Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Antitheatricality And Irrationality: An Alternative View, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"Over the last three decades, antitheatrical authors like Stephen Gosson, Phillip Stubbes, and William Prynne have become increasingly visible in the literary and cultural studies of the early modern period. Even so, the tendency has been to treat these authors as ideological extremists: reactionary hacks whose opposition to stage plays originates in outrageous ideas of the self, impossible notions of right and wrong, and bizarre beliefs about humanity’s susceptibility to external suggestion. This characterization can be traced back to several of the pioneering studies in the field, including Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1985) and Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s …

Jane Austen Meets The Gps: Place And Space, David Kolb

Sophia and Philosophia

When one reads Jane Austen’s novels, one finds that her heroines’ lives center around a beloved and comfortable home, in a local region including a small town, some neighboring estates, and local hills and valleys. It is a detailed and textured home area of nearby places reachable on foot or horse. One to three miles are walkable to a friend’s house or a favorite scenic hill. Beyond this region is no longer “home.” Fifteen or twenty-five miles can be distant.

Ghosts And Angels In The House: Cecilia De Noel And The Search For Faith In The Late Nineteenth Century, Christine Sutphin

English Faculty Scholarship

The nineteenth century, so often thought of as the age of scientific theory, technological change, and realism in fiction, abounds with supernatural phenomena. While some readers and observers of culture could define practices and texts related to the supernatural as pernicious because irreligious or unscientific, others could appreciate ghost stories at least as imaginative entertainment resulting in pleasurable fear but not otherwise significant. However, these stories can be read as serious and profound explorations of the unknown and the moral, philosophical, and spiritual questions with which we continue to struggle.

Of all the ghost stories published during the period, perhaps …

The Shadow Of The War: Postwar Destabilization, Nostalgia, And Fragile Truth In The Works Of A. A. Milne, Sarah E. Johnson Labarbera

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

The Said And The Unsayable : Silence In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility, Mansfield Park, And Persuasion, Laura Evelyn Thurber

Theses, Dissertations, and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Subversion Of Traditional Gender Roles In Thomas Hardy’S 'The Mayor Of Casterbridge', Emma S. Shaw

Student Publications

This essay examines Thomas Hardy's understanding and subversion of gender roles in The Mayor of Casterbridge by focusing on the novel's two most prominent characters and their respective progressions over the course of the narrative. Michael Henchard’s hypermasculine behavior and eventual undoing is juxtaposed with Elizabeth-Jane’s active rejection of the male gaze, as well as her unique role as a proxy for the reader. In his 1886 novel, Hardy questions the legitimacy of gender expectations by acknowledging and subsequently undermining patriarchal traditions.

“One Feeling In Such A Solitude”: Representations Of Love And Marriage In The Works Of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley And Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jenna E. Fleming

Student Publications

The early nineteenth century was characterized by a dynamic literary discussion and debate over the nature and effects of human relationships. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, two of the foremost writers of the period, experimented with and drew conclusions about differing images of marriage within their works. Making use of this public literary genre, the couple engaged in a conversation with one another as they explored and refined their views and judgments of relationships including their own. The title of the paper is taken from the seventh chapter of the third volume of Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein, …

Balance In Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne Through Friedrich Schiller’S Eyes, Peter W. Rosenberger

Student Publications

Many critics of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy see the novel’s narrative elements and structure as a form of narrative play, which reject Enlightenment systems of understanding. In this paper, through the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, I will argue that the novel’s narrative structure is best understood as a balance of aesthetic impulses. For most scholars, to understand the narrative form, digressions, philosophy of knowledge, and/or history in Tristram Shandy, one must understand how the novel subverts the categorization and systematization of Enlightenment thinking. The patterns of subversion in the text lend themselves to arguments that characterize the novel as one …

Changing The Victorian Habit Loop: The Body In The Poetry And Painting Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti And William Morris, Bryan Gast

Dissertations (1934 -)

Founded in England in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against Victorian artistic convention and sought to recapture a medieval style of painting believed by its members to have existed before Raphael. That style was a significant departure from the prevailing Royal Academy style, however, and—as many critics note—ahead of its time. Among the Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris were unique for their creative output as both poets and painters. This dissertation examines the representation of the body in some poems and paintings by Rossetti and Morris and analyzes the impact of the Pre-Raphaelites on habits of thinking about …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

Owen Barfield And "Is Man A Myth?", Phillip Joe Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

No abstract provided.

Adam Smith For Our Times, Ii: Of Sympathy And Selfishness, Michael Gavin

Studies in Scottish Literature

Summarizes the published proceedings of a recent conference at Mercer University discussing the significance for 21st century America of the 18th century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, and offers a critical perspective.

Oceans And Ecotones In Mary Shelley’S Maurice, Or The Fisher’S Cot, Colin Carman

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay is about oceans in one of Mary Shelley’s non-canonical works, Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot: A Tale (1820), and the relatedness of humans to their ocean environments; it’s also about Shelley’s representations of those rich and diverse life-forms that populate the edge between sea and land-mass and within what ecologists refer to as an “ecotone.” By characterising the ocean as an ecotone in Maurice, Shelley makes explicit a more eco-conscious way of understanding the nature/culture dichotomy and in terms that directly involve the shifting boundaries between land and sea, saltwater and freshwater, human and animal. This English Romantic …

Glimpses Of Lost Home In The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien And Owen Barfield, Phillip Joe Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

No abstract provided.

“With What’S Unreal Thou Coactive Art”: Gender And The Forces Of Illusion In The Winter’S Tale And The Tempest, Mark S. Rideout

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

"Busking For The Queen Of Faerie: Elizabethan Playwrights In Contemporary Fantasy Fiction", Kristen Mcdermott

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

“Art Thou Not, Fatal Vision, Sensible / To Feeling As To Sight?”: Spiritual Bondage, Carnal Corruption, And Horror In Marlowe’S Doctor Faustus And Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Jared Johnson

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Immortal Parts: Ghostly Renown In Shakespeare, Jennifer Holl

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Hath Not Thy Rose A Canker?”: Monstrous Generation And Comic Subversion In King Henry Vi, Part 1, Heather Frazier

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.