Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Trends In The Contemporary Irish Novel: Sex, Lies, And Gender, Jennifer Jeffers Dec 2015

Trends In The Contemporary Irish Novel: Sex, Lies, And Gender, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The 1990s Irish novel presents its own brand of uniqueness and sophistication to the contemporary Anglophone novel. In this article I divide the development of the 1990s Irish novel into three groups. The first type of novel that emerges in the 1990s concerns the presentation of a different image of Ireland, one that magnifies gender construction and sexual preference. The second group of novels concerns the act of reading itself and the difficulty in determining truth from lies. These novels impair the reader's ability to read in an effort to show that everything is a form of interpretation: memories, history, …


Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard Jul 2015

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …


The Literary Unconscious: Ideology And Utopia In The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel In England And Russia, Isra Ahmed Daraiseh Jul 2015

The Literary Unconscious: Ideology And Utopia In The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel In England And Russia, Isra Ahmed Daraiseh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this volume, I have examined a number of works of nineteenth-century realist fiction from England and Russia, using the double interpretive method recommended by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. In particular, I have employed the dialectical double hermeneutic suggested by Jameson, who argues that the most productive approach to literary texts is to consider them from the double perspective of ideology and utopia. That is, critics should approach literary texts by seeking out the ideological roots that lie beneath the textual surface and from which the texts grow, while at the same time keeping a careful eye out …


Appropriating The Restoration: Fictional Place And Time In Rose Tremain’S Restoration: A Novel Of Seventeenth-Century England, Judith Bailey Slagle Jun 2015

Appropriating The Restoration: Fictional Place And Time In Rose Tremain’S Restoration: A Novel Of Seventeenth-Century England, Judith Bailey Slagle

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: It was the sixties—albeit the 1660s—a time for tricksters, rakes, subversive women and sexual energy on the stage. It was a time of fun for those with the means to partake of it. The “good old days” are, of course, always better from a distance, but writers on through the twentieth century found the Restoration an apt setting for their fictions about prostitution, political intrigue, and tragic or comic historical events, especially for the cinema.


What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace And The Pursuit Of Sincerity In Infinite Jest, Henry Clayton Jun 2015

What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace And The Pursuit Of Sincerity In Infinite Jest, Henry Clayton

Honors Theses

Throughout his literary career, David Foster Wallace articulated the problems associated with the profusion of irony in contemporary society. In this thesis I assert that his novel Infinite Jest promotes a shift from the reliance on irony and subversion to a celebration of the principles of sincerity. The emphasis on sincerity makes Infinite Jest a landmark novel in the canon of American fiction, as Wallace employs postmodern formal techniques, such as irony, metafiction, fragmentation, and maximalism, in the interest of promoting traditional, non-ironic values of emotion, community, and spirituality. I draw from works of postmodern theory and criticism to bolster …


British Fascism In The 1930s In Life And Literature, Jennifer M. Janes Jun 2015

British Fascism In The 1930s In Life And Literature, Jennifer M. Janes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Political and economic turmoil in 1930s Britain gave rise to a home-grown fascist movement led by the controversial Oswald Mosley. Literature of this period by Joseph O’Neill and Rex Warner mirrored the internal nature of the British fascist movement by depicting fascist-like societies embedded under or entrenched within the English countryside. Their metaphors of fascism rising as a solution to fear and disorder conjure the threat of fascism that was rising in Europe in that period. The metaphors are made more particularly relevant by the fact that the forces of Italian, German, and British fascism were not invasions from without, …


Refiguring George Macdonald: Science And The Realist Novel, Karl Hoenzsch May 2015

Refiguring George Macdonald: Science And The Realist Novel, Karl Hoenzsch

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This article analyzes George MacDonald’s realist novels. It looks at how David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Lilith engage with scientific discourse and epistemological concerns of the period. These scientific and epistemological dealings include a positive evaluation of evolution, a resistance to pseudoscience and Calvinism, an endorsement of non-dualism, and an analysis of scientific models and methods. The generic classification of Lilith as a realist novel with fantastical elements is discussed.


Recalling Anna, Reclaiming Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach To Jean Rhys's "Voyage In The Dark", Emily Duffy Jan 2015

Recalling Anna, Reclaiming Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach To Jean Rhys's "Voyage In The Dark", Emily Duffy

English Independent Study Projects

A psychoanalytic reading of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, which compares the experiences, dreams and memories of the character Anna with that of Freud's protagonist, Dora, in his Portrait of Dora.


Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg Jan 2015

Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg

Honors Papers

Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel’s transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve …