Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

The Power Fantastic: How Genre Expectations Mediate Authority, Angela Rose Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reconciles academic and popular uses of the term genre, concluding that genre is a transmedial, mutable, associative, recognized system regulated through tacit understandings of prestige and power in a given Social space. The study employs a digital humanities method (dependent on digitally facilitated data analysis), conducting descriptive discourse analysis on collected online discussions from fan spaces concerning the fantasy genre and matters related to fantasy. In this way, I construct an image of the fantasy genre, and genre in general, as a multimodal space in which material freely passes between traditional and new media and participants actively negotiate …

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

Preface To Ssl 42:2, Patrick G. Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Preface articulating the purpose of the SSL symposium series and the symposium on Spatial Humanities, and a brief introduction to the other articles in the issue.

Introduction: Spatial Humanities And Scottish Studies, Eric Gidal, Michael Gavin

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the 2016 SSL Symposium on Spatial Humanities and Scottish Studies, reviewing recent discussion on the spatial understanding of Scottish history and culture and providing extensive references to relevant geographical and digital humanities scholarship.

Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant And The Welsh And Scottish Tour (1760-1820), Alex Deans, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the digital mapping element in a collaborative AHRC-funded project Curious Travellers, that combines the editing and critical interpretation of early Romantic-period travel writing with cartographical work involving digitized historic maps, especially in the correspondence and manuscript and published travel journals of the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and provides examples of the issues involved in matching texts and maps, particularly for Gaelic place-names.

Digital Literary Geography And The Difficulties Of Locating 'Redgauntlet Country', Christopher Donaldson, Sally Bushell, Ian N. Gregory, Joanna E. Taylor, Paul Rayson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents a case study about Sir Walter Scott's Jacobite novel Redgauntlet (1824), drawn from larger grant-funded projects in historical geographical information systems based at Lancaster University, reviewing a variety of other historic literary mapping projects, describing the text corpus of Lake District sources and models used in the larger projects, and contrasting the location of Scott's fictional geography and places in the Solway Firth area of South-West Scotland with the historic places, largely across the border in North-West England, to which he also refers.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

Imagining Evil: George Macdonald's The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875), Colin Manlove

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses a neglected and uncharacteristic children's story, The Wise Woman, by the Victorian Scottish novelist and fantasy writer George MacDonald, setting it in the context of MacDonald's own development and of other Victorian children's moral fantasy, concluding that "The Wise Woman is not simply a story of the attempted correction of two children, but a vision of good and evil in the mind and in God’s creation.... In its moral and spiritual complexity, and its picture of divine grace all about us if we will open our hearts, The Wise Woman has a profundity and a lucidity that …

English Literature And Scottish University Reform: David Masson's State Of Learning In Scotland, Jack M. Downs

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the role of the Victorian critic David Masson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, in the mid-Victorian reform of the Scottish university curriculum, as mandated by the Scottish Universities Act (1858), in light of the late George Elder Davie's influential study The Democratic Intellect and subsequent scholarship, and examines Masson's two inaugural lectures, particularly his State of Learning in Scotland (1866), and his inclusion in his Edinburgh lectures of Scottish literature within a British teaching canon.

Authority And The Narrative Voice In Stevenson's Weir Of Hermiston, Gillian Hughes

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses and analyzes Robert Louis Stevenson's use of the narrator's voice in his short, unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, comparing his narrative strategies with those of Walter Scott, George Moore, George Douglas Brown, D.H. Lawrence, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, concluding that "Stevenson’s fictions are experimental works," that "respond ingeniously to the dominant and quasi-official formulae and assumptions of writers of classic Victorian novels, and in turn establish an important model from which subsequent British novelists ... could learn."

Writing Scotland's Future: Speculative Fiction And The National Imagination, Timothy C. Baker

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the fictional treatment of future Scotlands in the wake of the 2014 Referendum, through discussion of varied speculative novels or stories by Graham Dunstan, Paul Johnston, Ken Macleod, Matthew Fitt, Julie Bertagna, Momus, Andrew Crumey, A.L.Kennedy, Michael Faber, and Sarah Hall, arguing that "the relation between Scottish literature and Scottish politics is more complex than is often thought," that "rather than simply commenting on current political situations, much contemporary Scottish fiction offers a rethinking of politics entirely," and that "Scotland’s future is not, and cannot be, confined to a single narrative."

William Reid And The First Newspaper And Chapbook Publication Of Robert Burns's "Written In Friar's Carse Hermitage", Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Traces the first newspaper and chapbook publication of Robert Burns's poem "Written in Friar's Carse Hermitage," written in 1788 and first published in September 1791 in the Glasgow Courier; links the publication to that of Burns's "Ode to the Shade [or in Memory] of [James] Thomson," written for the Earl of Buchan's Thomson commemoration that year; and connects publication in both formats to Burns's friend the Glasgow publisher William Reid, although this date for the chapbook antedates by several years the date usually given for the first chapbook publications by the firm of Brash and Reid.

Books Noted And Received, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Short reviews or brief notices of seventeen books published or received since publication of Studies in Scottish Literature, 42:1 (Spring 2016).

Spatial Humanities And Memory Studies: Mapping Edinburgh In The First Age Of The Enlightenment, Murray Pittock, Craig Lamont

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the first phase of a digital project mapping social and cultural relationships in early 18th century Edinburgh, Scotland, part of a larger AHRC grant-funded study Allan Ramsay and Edinburgh in the First Age of the Enlightenment; explores interrelations between urban history, digital mapping, and emerging interest in the field of memory studies; and suggests links between the heterogeneous and cosmopolitan nature of housing in early 18th century Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment culture of innovation.

Contributors To Ssl 42:2

Studies in Scottish Literature

Brief biographical notes on the literary scholars and digital humanists contributing to the volume.

James Joyce Dubliners Run: He Went Through The Narrow Alley Of Temple Bar Quickly, Barry Sheehan

Other resources

I write a blog www.jj21k.com which looks at the works of James Joyce, the environment which he wrote about and changes that have taken place since he wrote about them. The blogposts are predominantly about Dublin. As part of discovering Dublin by reading and Running I have written several longer pieces.

This piece creates a running narrative that runs through each of the Dubliners stories, physically connecting them and making observation on them and the city of Dublin.

You can see more background information and other posts on www.jj21k.com.

Verdens Undergang (1916) And The Birth Of Apocalyptic Film: Antecedents And Causative Forces, Wynn Gerald Hamonic

Journal of Religion & Film

This essay describes the antecedents and causative forces giving rise to the birth of apocalyptic cinema in the early 20th Century and the first apocalyptic feature, Verdens Undergang (1916). Apocalyptic cinema's roots can be traced back to apocalyptic literary tradition beginning 200 BCE, New Testament apocalyptic writings, the rise of premillenialism in the mid-19th Century, 19th century apocalyptic fiction, a growing distrust in human self-determination, escalating wars and tragedies from 1880 to 1912 reaching a larger audience through a burgeoning press, horrors and disillusionment caused by the First World War, a growing belief in a dystopian future, and changes in …

Friends Of Musselman Library Newsletter Fall 2016, Musselman Library

Friends of Musselman Library Newsletter

From the Dean (Robin Wagner)

Library Exhibits

GettDigital: Sports Reels

Research Reflections: The Gettysburg Superstar (Devin McKinney)

Remembering 9/12

Will Power: 400 Years After the Bard

Treasure Island (Robin Wagner)

Margin of Error

A Call to Activism in the Summer of '65 (Richard Hutch '67)

Digital Scholarship: The New Frontier (Julia Wall '19, Lauren White '18, Keira Koch '19)

Scrapbooks and Photo Albums: Snapshots of History (Clara A. Baker '30)

Soldiers' Scrapbooks (Laura Bergin '17)

A Book of Dreams (Alexa Schreier)

Who Do You Think You Are? (Timothy Shannon)

From Professor-Student to Collaborators (Jesse Siegel '16)

The Mysterious Easel Monument …

The Uprising Of The Anecdotes: Women’S Letters And Mass-Produced News In Jacob’S Room And Three Guineas, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This short article explores the similarities between Walter Benjamin's theory about the disruptive potential of an anecdote vis-a-vis the conventional narrative and Virginia Woolf's use of anecdotes in her novel, Jacob's Room and her anti-war treatise, Three Guineas.