Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations: The Failed Redeemers And The Fate Of The Orphan, Rebekah Overbey

Masters Theses

The figure of the orphan is scattered throughout the pages of Victorian novels, though few novelists created orphans that were quite as memorable as Charles Dickens. Lonely orphans and abused children appear in nearly all of Dickens' fictional works; in the novels in which the orphan is the main character, this innocent, helpless orphan is often adopted by a wealthy and benevolent benefactor, and the orphan is thus redeemed by a dramatic rescue. In Great Expectations, however, Dickens inverts this redemption by rescue that was so characteristic of his earlier novels. Instead of an innocent, helpless child, Great Expectations has …

Brian Friel’S Modern Irish Drama: Writing The Past, Present, & Future, Brian F. Mccabe

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Postcolonial and historicized readings of Irish literatures describe the evils of colonialism, and the ways it has distorted nationhood and nation-building to serve the ends of greedy empires. But, what happens to a nation or nations in the vacuum after a major colonial power abandons the colony or is driven out? [excerpt]

Fifty Years Of ‘The Barracks’, Eamon Maher

Articles

John McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks , was published 50 years ago, thus marking the arrival of one of Ireland’s most significant writers of the latter half of the20th century. The following year, 1964, saw the book awarded the prestigious Macauley Fellowship, which allowed McGahern to avail of a one-year sabbatical from his teaching duties in Scoil Eoin Baiste in Clontarf.

Magistra Doctissima: Essays In Honor Of Bonnie Wheeler, Dorsey Armstrong, Ann W. Astell, Howell Chickering

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

The editors of this volume use its title to honor Bonnie Wheeler for her many scholarly achievements and to celebrate her wide-ranging contributions to medieval studies in the United States. There are sections on Old and Middle English Literature, Arthuriana Then and Now, Joan of Arc Then and Now, Nuns and Spirituality, and Royal Women. As the editors note in the introduction, the volume "confirms Bonnie's commitment to the multidisciplinary study of the Middle Ages" and affirms her conviction "that the medieval and the modern are best viewed not as 'the past' and 'the present' but as interpenetrative categories."

Pusey's Sermons At St. Saviour's, Leeds, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

"E . B. Pusey as a Preacher." It would not be surprising to find such a phrase as the title of a nineteenth-century work. Authors in both Britain and America used it in books and articles about numerous ministers, literary figures, the Apostle Paul, and even Jesus himself.¹ Edward Bouverie Pusey, in fact, was the subject of one such piece: a review of Sermons for the Church's Seasons from Advent to Trinity, published in the Spectator on 11 August 1883.

Such a scope would, however, be too broad for a scholarly study in the twenty-first century. Pusey's canon …

Monstrosity, Karen N. Wohlgemuth

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Early Gothic Period of English Literature was widely scrutinized for its sensationalism. This thesis explores the value of the genre by offering an alternative view of the monster typically portrayed. A close textual analysis of The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and Frankenstein prove that the real monster is society, and more importantly ourselves. While this thesis dissects the innate characteristics of humankind in the novels, the author hopes that the readers will recognize the same themes in contemporary society. As students of the learned world, we all can acknowledge that Gothic fiction can teach us more …

Orts 74, 2013, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The George MacDonald Society will be hosting a conference from lunchtime Wednesday 13 August to Friday 15 August 2014 at C.S. Lewis' own College, Magdalen, in Oxford. The provisional title is Re-­‐ Imagining the Inklings: the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, and will be chaired by Professor Stephen Prickett our Chairman.

Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience And Masculinity In Bryher's Historical Fiction, Haley M. Fedor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project analyzes three of Bryher's historical novels, while also providing background on the shadowy figure of Bryher herself. Looking at Gate to the Sea, Roman Wall, and Ruan, each serves to represent lesbianism in a variety of coded or metaphorical ways. Various geographical locations or landscapes serve to either represent or depict homosexual desire, and also construct queer spaces for characters to traverse. Limited scholarship exists on any of Bryher's works, particularly that which looks at lesbian sexuality. The genre Bryher writes in allows for a cross-writing of lesbian characters, or gendering lesbian characters as male, and displays awareness …

The Interplay Of Authorial Control And Readerly Judgments In Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Marissa Danaé Nelson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Mainly focusing on postmodern literary theory, I will analyze Ian McEwan’s Atonement and suggest how it becomes a simulacrum due to the protagonist, Briony Tallis taking control of authorship from McEwan and expressing how she is the author of the text. Because Briony negates an important aspect of the novel, hyperreality occurs. This thesis will look at the role McEwan plays as author of Atonement, how main characters Robbie and Cecelia take part within this fictional world and how they become aware of an authorial presence within their lives, how Briony takes ultimate control of the pen and appoints herself …

“The Delight Of Our Earlier Days”: Character, Narrative, And The Village School, Patrick C. Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dear Christopher, Abby Shelley

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

Second Place

Wisdom From A Lost Friend To A New Friend, Veronica Murphy

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

Third Place

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

Review Of "Of Love And War" By Judy Hayden, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Acting, Integrity, And Gender In Coriolanus, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Shakespeare's Coriolanus... anticipates and corroborates modern-day analyses emphasizing the sociopolitical dimensions and determinants of antitheatrical discourse. In the present essay, I would like to shift my focus from questions of class/status to questions of sex/gender, endeavoring to trace the links between Coriolanus’s antiperformative zeal and his ultra-masculine identity. For though it is true that Coriolanus opposes the dissimulation of others on political grounds (i.e., it creates social confusion), what causes him to reject play-acting in his own person is the sexualized fear that it will unman him (i.e., turn him into a squeaking virgin or crying boy). In this manner, …

Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches To Teaching Women Writers, Karen Gevirtz, Martha Bowden, Jonathan Sadow

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

The Counterfeit Child, Steven Bruhm

Data and Test Instruments

No abstract provided.

Jane Austen, The Prose Shakespeare, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

This essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration, rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as a “prose Shakespeare” by nineteenth-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’ dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading.

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

"Something Old And Dark Has Got Its Way": Shakespeare's Influence In The Gothic Literary Tradition, Natalie A. Hewitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of …