Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

C. S. Lewis And His Later Respondents: Letting In Fresh Air, Preventing Questions, And Reimagining A Preface To Paradise Lost, David V. Urban

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This essay chronicles significant responses to C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) that occurred from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. Important responses include those of William Empson, Stanley Fish, Stuart Curran, John Rumrich, Peter C. Herman, Michael Bryson, and Joseph Wittreich. All of these scholars challenged Lewis on various points—most commonly concerning matters of Lewis’s analysis of Milton’s Satan, his alleged oversimplification of Milton’s theologically complex epic, the supposed similarities between A Preface and Fish’s Surprised by Sin, and his assumed hegemonic prevention of new avenues of critical inquiry into Milton’s epic. This essay contends …

Marina Y Cleopatra En El Escenario Teatral, Jon Paul Lawton

World Languages and Cultures Student Papers and Posters

Cleopatra and Doña Marina come from distinct time periods in world history— respectively, the declining Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and the age of the Spanish conquest. Literature has been inspired by these historical figures, creating various interpretations of this Egyptian queen and Aztec translator. Fundamentally, these two personalities share similarities: both women fall in love with foreign invaders and harness influence in the political arena of their times. For this, they must rectify their romantic desires with loyalty for their home countries. The plays Todos los gatos son pardos by Carlos Fuentes and Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare reveal …

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a divergence between Woolf’s vision of private physical spaces necessary for creating art and that of some feminists of color such as Alice Walker, Ortiz Cofer, and Gloria Anzaldua. Both Woolf and these contemporary scholars agree on the importance of physical spaces for female artists. However, they disagree on the nature of these spaces. Woolf’s private physical space is a room with a lock on the door whereas these writers’ room is the kitchen table, the bus, or the welfare line. Walker and like-minded writers challenge the narrowness of Woolf’s room because her locked room is a luxury …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Murder She Sang: How Contemporary Country Murder Ballads Alleviate Blame, Alyssa Hubbard

Honors College Theses

Murder ballads, or narrative songs centered on a murder and/or its aftermath, were historically used as a tool to emphasize a criminal’s guilt, cruelty, and inhumanity. Ballads centered on women in particular underlined the idea that women are naturally inclined to sin and easily corrupted, and because they were often written by men in an imitation of the woman’s voice, any regret or repentance within them is falsified or exaggerated, intended to warn other women away from committing similar transgressions.

In contrast, contemporary murder ballads, such as those sung by country music artists like Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, and The …

How “Interested” Criticism Fueled The Formulation Of Nineteen Eighty-Four’S Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch

All Theses

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a “cultural afterlife” as a result of “interested” criticism, which has a set political/practical barometer or motive. While everyone agrees that the novel presents a frightening dystopia, many also consider it a prophetic piece that illuminates the possible corruption of executive power of a nation thanks to this cultural afterlife; the modern and popular term “Orwellian” resulted from these sorts of analyses and have only escalated in the years since its inception. As a result, within the past decade, multiple scholars, analysts, and journalists have referenced Orwell’s novel as a factual representation of this executive …

A Seventeenth-Century Air History In Conversation With Antony And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

This article works to unpack the recurrences of air-related language utilized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout this play, the notions of breath, wind, air, and vapor are consistently referenced, demonstrating the way in which atmospheric intangibility was a key point of exploration for contemporary scientists and philosophers. Through this analysis, it is clear that Shakespeare employs breath in three ways: the breath of (public) life, a lack of breath, and, most importantly, breath as a symbol of power and autonomy, which at times overlaps with the breath of life in ways that demonstrate contemporary conceptualizations of living beings. The …

Stigma And The Social Function Of Fate In The Story Of Túrin Turambar, Clare Moore

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper applies Erving Goffman's theories of stigma to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin in order to explore the social function of Túrin's fate throughout the narrative. Interpreting fate as a stigma reveals the role society plays in the tragedy of Túrin's story through the lens of a social model of disability.

Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism And Communications Media In Violet Hunt's "Love's Last Leave.", Melissa Dinsman, Heather M. Robinson

Publications and Research

An overlooked figure of modernist circles, Violent Hunt was a suffragette, novelist, and author of ghost stories. In her second collection of haunted narratives, More Tales of The Uneasy (1925), Hunt explores the ghostliness of the Great War, both for those on the front and at home. In this essay, we focus on the third story in this volume, “Love’s Last Leave,” and argue that Hunt includes both ghost story tropes and communications media to articulate the real deadliness of the Great War. Communications technology and spiritualism share a similar historical evolution, and in “Love’s Last Leave” both types …

A Checklist And Index To Lembas Extra 1985 To 2019, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

A Checklist and Index to Lembas Extra 1985 to 2019

Index To Tolkien Studies Volume 1 (2004) Through Volume 18 (2021), Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review Volume 1 (2004) through Volume 18 (2021)

Index To The Journal Of Tolkien Research Volume 1 Through Volume 13 Issue 1, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 1 through Volume 13 issue 1

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

The Nature Of Middle-Earth (2021) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Carl F. Hostetter, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Carl F. Hostetter

Preface To Ssl 47.1, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the issue contents, pays brief tribute to six long-time Scottish literature scholars who have recently died (Michael Timko, Priscilla Bawcutt, Greg Kratzmann, Robert Donaldson, Thorne Compton, and Dorothy McMillan), notes that the journal has now surpassed 400,000 article downloads, and describes plans for forthcoming issues.

Introduction: Literary Geographies: The Solway Firth, Gerard Lee Mckeever

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the symposium that follows by describing the Solway Firth, its shores and its significance in the late 18th and early 19th century, defining the perspective of the symposium as "critical regionalism," examining the theme through an 1821 magazine story-series about a steam-boat on the Solway and through Allan Cunningham's novel Lord Roldan (1836), and reviewing the other symposium papers to highlight their contributions to this theme.

'This Prodigious Mass': The Eruption Of The Solway Moss In 1771, Alex Deans

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the sudden bursting of the peat surface of the Solway Moss, above and west of the Esk River, and the destruction that followed, through initial reports from the Scots Magazine, the account by John Walker in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and two accounts by Thomas Pennant, one before the disaster and a fuller one after, in his Tour in Scotland... in 1772 (1774).

From Skiddaw To Scruffell: Sightlines Over The Solway, Christopher Donaldson, Joanna Taylor

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the geography, and literary antecedents, of William Wordsworth's poems about Robert Burns from the visit he and his sister Dorothy made across the Solway Firth to Dumfries and Ellisland in 1803, and discusses the link they made between the two mountains of Skiddaw in Cumberland and Curfell or Criffel on the Scottish side of the Firth.