Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics Between Romanticism And Liberalism, Robert Mitchell

Literature

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics.

Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling …

Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data In Medieval Manuscript Studies, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. We describe the website’s lifecycle as well as our progress so far in creating a new dataset for the Brut corpus, “Re-Imagining History,” part of the ongoing project “Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of …

“Around We Go”: The Apocalypse As Revolution And Revelation In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

The tradition of global disasters in literature is long-standing and David Mitchell contributes to that discussion. For him, the possibility of political, social, and environmental collapse is imminent based on patterns he traced throughout human history. One common thread Mitchell weaves throughout his works is the presence and the relevance of the apocalyptic. In his best known work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell explores the cyclical trends of humanity across time and space, including the recurrence of predacity, cruelty, and systematic oppression. Rather than being overwhelmed by a nihilistic reality, Mitchell centers Cloud Atlas around recurring figures of revolution, resisting and …

Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be examining temporality in British texts about Egypt across time. In order to achieve this, I analyze the play Antony and Cleopatra (1606) by William Shakespeare, and put it in conversation with Pharos, the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Newell Boothby. I will also be discussing Alexandria (2009) by Lindsey Davis, as a demonstration that the pattern in my findings is enduring. I will be dissecting the portrayal of Egyptian temporality, which I have found to be conveyed as a stasis, as contrasted by the quick-time of dominating imperial powers. These sources will allow me to compare depictions of …

A Brief And True Report Of The Newfoundland Of Virginia, Thomas Hariot

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

Visiting Jane: Jane Austen, Fan Culture, And Literary Tourism, Brianna Surratt

Senior Theses

People have been visiting sites associated with Jane Austen for two centuries now, and there have been fans of her work for even longer. Austen inspires unique devotion among her fans for an author about whose life we know very little. Furthermore, these fans have been fighting among themselves for as long as fans have existed over who loves her the right way – the academics or the amateurs? This work explores that unique fan culture in detail through the lens of literary tourism, going into detail about two sites in particular – Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England, and …

“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.

Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency …

Tolkien And The Classical World (2021), Edited By Hamish Williams, John Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of Tolkien and the Classical World (2021), edited by Hamish Williams

Contemporaries & Other Inklings Collection Finding Aid, Taylor University

Finding Aids

The Contemporaries & Other Inklings Collection features a variety of rare books, pamphlets, and articles written by and about members of the Inklings and those who were their friends or inspirations. Please refer to the separate finding aids for these authors: C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, and Owen Barfield.
Last Updated: August 29, 2022

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

A Changing Narrative For Englishwomen's Authorship During The Early Modern Period, Erin Kruger

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This thesis is a look into women’s authorship in the English Early Modern period, specifically looking at the time period from 1543 until 1621. The main writers of focus are Catherine Parr, Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, and Aemilia Lanyer, with supplemental texts from the period used to frame the thesis argument. Modern research on this era is also used to supplement the work. Over the course of the period, the innovation of women’s authorship led to two primary changes in the nature of women’s authorship: more inclusive women’s authorship and the expansion of topics that women wrote on. These …

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.

She Lives: Bringing The Bride Of Frankenstein To Life In The Comics, Michael Torregrossa

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein recently celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary, and its story remains vibrant in popular culture, especially in the comics medium. I’ve done a number of conference papers in the past devoted to representations of the Creature and his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in comics and comic art, but I’ve only recently begun to look at how the character of the Bride of Frankenstein has been depicted. I’d like to use this opportunity to further that work and look more closely at continuations and recastings of her story. The Bride has no chance at life in Shelley’s novel, as she is …

Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren

Other Faculty Materials

Remix the Manuscript is a digital humanities research project centered around a single medieval manuscript, the Dartmouth Brut Chronicle (Rauner Codex MS 003183). This ongoing experiment with digital tools uses this one example to explore one broad question: How are the digital tools available today determining what we will know 100 years from now about things that happened 1000 years ago?

C.S. Lewis Collection Finding Aid, Taylor University

Finding Aids

The C. S. Lewis Collection features a variety of books and articles by and about Lewis. It also includes letters and manuscripts written by Lewis, as well as rare and first editions of his books.
Last Updated: August 29, 2022

Middle-Earth, Or There And Back Again (2020) Edited By Łukasz Neubauer, Marjorie Burns Professor Emerita

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Marjorie Burns, of Middle-earth, or There and Back Again (2020) edited by Łukasz Neubauer.

The Seduction Of Pessimism: Eros, Failure, And The Novel, Tom Ribitzky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Plato’s Symposium, we get a pessimistic myth not only about love, but about the first experience of loss, in which we were once globular cosmic beings who were split in two by Zeus’s thunderbolts as punishment for not obeying the Olympian gods. Falling down to earth after the split, Zeus introduced eros out of pity for our condition. Our consolation was to find our other halves and hold on to them as a way of remembering what it was like when we were whole. But, as Allan Bloom notes:

…man’s condition soon worsened. In the beginning, their real …

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

George Macdonald Collection Finding Aid, Taylor University

Finding Aids

The George MacDonald Collection features a variety of rare books, letters, and serialized fiction written by MacDonald, as well as scholarship and articles written about him.
Last Updated: August 29, 2022