English Language and Literature Commons^™

Grafting Onto `The Jew': The Importance Of Being Jew-Ish To Early Modern English Christian Identity, Joan Blackwell Wedes

Wayne State University Dissertations

The dissertation examines how Jewish figures in early modern plays, prose, and poetry moved beyond the uncomplicated medieval image of murderous villain and towards a more reasoned consideration of the Jew's position in Christianity as well as in English life. While there has been significant scholarship on early modern representations of Jews, particularly in drama, these studies have not examined how Paul's Letter to the Romans, in forming much of Reformation doctrine, was also crucial in forming attitudes towards and representations of literary and living Jews. My project uniquely combines history, biblical studies, and literary analysis to reveal how early …

Undermining The Angelic Restrictions Of First-Wave Feminism: What The New Woman Did, Didn't, And Wouldn't Do, Jane Kristen Asher

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation provides an intertextual reading of Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895), Victoria Cross's The Woman Who Didn't (1895), and Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't (1895) in order to historically and culturally contextualize these popular New Woman novels in social-purity feminism, the marriage debate, and reticent sexual politics of the late-nineteenth century. By examining the ways that The Woman Who heroines discursively and thematically engage with first-wave feminism and by focusing on this dialectical exchange of feminist ideas and practices as they were manifested in feminist publications and campaigns at the turn of the century, I argue …

Poetry And Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street And The Queen Caroline Controversy (Book Review), Michael Scrivener

English Faculty Research Publications

John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. xix + 272. £50.00 hardback. 9780230280717.

English Convents In Exile, 1600–1800, Part 1 (Book Review), Jaime Goodrich

English Faculty Research Publications

Caroline Bowden, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, and Nicky Hallett, eds. English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800. Part 1. Vols. 1 3. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. cxviii + 1265 pp. $495. ISBN: 978 1 84893 214 2.

Experiential Knowledge: How Literacy Practices Seek To Mediate Personal And Systemic Change, Gwen Gorzelsky

English Faculty Research Publications

As a field, literacy studies has a well-established body of scholarship examining how literacy promotes systemic change or could contribute to desirable revisions of existing systems. To analyze the underlying presumptions about knowledge, literacy, and change in this scholarship, the author categorizes it in four strands. All four strands of scholarship posit a relationship between personal and systemic change and a means by which literacy practices mediate this relationship. The author analyzes each strand's presumptions about how this mediation occurs to argue that literacy researchers can expand the field's conceptual tool set by focusing on what she calls experiential knowledge. …

Postcritical Theory? Demanding The Possible, Jeff Pruchnic

English Faculty Research Publications

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown. (New York: Zone, 2010. Pp. 168, 10 illustrations. $25.95 cloth.)

Cosmopolitics I by Isabelle Stengers. Translated by Robert Bononno. (Posthumanities Series, 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. 310. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.)

Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea by Alberto Toscano. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 304. $26.95 cloth.)

Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 288/416. $95 cloth; $26.95 paper.)

Hallowed Ground: Literature And The Encounter With God In Post-Reformtion England, C. 1550 - 1704, Michael Thomas Martin

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which the encounter with God is figured in post-Reformation English writing between the years 1550 and 1704. The introduction contextualizes the ways in which individuals might encounter God within cultural and historical circumstances of the period: the gradual disappearance of the tradition of spiritual direction that accompanied the suppression of Catholicism in England during the period and the growing influence of more purely "scientific" modes of inquiry, especially after Descartes. Because of these changes, the ways the encounter with God could be experienced were also changing. The introduction also shows how developments in religious …

Nothing But A Pack Of Cards: Semi-Fictitious Persons And Flopping Jellyfish In Elizabeth Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against 'interpreting' both the novel and its 'monstrous' heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, …

Bewitching The Stage: Elizabethan And Jacobean Witch-Lore And Witch-Hunt, Kyoung H. Lee

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project hypothesizes that the early modern stage witch's grotesque femininity and her masculine presumption of agency were the effective signifiers of the feminine covert, what men fantasized about the reproductive secrets of womanhood and their control over the feminine activities. My investigation of late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama indicates that the fictional witch is postulated as the negative example of female fertility and feminine nurture: the witch not only interferes in the natural process of fertility in humans as well as in nature but she also contaminates maids and mistresses with her mismanagement and overconsumption of household resources. I …

“Everything She Knew": Race, Nation, Language, And Identity In Philip Pullman’S The Broken Bridge, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

A decade before his international acclaim for the His Dark Materials fantasy series, Pullman authored The Broken Bridge, a coming-of-age tale featuring Ginny, an Afro-British teenaged girl living in postmodern coastal Wales. The Broken Bridge delves into dilemmas of racial identity, ideologies of language and location, and aspects of non-Western religion that are not often touched upon in young adult literature. Pullman’s deft characterization prevents Ginny from becoming a caricature; instead, he presents the story of a very real sixteen-year-old girl with resentments, fears, and doubts. Ultimately, The Broken Bridge serves as a metaphor for the irreconcilability between an …

Bodies Of Type: The Work Of Textual Production In English Printers' Manuals, Lisa M. Maruca

English Faculty Research Publications

This essay examines the shifting, ideologically situated and contested representations of print texts and technologies in two representative printers' manuals: Joseph Moxon's 1683 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing and John Smith's 1755 The Printer's Grammar. The construction of orderly print is supported in each by changing discourses of sexuality and gender. Moxon's manual celebrates the heterosexual working bodies of print, the laborers whose physical production of print is as important as the text supplied by writers. In Smith, however, the naturalized gendering of a now invisible print privileges only the Author, whose disembodied intellect transcends the …

Sex/Textual Conflicts In The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath's Doubling Negatives, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.