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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
"A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration": Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, And Totality, Gerry Canavan
"A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration": Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, And Totality, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
Using research undertaken at the Olaf Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool, this article explores the tension between cosmopolitan optimism and cosmic pessimism that structures Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, and asks whether the novel succeeds in solving the philosophical problems that first spurred Stapledon to write it. I conclude, unhappily, that it does not: while an impressive achievement, and despite a surface optimism, the book's confrontation with infinity, totality, and the sublime is ultimately depressive rather than generative of a felicitous cosmological order, requiring Stapledon to try again and again to somehow solve this philosophical conundrum in …
Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny
Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny
Dissertations (1934 -)
Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), the subject of my dissertation, was a Christian mystic whose writings, Revelation of Love and A Book of Showings, are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars is how could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and literary language? The reason scholars have puzzled over this for centuries is that women had been denied access to traditional education. Some scholars have answered this problem through close textual comparisons linking her text to those in the patristic tradition or through modern …