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Articles 1 - 30 of 111
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Treating Traum(A): Examples In The Tanakh That Mirror Events During The Life Of Bonhoeffer And Crimes Of The Ian Rankin Novel Knots And Crosses, Geraldine Mitchell
Treating Traum(A): Examples In The Tanakh That Mirror Events During The Life Of Bonhoeffer And Crimes Of The Ian Rankin Novel Knots And Crosses, Geraldine Mitchell
Journal of Franco-Irish Studies
The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) contains a wealth of stories reflecting life in the ancient world including struggles and wars that prove(d) traumatic. It is shown time and again that history repeats itself, and the stories of the Bible reappear in the modern world, both real and (crime) fictional. In this paper, traumatic experiences associated with the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as the fictional character DI John Rebus created by the crime writer Ian Rankin, are linked with similar incidents recorded in the Tanakh. The first novel in the Rebus series, Knots and Crosses, also forms the basis …
In Search Of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, And The Secular In Twentieth-Century South Asia, Crystal Baines
In Search Of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, And The Secular In Twentieth-Century South Asia, Crystal Baines
Doctoral Dissertations
This study analyzes the centrality of South Asian Buddhist heritages in the articulation of multiple iterations of “the secular” in post-independent Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. As contradictory as such a proposition might seem, this project demonstrates that literature was a forum where the category and language of Buddhism were reoriented to fashion new ideas of “the secular” for modern South Asian polities. With this in mind, I turn to the quintessential genres of secularity in South Asia: the twentieth-century novel and short story. These genres reveal how the category of Buddhism, Buddhist ethics and literature were received and used …
The Deer-Maid Motif In The Children Of Húrin, Kris Swank
The Deer-Maid Motif In The Children Of Húrin, Kris Swank
Journal of Tolkien Research
The story of Túrin Turambar goes back to the end of the First World War, and Tolkien continued to work on it through the 1950s. Later versions repeatedly describe Túrin’s sister Niënor figuratively—as or like—a hunted deer, especially after her enchantment by the dragon Glaurung. Tolkien identified Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo as sources for Túrin, however, the motif of a maiden enchanted as a deer does not derive from those sources. The Irish story of Oisín’s mother, Sadhbh or Saav, who was transformed into a fawn by an evil druid, shares several analogous …
Sam's Song In The Tower: The Significance Of 'Merry Finches' In J.R.R. Tolkien's _Lord Of The Rings_, Jane Beal Phd
Sam's Song In The Tower: The Significance Of 'Merry Finches' In J.R.R. Tolkien's _Lord Of The Rings_, Jane Beal Phd
Journal of Tolkien Research
In The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee climbs the Tower of Cirith Ungol to try to rescue his master and friend, Frodo Baggins, who has been taken captive by Orcs. When Sam is near despair because he cannot find Frodo, Sam sings a song that makes reference to “merry finches.” What is the significance of this phrase in his lyrics? To answer this question, my essay first explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s ornithological knowledge, especially of finches in England, which is readily demonstrated from a letter he wrote to his son, Christopher Tolkien (July 7, 1944), about his observations of bullfinches …
Introduction To The Special Issue On Tolkien's Animals, Kris Swank
Introduction To The Special Issue On Tolkien's Animals, Kris Swank
Journal of Tolkien Research
Introduction to the Special Issue on Tolkien's Animals
Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You
Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …
Satire In Swift And Voltaire: Towards A Humanist Dialectic, Ola Kittaneh, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb
Satire In Swift And Voltaire: Towards A Humanist Dialectic, Ola Kittaneh, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb
An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)
This article examines how the Enlightenment writers Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s attitudes and works resonate with our modern writers’ concepts on the role of the humanist intellectual. Informed by Edward Said’s recent theoretical concepts on the humanist intellectual, the article compares the way the two writers use the power of satire to achieve a humanist end that focuses on the pitfalls of identitarian thinking which often leads to national or religious fanaticism. There is certainly a need for Swift and Voltaire to be repositioned in relation with the broad contours of modern writers’ notions of the intellectual. By reading the …
Narrating Egyptian Women’S Prison Experiences - El Saadawi And Bakr, Nour El Captan
Narrating Egyptian Women’S Prison Experiences - El Saadawi And Bakr, Nour El Captan
The Undergraduate Research Journal
The research attempts to discover what Egyptian women prisoners’ experience was like in the 1980s and 90s through studying two major texts which fall under the genre of prison literature: Twelve Women in a Cell by Nawal El Saadawi and The Golden Chariot by Salwa Bakr. Through a thorough reading and analysis of the works, similar tropes and different attitudes can be found in the texts. Both works discussed class, comradery, and the patriarchy but differences exist when it comes to their different portrayals of prison.
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21st-century poets and their 20th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …
Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham
Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Though the writings of Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera are “incommensurable” in many ways, I find “commesurablilities”––the kind of commensurabilities the Susan Stanford Friedman seeks out across the planetary landscape of modernism––in the way they negotiate a new creative identity in a modern environment with the bang clash of history and present ringing in their ears. I see this commensurability in at least three key features: 1) Woolf and Ihimaera each gave birth to new literary movements: Woolf was mother to high British Modernism with experimental techniques such as free indirect discourse and the relegation of plot to the background; …
#Metoo And Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, And Teaching About Sexual Violence And Rape Culture, Gabrielle Stecher
#Metoo And Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, And Teaching About Sexual Violence And Rape Culture, Gabrielle Stecher
Feminist Pedagogy
No abstract provided.
Frights And Forests: The Hellish Landscape Of The Dark Forest, From Sleepy Hollow To The Forest Of Arden, Minna Nizam
Frights And Forests: The Hellish Landscape Of The Dark Forest, From Sleepy Hollow To The Forest Of Arden, Minna Nizam
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
This paper seeks to explore forest settings in fantasy, and its hellish landscapes. From the headless horseman in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, to the frights and horrors of mythical creatures in fantasy settings placed in forests. The purpose of this study is to dive deep into the fear of the forest, its early days in storytelling, to more modern renditions. Sources used will be primarily books, and texts within books, such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, and much more.
Seven Minutes In Hell: Hells In Fantasy Games, Nyssa Gilkey
Seven Minutes In Hell: Hells In Fantasy Games, Nyssa Gilkey
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
Join Nyssa Gilkey on a tour through several different fantasy video game depictions of hell. We’ll spend about seven (-ish) minutes looking around each hell or underworld before moving on, touring Helheim in God of War and God of War: Ragnarok, Hades and Elysium as portrayed in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey DLC, and the Duat of ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed: Origins DLC. With sufficient time and interest, we can tour other fantasy depictions of hell. Participants will be able to ask questions and discuss throughout the journey.
Mythopoeic Awards Discussion, David Lenander, David Emerson
Mythopoeic Awards Discussion, David Lenander, David Emerson
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
No abstract provided.
Political Demons: Society As Hell In Hellblazer And Sandman, Andrew Burt
Political Demons: Society As Hell In Hellblazer And Sandman, Andrew Burt
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
In the Hellblazer and Sandman comic book universes, hell depends on the writer’s worldview and often on the decade in which they are writing, appearing as a twisted version of a dreary regular world. Thus, this hell is often related to the contemporary Western political and cultural landscape as seen through Judeo-Christian conceptions of hell, demonology, and fears of everlasting torment and damnation, just like Dante’s Inferno and many other representations for centuries. In creating a hell that mirrors the modern world and accounts for contemporary folklore about the supernatural, the creators humanize the character’s quests and reify the fruitlessness …
Hell As An Exploration Of Sin: A Comparison Of Alan Moore’S Providence To Dante’S Inferno, Zachary Rutledge
Hell As An Exploration Of Sin: A Comparison Of Alan Moore’S Providence To Dante’S Inferno, Zachary Rutledge
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
In Alan Moore’s graphic novel Providence, Robert Black travels Lovecraftian New England and suffers a series of horrifying encounters—each an allusion to a Lovecraft story. These encounters contain direct references to various sins and taboos, thereby making explicit much of the sublimated sexuality in Lovecraft’s works. Therefore, Black’s journey constitutes not only a trip through Lovecraft’s mythology but also reads as a cataloguing of sins reminiscent of Dante’s passage through the levels of sin in Inferno. This paper identifies and explores the similarities between Dante and Black as examples of those who descend to the underworld along with a …
The Image Of Satan In Evangelical Children’S Fantasy, Melody Green
The Image Of Satan In Evangelical Children’S Fantasy, Melody Green
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
Over the last few decades, niche publishers have presented several children’s fantasy series marketed as being “in the tradition of Lewis and Tolkien.” These publishers, however, are neither British, nor are they Anglican or Catholic. They are instead American Evangelical organizations, providing a space for faith-informed stories that wander somewhere between allegory and parable. Within the pages of these texts can be found not only the expected Christ-figures, but there are also Satan-figures and hellish landscapes much more likely to reflect concepts from Dante, Milton, and medieval witch-hunting guides than from the Bible, the text that evangelicals claim to be …
Panel: The Rings Of Power Season 1: Underworlds, Overworlds, And Ocean Worlds, Tim Lenz, Leah Hagan, Grace Moone, Pablo Guss
Panel: The Rings Of Power Season 1: Underworlds, Overworlds, And Ocean Worlds, Tim Lenz, Leah Hagan, Grace Moone, Pablo Guss
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
Now that the first of five planned seasons of Amazon’s big budget Second Age adaptation The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has aired, we will provide a retrospective of Season 1. We will compare Tolkien’s Second Age writings with the realized version in the show, including how the writers and showrunners have interpreted certain specific passages from the texts, and where significant departures were made for sake of adaptation. We will highlight themes of the season, as well as specific characters, relationships, and settings that have resonated with audiences, and speculate on where the series could potentially …
Pullman’S Problematic Paradise: Dissolving Into Dust, David E. Isaacs
Pullman’S Problematic Paradise: Dissolving Into Dust, David E. Isaacs
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Phillip Pullman has openly positioned himself as the anti-C.S. Lewis who attempts to embed the gospel of atheism through his fantasy novels. Pullman recasts classics such as Paradise Lost and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell so that humans triumph over the oppressive Authority by learning that sinning is simply enjoying life. This paper will specifically explore Pullman’s depictions of the underworld and his alternative vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in The Amber Spyglass, examining Pullman’s attempts to assure readers that by rejecting Christian views of the final translation, one can …
Hellish Landscapes In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Legendarium, Willow Dipasquale
Hellish Landscapes In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Legendarium, Willow Dipasquale
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium is rich with magical and mythological elements—enchanted rings, powerful wizards, stories told long ago—and near-Biblical struggles of good over evil, power over life and death, and the inexorable passage of time. The Halls of Mandos in Valinor even have echoes of the “afterlife,” serving as a liminal place for the spirits of Elves to await their next destination. Interestingly, though, a “hell” in the classic sense (that is, a spiritual region of eternal torment and suffering) does not seem to truly exist in Tolkien’s imagined worlds. However, Tolkien does fill those worlds with hellish landscapes: Utumno and …
Who The Hell Is Helen Of Sparta?, Nyssa Gilkey
Who The Hell Is Helen Of Sparta?, Nyssa Gilkey
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
The rising popularity of Greek mythology is due in some part to female authors such as Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes lending a fresh perspective to the Homeric tradition. However, these female authors tend to actually reduce the importance of one of the most important female characters of the Trojan War: Helen. Helen of Sparta has been an enigma to writers throughout the last 3000 years, her story changing with each iteration and era. Since Homer’s Iliad, the most beautiful woman in the world has been victim and villain, strong and weak willed. She has chosen husbands, and been …
Planes Of Oblivion In The Elder Scrolls, Michael Barros
Planes Of Oblivion In The Elder Scrolls, Michael Barros
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
The planes of Oblivion from The Elder Scrolls (TES) series are not explicitly Hell; they are any dimensions of reality which are not under control of the Aedra, the benevolent spiritual entities. As a result, these planes may be totally unknown, pleasant, chaotic, or horrifying, depending on who is in charge, reflecting the personality of its ruler. These planes are at the heart of the franchise, and the intrusion of the planes of Oblivion and its inhabitants is a constant in the series. The planes of Oblivion are a reimagining of Hell as a place of potential, rather than evil. …
Persephone Bites: Consumption In The Underworld, Erin Sledd
Persephone Bites: Consumption In The Underworld, Erin Sledd
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
If you know one thing about Persephone, it is that she was abducted by Hades, held captive, and ate pomegranate seeds in the Underworld. Although Demeter rescued her daughter, she had to return for several months each year as a consequence of consuming the “Fruit of the Underworld.” But tasting those succulent ruby red seeds was not the first time she succumbed to desire—according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter II, the first thing Persephone “bites” is a lure. Hades sets a trap: a flower with “one hundred stems of fragrant blossoms.” When Persephone grasps a stalk of this …
Only In Dying Life: The Production Of Hope And Peace, Taylor Johnson Guinan
Only In Dying Life: The Production Of Hope And Peace, Taylor Johnson Guinan
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
Unlike fantasy authors of previous generations like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote depictions of an afterlife that mirrored their personal faiths, modern children’s fantasy authors of the last thirty years, such as Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Phillip Pullman, Rick Riordan, J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Stroud, and Garth Nix, often merely use religious concepts as a way to depict the land of the dead. In their depictions, the land of the dead is a dark, terrible, and uninviting place. However, rather than ending on that dark point, these authors transition from fear to a sense of peace, acceptance, …
Through Sauron’S Eye: Hell, Arda Unmarred, Arda Marred, And Arda Healed According To The Maia Formerly Known As Mairon, Cameron Bourquein
Through Sauron’S Eye: Hell, Arda Unmarred, Arda Marred, And Arda Healed According To The Maia Formerly Known As Mairon, Cameron Bourquein
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
From the beginning of Tolkien scholarship Mordor has been analyzed in light of its Hellish iconography; from the perspective of the narrative voice, what constitutes “Hell” in Middle-earth may seem clear. But what is Hell to Mordor’s chief inhabitant? What is Hell in Sauron’s Eye? The Rings of Power has brought Sauron into the spotlight by interpreting him not as depersonalized evil but as a character in his own right. Actor Charlie Vickers has shared how he developed this character for the screen, adapting characteristics taken directly from Tolkien’s own writings: Sauron’s love of order and his desire to “heal” …
Hell Is School—And Other People—And Myself (But Mostly Other People): From Inferno To The Paradiso In The Scholomance Series By Naomi Novik, Nicole Duplessis
Hell Is School—And Other People—And Myself (But Mostly Other People): From Inferno To The Paradiso In The Scholomance Series By Naomi Novik, Nicole Duplessis
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
In her novels A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik constructs a world in which school is Hell and the outside world is Heaven—or so it seems from the inside. From the competition and internal hierarchies that exist between the students, to the monsters, or “mals” that stalk students and devour them for their “mana,” to the brutal lessons, harsh punishments, and presumed Darwinism of the school itself, the inside of the Scholomance seems the embodiment of Hell to the novel’s protagonist and central consciousness “El,” short for Galadriel, even as she …
Hell As Colonizing Force: Postcolonialism In World Of Warcraft’S The Maw, Heather Bass
Hell As Colonizing Force: Postcolonialism In World Of Warcraft’S The Maw, Heather Bass
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
The lore in World of Warcraft represents various global religions along with their multiple paths to the soul’s redemption. One quest asks players to approach various divintities and retrieve their sacred objects in order to save a paladin from the disease of undeath in desolate Icecrown. Scholars have also noticed World of Warcraft’s religious capacities with one such example being comparing Thrall to Jesus. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the World of Warcraft lore has its own version of Hell–a region known as the Maw–with its own version of Satan. The Maw is one of the new territories …
The Lord Of The Rings & Dante’S Inferno: The Pilgrim’S Path—A Descent Into Hell, Hayden Bilbrey
The Lord Of The Rings & Dante’S Inferno: The Pilgrim’S Path—A Descent Into Hell, Hayden Bilbrey
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
This project explores the parallels between the journeys of Dante’s Pilgrim in Inferno and Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. It asserts that these two examples are a variant of the hero’s journey, more akin to a divine pilgrimage. Through this analysis, each author’s use and repurposing of mythology and monsters to fit within a Christian narrative will be closely examined. Following the Pilgrim and Frodo, this project charts their voyages through hell (or hellish landscape) and the effects that has on each of them psychologically and spiritually. In essence, this project seeks to chart both external …
Cloaked In Shadow: The Biopolitics Of Sauron’S Middle-Hell, Journee Cotton
Cloaked In Shadow: The Biopolitics Of Sauron’S Middle-Hell, Journee Cotton
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
This paper considers hellish aspects of The Lord of the Rings through an environmental bioethical framework focusing on the intersection of biopolitics, race, and ecology. Key figures that shall be examined include Sauron, Saruman, Uruk-hai, and the body of Middle-earth. Sauron shall be read as a Hades figure; they share numerous connections, such as their domain is hell, influence over invisibility (Hades’ cloak and Sauron’s Ring), characterization of giver of gifts, possession of dead bodies, and connection to the earth’s fertility (or lack). Sauron’s possession over dead bodies arises from the necropolitical power he incites over bodies in his sphere …
Orpheus, The Harrowing Of Hell, And Mary Magdalene In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile
Orpheus, The Harrowing Of Hell, And Mary Magdalene In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile
Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)
Tolkien has a wealth of precedents in giving his Orpheus and Eurydice, i.e., Beren and Lúthien, a happy ending. My paper proposes to survey these precedents in the Orphic tradition of Ancient Greece, in its subsequent Christening in late ancient and medieval literature, and in its connections with the Harrowing of Hell. Looking for a female Orpheus, an undiscussed parallelism is found in the figure of Mary Magdalene.