Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

"Bring Out Your Dead!": Cashing In On Shakespeare In The First Folio, John M. Bowers

Special Collections Events

William Shakespeare wrote his plays for box-office profits at the theater, not for a reading public. When his old colleagues John Hemings and Henry Condell published his plays seven years after his death, they too were looking for financial profit and "packaged" the dramas -- as well as the dramatist himself -- to boost income by appealing to a new market of readers, thus making Shakespeare the subject of literary studies ever since.

21st Century Shakespeare, Evelyn Gajowski

Special Collections Events

Why do Shakespeare's texts resonate so powerfully for us at the outset of the twenty-first century? Why is Shakespeare more popular today than ever before? What are the various ways in which we consume Shakespeare's texts 400 years after he produced them? Professor Gajowski aims to suggest answers to these questions by elucidating the current state of the art of analyzing Shakespeare

Falling Though Space... Portrait Of A Poet From A Bird's Eye View, Christopher Kean

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

In his wartime writing, Falling through Space, Richard Hillary reveals the perspective of a Royal Air Force pilot which leads to a contemplation of existence between two zones: the tragic and the trivial. Aviation literature from this period, in fact, leads to contemplation of the opposing spaces of existence once left only to poets: earth and sky. The middle space between these two, between elevation and rooted humanity, is the topic of this paper.

Building from a series excerpts from literature, I will address the plight of the poet in particular, and of mankind in general. The unique aviator …

Thomas Hardy Essay Competition

Honorable Mention

Call for essays on Thomas Hardy worth 250 pounds.

British Women Writers Conference Call For Papers

Honorable Mention

For its 25th annual meeting, the British Women Writers Conference invites papers and panel proposals considering the theme of “Generations.

Cerdded, Fay Stevens

The Goose

Poetry by Fay Stevens

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Exposing The “Shadow Side”: Female-Female Competition In Jane Austen’S Emma, Melissa M. Lyman

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many critics have examined the shifting nature of female friendship in Jane Austen’s Emma from cultural and historical angles. However, a comprehensive scientific analysis of female-female alliance and competition in the novel remains incomplete. The Literary Darwinist approach considers the motivations of fictional characters from an evolutionary perspective, focusing primarily on human cognition and behaviors linked to reproductive success, social control, and survival. While overt physical displays of male competition are conspicuous in the actions of the human species and those of their closest primate relatives, female aggression is often brandished psychologically and indirectly, which makes for a much more …

Counterfeit Letters And Fictional Trials: Thomas More’S Utopia As Cultural Brand, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Utilizing marketing theory on iconic brands, this article provides a focused study of surviving English editions of Thomas More's Utopia (1551) and the different ways in which the publication was adapted by its print agents, who eventually turned it into an iconic, English brand-name. By drawing a connection between the popularity and versatility of More’s text and the rapidly developing genre of utopian fiction, this article sheds light on the speed with which the press both reacted to and played a role in creating popular taste.

Blind But Seeing: Post-Clinical Medicine In Jose Saramago's Blindness, Matthew J. Ftacek

All NMU Master's Theses

This project examines José Saramago’s Blindness (1996) in the context of two other narratives focused on plagues and epidemics – Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) – each written at different points in time during the development of clinical medicine as chronicled by Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. The paper draws heavily upon Foucault’s work on clinical medicine, as well as a number of different theories of medical history, government policy, and cultural attitudes towards health and illness. The goal of the project is twofold: first, to examine how …

"Your Reclamation”: The Gothic Child And Moral Restoration In Charles Dickens’S A Christmas Carol, Ashten Roberts

Master's Theses

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), an example of Victorian Gothic literature, portrays spirits escorting Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey through time in order to transform him from a miser to a benefactor. Dickens’s text has received much critical attention, and while most critics agree that the novella includes various elements of the gothic, few draw attention to the possibility of the child characters as gothic elements. I argue that Carol’s child characters can be read in terms of what Margarita Georgieva calls “the gothic child.” According to Georgieva, the gothic child can be an adult’s memory from childhood …

The Poet's Corpus: Memory And Monumentality In Wilfred Owen's "The Show", Charles Hunter Joplin

Master's Theses

Wilfred Owen is widely recognized to be the greatest English “trench poet” of the First World War. His posthumously published war poems sculpt a nightmarish vision of trench warfare, one which enables Western audiences to consider the suffering of the English soldiers and the brutality of modern warfare nearly a century after the armistice. However, critical readings of Owen’s canonized corpus, including “The Show” (1917, 1918), only focus on their hellish imagery. I will add to these readings by demonstrating that “The Show” is primarily concerned with the limitations of lyric poetry, the monumentality of poetic composition, and the difficulties …

Combinatorics Of The Sonnet, Terry S. Griggs

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Using a definition of a sonnet, the number of basic rhyming schemes is enumerated. This is then used to discuss the 86 sonnets which appear in John Clare's The Rural Muse.

Harken Not To Wild Beasts: Between Rage And Eloquence In Saruman And Thrasymachus, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

One of the giant gaps in Tolkien scholarship has been to miss how deeply Saruman answers the age-old antagonism between rhetoric and philosophy. Like John Milton, Tolkien cannot bring himself to trust rhetoric. It threatens the unitary truth of a divinely-revealed moral order and, ironically, Tolkien applies great rhetorical skill to convince his reader of rhetoric’s illusionary nature. In this matter Tolkien has been largely successful, since few readers (if any) question the de-privileging of Saruman’s perspective. In the process, though, I suggest that Tolkien has developed in his master rhetorician a new relationship between rhetoric (eloquence) and rage ( …

Honey, Wax, And The Dead Bee, Keith Botelho

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

When Is A Panther Not A Panther? Representing Animals In Early Modern English Heraldry, Kathryn Will

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Response: Fabulous Or Spectral?, Ian Macinnes

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Response: Literary And Multispecies Entanglements And The Challenges Of Historical Animal Studies, Brett Mizelle

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Response: Monster Pets, Karen Raber

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.