Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Andrew Hadfield, John Donne: In The Shadow Of Religion, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"The Most Glorious War Recorded In The British Annals”: Portugal In British Figurations Of The Peninsular War, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“THE MOST GLORIOUS WAR RECORDED IN THE BRITISH ANNALS,” AS ROBERT Southey described it in the dedication of his History of the Peninsular War,1 the conflict that brought together Portugal, Spain, and Britain against Napoleon’s armies between 1807 and 1814 was a dominant preoccupation of the British public in general, and of the first generation of Romantics in particular.2 Many critics have shown the extent to which the Iberian uprising against the tyranny of Napoleon galvanized the British people, united the British nation, and afforded Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge a renewed opportunity to sympathize with the cause of …

Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

Milton’s youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady’s movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton’s understanding of virginity’s poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise …

Review Of Lara Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’S Poetry And Prose In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Twisting Facts To Suit Theories: In Defense Of Sherlock, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts.

Review: Time, Domesticity And Print Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Katherine Malone

English Faculty Publications

This is review of Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjaer was published on the website Review 19.

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 …

Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sky Of Our Manufacture: The London Fog In British Fiction From Dickens To Woolf, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Died Today. Or, Maybe, Yesterday; I Can't Be Sure..., Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

50 years on, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead continues to captivate and to entertain audiences with its darkly comic examination of existential themes of life, death, and indecision drawn from the pages, situations, and characters of Hamlet. First produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the play opened at the Old Vic in London in 1967, and has been reprised there this season to rave reviews, with none other than Harry Potter in a leading role.

Multisensory Tristram Shandy, Cynthia N. Malone

English Faculty Publications

An absorbed reader typically pays little conscious attention to the visual, tactile, and sometimes aural sensory experiences of reading. Unexpected formal and visual features of Laurence Sterne’s nine-volume fictional narrative, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, startle readers out of absorption and call attention to familiar operations like decoding black figures on white paper and turning pages. My edition of Volume I is designed to engage the senses through its visual structure, textures, and unexpected materials (buttons, marbled paper strips, and ribbons) and through formal surprises (interpolated documents, accordion-fold inserts, and paper lace). In its structure …

The Return Of The Poor Man: Jude The Obscure And Late Victorian Socialism, Suzanne J. Flynn

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines Hardy's decision at the end of his career as a novelist to return to the "striking socialistic" themes which had defined his first (unpublished) novel. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's exploration of the spiritual and intellectual deprivation that attends the condition of the working-class poor. While the novel was reviled at the time as blatantly "anti-marriage," its fiercest polemic is reserved for the soul-destroying economic and social systems which continued to keep the class structure rigidly intact. While Hardy was never a socialist himself, his final novel has much in common with the numerous socialist and radical …

“The Finest Production Of The Finest Country Upon Earth”: Gender And Nationality In The Writings Of Nineteenth-Century British Women Travelers To Portugal, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Critical attention to the writings of nineteenth-century British women travelers has repeatedly stressed their value as evidence of the writers’ attempts at overcoming the constraints of nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity that constructed women as inferior or ancillary (Frawley; Robinson; Foster; Dolan; Middleton); it has also often emphasized the importance of reading them within contemporary discourses such as imperialism, colonialism, or nationalism (Blunt; Frawley; Foster; Mills; Siegel). This essay focuses on three accounts by nineteenth- century British women travelers to Portugal— Marianne Baillie’s Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824); Julia Pardoe’s Traits and Traditions of Portugal …

Shylock Celebrates Easter, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger

English Faculty Publications

Many a medievalist has been seduced by Chaucer. Perhaps it’s the totality of Chaucer’s enduring characters, memorable tales, elusive narrator, and fragmented whole that keeps us coming back. We are fascinated and delighted, too, by his linguistic play and the lyrical cadence of Middle English. Chaucer may have led us to graduate study in the first place and remains a treat that organizes our pedagogical lives. For some who teach in smaller programs or two-year colleges, Chaucer’s canonical status may provide the only guaranteed place for medieval texts in the curriculum and thus represents one small chance to share our …

Robert Southey On Portugal: Travel Narrative And The Writing Of History, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Robert Southey was once referred to by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch as “one of the best known of the unread poets” (9) in a study that deliberately focused on what he considered Southey’s largely failed poetic quest: “Southey’s grand failures,” he explained, “are more interesting than his modest successes and far more illuminative of Romanticism and Romantic myth-making generally” (9). In an oblique way, my focus in this essay is likewise another of Southey’s grand failures-- his planned, but never finished, History of Portugal. This ambitious project, despite remaining mostly unwritten, occupied much of Southey’s time in the early years …

Slipping From Secret History To Novel, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The secret history, a genre of writing made popular as opposition political propaganda during the reign of Charles ii, has been the subject of renewed critical interest in recent years. By the mid-1740s, novelists were using markers of secret histories on the title pages of their works, thus blurring the genres. This forgotten history of the secret history can help us understand why Ian Watt and other twentieth-century critics tended to end their narratives of the rise of the “realist” Whig novel with the works of the Tory novelist Jane Austen. In particular, the blended narrative perspective that Watt praises …

The (Re)Naturalization Of Margaret Cavendish: Making Active The Relationship Between Nature And Female Subjectivity In Blazing World, Daniel P. Richards, Julie Chappell (Ed.), Kamille Stone Stanton (Ed.)

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Burbage's Father's Ghost, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

Introduction: John Gower's Twenty-First Century Appeal, Kara Mcshane, R. F. Yeager

English Faculty Publications

This is the introductory essay to a special issue of the South Atlantic Review focusing on John Gower. Guest editor for this issue is Kara L. McShane with the assistance of R. F. Yeager.

Social Healing In Gower's Visio Angliae, Kara Mcshane

English Faculty Publications

I argue that Gower uses metaphorical images common from vernacular romance—particularly the image of the rudderless ship—to help himself and his readers process the upheaval of the Great Rising. As a healing narrative, the Visio is meant as a public, political text that can begin healing at both personal and communal levels. The Visio is reforming, but it is not radical. In Gower’s worldview, social reform must begin with the highest levels of society and move downward.

Review Of Rethinking The South English Legendaries, Gregory M. Sadlek

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Eliza Haywood And The Narratological Tropes Of Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

Eliza Haywood’s novels and political writings are often considered in isolation from each other; however, there is a discursive thread that links her fictional and political works: her engagement with secret history. Across her career, in her novels as well as her political pamphlets and periodicals, Haywood deploys two important narratological tropes of the secret historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author’s own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflexively about the author’s own role as a writer of history. Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession …

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 …

Samuel Beckett And Testimony [Book Review], Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Nashe’S Poem For Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Jennifer Andersen

English Faculty Publications

This article makes a case for the dedication of "The Choise of Valentines" to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, and explores some of its ramifications for the interpretation of the poem. Beyond the significance of this identification for the poem, establishing the dedication to Lord Strange and Nashe’s participation in elite literary coteries would also be more broadly significant for Nashe studies.

Moral Reform In Comedy And Culture, 1696-1747 & Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, And The Rise Of Sensibility, 1670-1730. (Review), Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The article reviews the books "Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696-1747" by Aparna Gollapudi and "Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730" by Laura Linker.

Clarissa: An Abridged Version (Review), Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Othello's "Malignant Turk" And George Manwaring's "A True Discourse": The Cultural Politics Of A Textual Derivation, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

A critique is presented of the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare, focusing on a reference from Othello's final speech to an incident in Aleppo, Syria that the author attributes to the manuscript essay "A True Discourse" by George Manwaring, a companion of English adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley. Early 17th century British history, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Queen Elizabeth I are mentioned, as well as references in the works to Turks and the censorship of English literature.