too, the weather of the present is the weather of the past. Both this set of variables and its status as …

Thinking Continental: Writing The Planet One Place At A Time By Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, And O. Alan Weltzien, Cory Willard

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Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien, eds.

Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives In An Age Of Crisis By Molly Wallace And David Carruthers, Bryant Scott

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Review of Molly Wallace and David Carruthers' Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis.

Environmental Humanities: Voices From The Anthropocene By Serpil Oppermann And Serenella Iovino, Pamela Banting

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Review of Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, eds.

"A Meruelous Thinge!": Elizabeth Of Spalbeek, Christina The Astonishing, And Performative Self-Abjection In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 114, Murrielle Michaud

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Contributing to the spirited discussion regarding feminist and pro-feminine readings of Middle English hagiography, this dissertation challenges the tradition of grouping accounts of medieval holy women into a single genre that relies on stereotypes of meekness and obedience. I argue that fifteenth-century England saw a pro-feminine literary movement extolling the virtues of women who engaged in what I term “performative self-abjection,” a form of vicious self-renunciation and grotesque asceticism based on Julia Kristeva's model of the abject. The corollary of women's performative self-abjection is ex-gratia spiritual authority, public recognition, and independence, emphasized in the English corpus of fifteenth-century women’s hagiography. …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …

Cerdded, Fay Stevens

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Poetry by Fay Stevens

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

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Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Two Poems, Andrew Taylor Dr

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Poetry by Andrew Taylor

Rewriting The Goose, Camilla Nelson

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Poetry Editorial by Camilla Nelson

In The Loves Of Barnacles, Carol Watts

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Poetry by Carol Watts

Bell In The Rain, Annabel Banks

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Poetry by Annabel Banks

Spatial Engagement With Poetry By Heather H. Yeung, Deborah C. Bowen

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Review of Spatial Engagement with Poetry by Heather H. Yeung.

Strange Compositions: Chemistry And Its Occult History In Victorian Speculative Fiction, Susan Hroncek

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines how depictions of chemistry in Victorian literature are influenced by concerns regarding the history of chemistry and its relationship to the occult. Among these depictions, I consider non-fiction writings of the period, such as histories of science and articles from periodicals, but I focus on novels that prominently feature chemistry, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1862), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894), T. Mullet Ellis’s Zalma (1895), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). These texts link chemistry with its origins in alchemy, the occult, and …

The Oxford Handbook Of Ecocriticism Edited By Greg Garrard, Camilla Nelson Dr

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Camilla Nelson reviews The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard

Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination Of James Joyce Edited By Robert Brazeau And Derek Gladwin, Rebekah A. Taylor

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Rebekah A. Taylor reviews Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce edited by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin.

Polish Or Work? Four Women Novelists And The Professionalization Of Accomplishment, 1796-1814, Ada Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814 examines the ways in which cultural models of accomplished, industrious femininity find expression in four novels written by women during the Romantic period: Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter (1801), Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). This dissertation reads accomplishment as a pervasive and familiar cultural practice that writers use to interrogate domestic ideology and middle-class women’s position in commercial society within the space of popular fiction. I focus, specifically, on instances in which the genteel heroine turns privately …

Phantoms Of Old Forms: The Gothic Mode In The Dramatic Verse Of Tennyson And Browning, Michael E. Ackerman

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

My dissertation, “Phantoms of Old Forms: The Gothic Mode in the Dramatic Verse of Tennyson and Browning” situates Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning within a lineage of writers who experimented with the Gothic mode in dramatic and verse forms. This study is, in the first instance, an experiment in applying a specific strain of Gothic critical theory, one that addresses issues of gender, to canonical literary materials not ordinarily approached in that light. Definitions of the Gothic are notoriously elusive, and this project is not an assertion that the Gothic is always, in all of its manifestations, about gender. …

Mis-Education And The Crisis In Male Subjectivity: William Godwin’S Middle Novels, 1799–1817, Lisa-Marie Lynn Butler

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the tumultuous period of the 1790s, the English anarchist philosopher William Godwin was a seminal figure whose 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness stood as a touchstone for the reform movement in Britain. Godwin is primarily known today as the author of Political Justice and Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a 1794 novel which many readers, past and present, have regarded as a fictionalized allegory of the philosophical claims outlined in Political Justice.

Although his fame as a novelist largely rests on this one popular novel, …

Invisible Presences: Virginia Woolf And Biography, Stephanie Kirkwood Walker

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The principal concerns of this thesis are the connections that Virginia Woolf made between writing, revelation, women and biography, set in the historical and literary contexts of her life in England from the late nineteenth century to her death in 1941. Her vision of biographical form, language and the biographical self is assessed within the environment established by her father, her Victorian childhood and education, Bloomsbury attitudes and a spirituality shaped by her Anglican heritage and her experiences of gender. My contention is that her novelist’s sense of the relationship between fact and fiction, her critical analysis of the significance …