Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Masculinity, Empire, And The Boyhood Companion In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Ruth Rempart

Campus Research Day

In 19th-century Britain, rigid social hierarchies and gender roles play a largely unseen role in the rise of the empire. In a society that relies upon the myths of heroic or self-sustaining masculinity to maintain the public sphere, how a “nontraditional” gentleman decides to affirm their masculinity can have a significant impact on the country’s cultural consciousness. As seen in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, young men tend to reassert their gender identities by pursuing careers that further British imperialist agendas. This paper examines the intersection between gender studies and postcolonial theory in 19^th-century …

The One Ring Of King Solomon, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien source criticism has long been looking for the source of the One Ring in the wrong places. Neither the historical ispiration from World War II and the Atomic Bomb nor the proposed literary influences such as the Ring of the Nibelungs, Wagner's Ring, or the several examples of invisibility rings found in world literature may suffice to explain the complexity of Tolkien's unique creation. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said so easily with regards to another possible source once we survey the richness of the related legends: it is the fabled signet ring of King Solomon.

Tolkien, Enchantment, And Loss: Steps On The Developmental Journey By John Rosegrant, Timothy K. Lenz

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Terry Pratchett’S Witches Novels And The Consensus Fantasy Universe: A Feminist Perspective, Clair J. Hutchings-Budd Ms

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Abstract

Between 1987 and 2015, Terry Pratchett published eleven novels and one short story within his Discworld universe that came to be known as his “Witches” sub-series. In these texts he engaged with the narrative imperatives, preoccupations, and tropes which together make up the consensus fantasy universe, and those deeper mythologies and legendarium with which the author necessarily has an intertextual relationship. This paper focuses upon one aspect of that consensus universe, which is the difference between male and female magical practitioners—witches and wizards—in the fantasy canon, and how Pratchett sought to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of the genre …

Nólë Hyarmenillo: An Anthology Of Iberian Scholarship On Tolkien (2022), Edited By Nuno Simões Rodrigues, Martin Simonson, And Angélica Varandas., Marjorie Burns

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Marjorie Burns, of Nólë Hyarmenillo: An Anthology of Iberian Scholarship on Tolkien (2022), edited by Nuno Simões Rodrigues, Martin Simonson, and Angélica Varandas.

Collation Model For Ms. Codex 218: [Four English Devotional Works]., Dot Porter

Collation Models

Four works written in Middle English, with passages in Latin. Texts included are Scale of perfection or Scala perfectionis, Bk. 1, ch. 19-93, and Bk. 2, ch. 1-46, by Walter Hilton; Stimulus amoris, or Prickyng of love, translated by Walter Hilton , attributed to St. Bonaventure; Amor die or Love of God; The Prick of conscience by Richard Rolle.

To Be Necessary: The Remarkable Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Although overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Shelley, in the public imagination, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) stands as a significant figure in her time who left a significant legacy. Her writings advocating for women’s education, equal rights, and career opportunities established her as the progenitor of the modern women’s rights movement. Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonated in the era of the Atlantic world revolutions and laid the foundation for later advances of women in the Western world; therefore, it is important to study her contributions in the present.

Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology Through Mythology With The Maker Of Middle-Earth (2022) By Austin M. Freeman, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Thomas Honegger, of Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-earth (2022) by Austin M. Freeman

Second Age, Middle Age, Norbert Schürer

Journal of Tolkien Research

The recent releases of the volume The Fall of Númenor and the series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power raise the question: What is the significance of the Second Age of Tolkien’s legendarium? This article suggests that Tolkien conceived of the Second Age as parallel to the Middle Ages in our world, which were the focus of his academic career in his studies of Old and Middle English language and literature. As various frameworks and overviews for the legendarium demonstrate, Tolkien thought of the Second Age, like the Middle Ages, as uniquely looking backwards and forwards …

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …

“By That Daughter’S Most Devoted Affection”: Anxious And Avoidant Attachments In Opie’S Adeline Mowbray, Meghan E. Hodges

Comparative Woman

Attachment theory, or the theory that one’s personality and social development is informed greatly by the infant-parent bond, largely arises in the 1950s with the work of John Bowlby. Although the phenomenon was only then beginning to be scientifically evaluated, it has long been observed that the relationship one has with one’s parents is a determinant factor in one’s development. This work investigates the impact of the failure to heal the insecure attachment Amelie Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1808). Adeline, having grown up in her distant mother’s intellectual shadow, develops a neurotic attachment to her mother which causes romantic maladjustment in …

Elizabeth Robins Portrays Working Women In Suffragette Literature: A Reflection Through The Lens Of The 2015 Film, Suffragette, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

I place the 2015-released film Suffragette within a context of the efforts Elizabeth Robins made to document and, by witnessing, to advocate, the early phases of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement in England. Robins wrote and participated across margins. An expatriate American living in England, she had no personal advantage to gain with a franchise. In her late forties and in ill health, she took perhaps only "safe" opportunities to thrust herself into the fray. But as Jane Marcus points out, with her research on the play that became Votes for Women, she took efforts to experience how working-class …

Don't Say Gay: Love Language In Coriolanus, Patrick Lynch

Dissertations and Theses

Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's Roman plays, a sub-genre which also includes Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. The one element these plays have in common is the ideal Roman hero, the civis romanus, who meets a tragic end. These heroes are not generally considered queer as no free Roman male could allow himself, per social indoctrination instilled since youth, to take on a submissive role. However, Caius Martius and the relationship he maintains with Tullus Aufidius could arguably be seen as homoerotic or even, possibly, homosexual. This paper takes a closer look at …

The Widow Of Malabar: A Digital Edition, Mariana Starke

OER Student Projects

Mariana Starke’s The Widow of Malabar (1791) is a tragedy set on India’s Malabar Coast. The play depicts a widow reluctantly preparing to commit sati (the practice of a widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre). She becomes the point of contention in a conflict between a Hindu Brahmin and her former lover, the general leading an invading British force. Throughout the play, the Brahmins are portrayed as vicious barbarians, the British as noble harbingers of a more civilized way of life. The Widow of Malabar thus provides a valuable look into British views of India (and of its …

How To Fight Evil: Lessons For The Church On Spiritual Warfare From Bram Stoker’S Dracula, Bronwyn M. Gray

Eleutheria

Dracula by Bram Stoker is an amazing piece of writing that is often misrepresented. Some Christians dismiss it because of the skewed belief that to enjoy life and literature is somehow less holy, and Dracula is also dismissed because of the judgment that books with blood, horror, and monsters cannot possibly grow us in holiness or teach us anything good. Not only is it forgotten that God created us to enjoy beauty, but also, to the second reason, the Bible itself contains blood, horror, and monsters; indeed, the Bible contains much more! Another unfortunate reality is that in the Western …

The Fall Of Númenor (2022) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Brian Sibley, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of The Fall of Númenor (2022) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Modern Languages and Literatures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …