Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Spatial Engagement With Poetry By Heather H. Yeung, Deborah C. Bowen

The Goose

Review of Spatial Engagement with Poetry by Heather H. Yeung.

"Why Is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War In The Hobbit", Jane Beal Phd

Journal of Tolkien Research

Why is Bilbo Baggins invisible? This study suggests that Tolkien’s knowledge of philology, theology, philosophy, literature, history, and his own life experience all contribute to the development of the symbolic, moral, and psychological significance of invisibility in The Hobbit. On one level, Tolkien’s theology is informed by his philology, so that being invisible (or “not able to be seen”) becomes a way of symbolically representing the Augustinian concept of evil as the absence of good in the world. On another level, Tolkien’s use of invisibility in The Hobbit demonstrates his knowledge of the philosophic and literary tradition associated with the …

James Joyce's Model Dublin, Barry Sheehan

Academic Articles

“You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.” (Joyce,1986, p.31).

James Joyce wrote about Dublin from a position of exile. He created a model Dublin, one in which he mixed people and places, events and activities, real and imagined and combined them into a city that suited his own ends.

This imagined city has been examined remotely in a multiplicity of ways, and by people in a way that the real city has not. One can ask whether it is Dublin at all? …

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

The Queen's Feud: Women And Kinship In Malory's Morte Darthur, Elsa K. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of blood feud on the knights of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur is clear and has been well studied. Likewise documented is the shift to an institutionalized political system focused on individual chivalry after the founding of the Round Table. This study focuses on the feuds and political changes, which also swept up the women in and around the Round Table including Nynyve, Lyonesse, Guenivere, and Morgawse. Individual chivalry gives women significant independence in action and changes the values they are celebrated for, but their family connections are always considered as primary motivations. The women of …

Faith And God (Chapter 3 Of "Reflections: Virginia Woolf And Her Quaker Aunt, Caroline Stephen"), Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

"Beyond the bulwark of family, for both Caroline Stephen and Virginia Woolf, the institution of the Church was central in fostering a patriarchal fortress that kept women in an inferior position. For Caroline, turning away from the church tradition of her forefathers led her to the Quaker tradition as a way to honor both her God and herself as a woman. For Virginia, that same impulse led her away from the church as well, and although she did not embrace the tenets of Quakerism, much of her work is certainly imbued with a Quaker sensitivity to mysticism and spirituality."

Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, And Constructing Selves: The Preface As Autobiographical Space, Julie A. Eckerle

English Publications

The preface is a unique textual space, one that demands very particular kind of rhetoric because of its generic constraints and yet allows ample room for an author's manipulation and creativity. Perhaps the best articulation of the prefaces paradoxical nature appears in Barbara Johnson's playful response to Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. The autobiographical details summarized here paradoxically depict Speght as the heroic defender of all people and, simultaneously, a woman who clearly knows her place. In her work on French Renaissance women writers, Anne R. Larsen reveals the value of this kind of study: Early women writers exploited the prefaces marginality …

Rebels From The Waist Down: An Exploration Of Sex And Love In 1984, Charles R. Vaught Jr.

2016 Symposium

In 1984, George Orwell depicts a dystopian vision of London. The novel, published in 1949, is a depressing and unhopeful look at the future. However, at its core 1984 is much more than just a futuristic science fiction tale, it is a sexually tragic love story. Throughout the novel, Orwell represents sexuality in this dystopian society as something that has to be suppressed and ultimately warped into a forced love for Big Brother. The very act of sex for fun is viewed as an act of revolt, and those who participate in it are depicted as insurgents. This distorted …

“Do No Harm”: An Exploration Of Medicine In William Shakespeare’S Writings And Modern Filmic Adaptations, Nicholas A. Shortreed

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

All Is Not Fair In Love And Shakespearean Comedy, Shelby Nguyen

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, And The Art Of Mingling Races In Henry V And Cymbeline, Jean Feerick

English

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that …

The Coventry Mysteries And Shakespeare's Histories, Clifford Davidson

Early Drama, Art, and Music

This study is a revision of a paper read at the Shakespeare Institute at Wheaton College and subsequently published in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy: Some Christian Features, edited by Beatrice Batson (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1989), 3-25.

Remembering Barbara Hardy, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I don't compare my intellectual capacity with Lydgate's, but I do remember the precise moment when I knew that the study and potentially the teaching of 'English' were absolutely what I wanted to commit myself to for the rest of my working life, an already distinctly 'mature' student though I was. That moment occurred during my first year at Birkbeck, when Barbara was lecturing on Samuel Richardson's vast epistolary work of fiction, Clarissa, and showing how Clarissa's syntax is one of the ways in which the nature of her intelligence is distinguished from that of every other character in the …

In Memoriam, Bill Adams (1923-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With the passing of Bill Adams at the age of 92 we have truly reached the end of an era. Bill had a close association with the George Eliot Fellowship for fifty years and only two days before his death on 21 June he had laid a wreath ih Nuneaton, as the Fellowship's guest of honour, and after his speech enjoyed chatting at the museum tea room with guests and members, some of whom he had known for decades.

Barbara Hardy (1924-2016), Isobel Armstrong

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This will be a very personal obituary because in losing Barbara I lost one of the profoundest friendships of my life. Her demanding intellectual boldness and buoyant strength of mind were immediately striking. But she also had a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm, a warmth that was evident in the home environment she created: to enter her Earl's Court flat was like entering a Matisse painting - full of colour, oriental carpets, bowls and pots, and paintings by her daughter, Kate. I was lucky enough to experience that warmth and energy less than a week before she died, …

In Janet Dempster's Footsteps: Reminiscence, David Harper

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The road from Trent Valley Station down towards the town centre curves gently past the row of horse-chestnuts in Bond Gate with their white candles. To the young boy arriving to take up residence in Nuneaton it promised something new, always interesting, always just out of reach.

From my earliest years I was a keen reader and felt the privilege of our local author's being one of the unquestioned greats; but it was George Eliot's north Warwickshire that initially attracted me, with The Mill on the Floss and Si/as Marner my favourites. This was reinforced by cycling the lanes for …

'Woman's Freedom Lies In Choosing The Husband Who Is To Be Her Master': Existentialism And The Female Slave In Daniel Deronda, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Various commentators have suggested that Daniel Deronda can be read as a text which espouses early existentialist principles, elevating the individual's search for personal truths above society's expectations and conceptions of duty. I am going to suggest that Deronda 's proto-existentialism is of particular interest when viewed as poised between nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations of existentialism, the godly and the godless, and when Deronda's search is compared with the narratives of the female characters whose freedoms are more curtailed by social mores.

Riding Horses In Middlemarch, Beryl Gary

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'George Eliot's Peculiar Passion' i the title of an article by Sarah Wintle, refers to the belief expressed by Katherine Mansfield in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, that George Eliot had a 'peculiar passion for horses'. At the beginning of the article, Wintle quotes the part of Mansfield's letter which asks Murry to

think of some of [George Eliot's] pictures of country life - the breadth - the sense of sun lying on warm barns - great warm kitchens at twilight when the men came home from the fields - the feeling of beasts horses and cows …

A Tribute To Barbara Hardy, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara and I were close friends for over fifty years. She was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis in 1962, and from then on we met three or four times a year. I had previously reviewed The Novels of George Eliot and been impressed by the subtlety of the sustained investigation and the freshness of approach. It would be accurate to say that it was the major influence on my own studies in Victorian literature.