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Iowa State University

English Language and Literature

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Great American Love Affair: Indians In The Twilight Saga, Brianna R. Burke Jul 2011

The Great American Love Affair: Indians In The Twilight Saga, Brianna R. Burke

Brianna R. Burke

No abstract provided.


Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers Jan 2010

Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers

Jeremy Withers

In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the forest is often depicted as an ideal place for ambushing one's enemy. Such persistent attacks lead many warriors in the poem to encounter densely wooded areas with trepidation and even at times with explicit violence towards these places. However, through its use of several arresting locus amoenus passages, the Morte demonstrates alternative ways for soldiers to experience natural landscapes. Rather than suggest that forests are inherently malicious and forbidding places (as many medieval romances have done), the poem suggests that when cleared of an immediate threat of ambush, natural landscapes can be restorative and …


Reading Trees In Southern Literature, Matthew Sivils Jan 2006

Reading Trees In Southern Literature, Matthew Sivils

Matthew Sivils

Trees fulfi ll an important semiotic function within southern literary texts, and through this role serve as nexuses between humans and the natural world of the American South. Because of their ability to assume a wide range of sometimes temporary meanings, it is useful to think of southern literary trees as semiotic bottle trees: arboreal platforms upon which writer’s place semiotic components, or containers. To begin I draw from the work of Patricia Yaeger and Farah Jasmine Griffi n as I examine how southern literary trees are inexplicably connected to the issues of both environmental and racial oppression. Then I …


'Willa Cather’S ‘River Of Silver Sound’: Woman As Ecosystem In The Song Of The Lark, Matthew Sivils Jan 2004

'Willa Cather’S ‘River Of Silver Sound’: Woman As Ecosystem In The Song Of The Lark, Matthew Sivils

Matthew Sivils

Willa Cather loved the Southwest. The landscapes and cu ltural history of the area held a prominent place in both her fiction and in her own creative consciousness.1 As Judith Fryer points out, after Cather visited New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, she became so enamored with the region that she returned many times over the fol lowing decade (41). During this period Cather published a novel heavily inspired by her affection for the Southwestern landscape-The Song of the Lark. This novel fol lows Thea Kronborg from her childhood in the fictional rural town of Moonstone, Colorado, through an artistic …


Turning Learned Authority Into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I'S Learned Persona And Her University Orations, Linda Shenk Jan 2003

Turning Learned Authority Into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I'S Learned Persona And Her University Orations, Linda Shenk

Linda Shenk

When the princess Elizabeth studied languages and rhetoric with William Grindal and Roger Ascham, she acquired more than practical skills. She earned the right to depict herself as a learned prince. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the image of the educated monarch had gained particular political currency when humanist thinkers marketed the schoolroom as the necessary training ground for both king and counselor. Learned status served as proof that one was sufficiently wise and virtuous to hold political office.


Jane Howell And Subverting Shakespeare: Where Do We Draw The Lines?, Linda Shenk Jan 1995

Jane Howell And Subverting Shakespeare: Where Do We Draw The Lines?, Linda Shenk

Linda Shenk

When Ralph Berry asks RSC director Bill Alexander to explain how a director chooses to do a Shakespearean play in a certain manner, Alexander replies: "For me, it all boils down to this: how best can I reveal this play, how best can I release my own perception of the play, my own feeling of what it's about, and what it says and why he wrote it" (Berry 178). To fulfill these goals, directors often choose to set a play in a different historical context, devise a thematic doubling scheme, and/or cut lines to emphasize a specific concept. Such decisions …