Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Oscar Wilde And The Invention Of A Life-Creating Fiction, Michael Lackey

English Publications

When discussing the origins, rise, and contemporary legitimization of biofiction, Oscar Wilde is a crucial figure. This is not just because he authored one of the first and most important reflections about the aesthetic form, but also because he became the subject of many biofictions, most notably Desmond Hall's I Give You Oscar Wilde: A Biographical Novel {1965), Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Louis Edwards's Oscar Wilde Discovers America (2003), and Colm Toibin's The Master (2004). Some, of course, would question and challenge my decision to include Toibin's novel in this list, as many would say …

Introduction: Ireland, The Irish, And Biofiction, Michael Lackey

English Publications

No abstract provided.

The London Game, Geremy Carnes, Betsy Aldrich, Brielle Amick, Luke Anderson, Cheyenne Burns, Benjamin Burr, Hannah Marie Chisnell, Caitlin Dollins, Jackson Ederer, Julia Fotiadis, Ethan Mathias, Marqueveosha Patton, Kai Ross, Caroline Smith, Jessica Spivey, Andrea Stanford, Lana Kay Tutterow, Castle Wagoner-Smith

OER Student Projects

The London Game is an interactive narrative developed by students and their instructor at Lindenwood University using the Twine tool. Players take the role of a time traveler who can experience any of three scenarios based on aspects of London history and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the Great Fire, the theatrical scene, and the struggles of poverty.

Exiles, Knowledge, And Power: Utopian And Dystopian Worlds In Early Modern England, Jennifer Topale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research project seeks to investigate the ways in which exiled early modern writers and literary characters engage with power and access knowledge, often through the creation of utopian and dystopian worlds, which either leads to their exilic identities and disempowerment or allows them to renegotiate their identities from the periphery to the center of power. The triadic relationship among the terms exile, knowledge, and power will be analyzed through postcolonial theory, identity politics, and feminist theory. Exiles can be defined as punitive, political, internal, and self-imposed, and some can inhabit more than one exilic identity. Each of these individuals …

Destabilizing Shakespeare: Reimagining Character Design In 1 Henry Vi, Carly Sponzo

Self-Designed Majors Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Alt Wars Of The Roses: A Guide To The Women In Shakespeare's First Tetralogy (Especially Richard Iii) For Fans Of Philippa Gregory's White Queen Series, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Since The Other Boleyn Girl made such a splash, especially with its 2008 film adaptation starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, novelist Philippa Gregory has turned out book after book of first person female narratives, historical fiction of the era of the early Tudors and the Cousins’ War. (Gregory has an aversion to calling it "Wars of the Roses" but seems to be the sole voice against that classification.) With the film series of The White Queen released in 2013, we have what some consider a fuller pop culture alternative perspective on the women who intersect with the plays that …

What Happens (And Doesn't) In Hamlet (And Who Cares?), Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This lecture, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, uses the classic text by John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, to initiate some important considerations on appreciating and teaching Hamlet. Attached as addenda 3 is a Handout which includes the list of soliloquies, keyed to act, scene, lines, as recorded in both the Riverside 2^nd edition and Norton 3^rd edition texts.

Wilson often gravitates to conundrums of the text. Is Hamlet fearing his own mental instability when he warns Marcellus and Horatio that he may put an "antic disposition" on? Why does Shakespeare give us two versions …

Teaching Titus Andronicus In Order To Re-Examine Shakespeare's Evolution Of The Tragic Form, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This paper revisits classroom strategies of two decades ago and the conference presentation that developed from them. Critics have come to regard Shakespeare's early tragedy Titus Andronicus as more than an early and inferior drama or one whose excess of violence makes it flawed. The early play merits attention for its insights in how Shakespeare evolved to write his mature tragedies Hamlet and Othello. A class in the Early Plays of Shakespeare (EH 403) usually studies the mature tragedies early in the semester, then revisits them with more insight after coverage of Titus Andronicus. Central to classroom debate is …

C. S. Lewis’S Complex Relationship With Queer Milton Studies: Indirect Inspiration, Hegemonic Antagonist, And Erased Inconvenient Forerunner, David V. Urban

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This essay discusses queer Milton scholarship’s various responses to C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost, beginning with Gregory Bredbeck’s groundbreaking 1991 PMLA article through the 2018 volume Queer Milton and beyond. Although most of these responses portray Lewis as one whose explicit denial of queer angelic behavior in Paradise Lost has served to prevent queer readings of Milton, Lewis can also been seen as one who, by this explicit denial, indirectly brought about queer Milton studies. Attention will be paid to Drew Daniel’s unexpected 2014 portrayal of Lewis’s offering an especially daring queer vision of Paradise Lost, a …

John Donne And The Paradox: An Analysis Of “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’D God”, Lily Daniels

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

A paradox is a statement that appears contradictory but ultimately makes sense. “Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God” (1632) by John Donne reflects the many paradoxes within the Bible and Christian faith. Read within the context of his religious beliefs and the rest of the Holy Sonnets, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is a poem that exhibits Donne’s theology of God and the process of salvation. The speaker affirms that the power of the triune God is required to break the bonds of sin. He finds freedom from sin in submitting to God’s will, and he finds innocence …

From Major To Minor Characters: The Fallen Woman And Her Female Friends In The Novels Of Wollstonecraft, Hays, And Austen, Anne Mclaughlin

English Honors Papers

In this thesis I argue that Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen use female-female friendships, sororal relationships, and depictions of the “fallen” woman in their novels to expose the oppressive nature of patriarchy and marriage for women. Wollstonecraft and Hays were radical in their time, which is represented in their novels that point out marriage’s inequities towards women in regard to divorce laws and custody laws. Focusing on how marriage impacts a woman’s friendships, Austen acknowledges the potentially isolating nature of marriage.

Wollstonecraft and Hays wrote novels that eschew the marriage plot by focusing on how female-female relationships provide …

Death, Discipline, And The Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric In Early Modern English Texts, Leslie Raybuck Malland

Theses and Dissertations--English

Death, Discipline, and the Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric in Early Modern English Texts locates allusions to the biopolitical culture of Early Modern England within popular English texts. Through my examination of the period’s fascination with death—public executions, newly-authorized anatomies—and the ways in which death, as well as the treatment of the dead, was authorized by and supported the ideological aims of the state, my research identifies how those themes carry over into the most popular works of the day, reviewing instances of both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric across genres to find allusions to biopower — or, state control of the biological. …

Monstrous And Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes In Wilde’S Salomé, Nayana Rajnish

English (MA) Theses

The subject of my research is the 1891 play Salomé, by Oscar Wilde and my thesis addresses the modern psychological implications of the cultural truths revealed by Wilde's re-vision of the myth of that biblical femme fatale. I argue that in fashioning a tragic heroine out of a female monster figure of “Immortal Vice”, Oscar Wilde created a document that captures two contradictory narratives: one in which Salomé plays the heroine of a tragedy and another in which she performs the role and functions of a villain. By employing Carl Jung's psychology of the archetypes, I am enabled …

Shakespeare’S Deviation From His Predecessors: Aligning "Romeo And Juliet" With Italian Renaissance Marriage Culture, Tara Lynn Hohn

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Creature In The Looking Glass: Miltonic Marriage And The Female Self In Breaking Dawn, Jay Wright

Undergraduate Research Awards

Near the close of Breaking Dawn, the final installment of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, Edward asks his new wife Bella a question. “When will you ever see yourself clearly?” (Dawn 744). Bella has no answer for him. Edward's question and, more importantly, Bella's apparent inability to answer is symptomatic of a broader issue throughout Breaking Dawn, in which, even as Bella obtains all that she has desired, her sense of self begins to fracture. Breaking Dawn formalizes Bella’s union with Edward through a series of increasingly binding steps: first through legal marriage, then sexual intimacy and pregnancy, then through vampiric …

Conquering Shame: The Growth Of Virginia Woolf’S Character In Moments Of Being, Ellie Windfeld-Hansen

Global Tides

This paper details the roles that shame, guilt, dread and humiliation play in Virginia Woolf's childhood and early adult life. It examines four key instances during these times in her life in which one or more of these feelings are present. Each of these instances also involves certain distinct family members. These experiences of Woolf's discussed in the paper and the family members with which she interacts strengthen her character and contribute to her unique perception and worldview.

Interlingual Morphology And Wakean Topology, Stephen Valeri

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

As an example of limit literature (literature that exhausts the entirety of what is possible in a given form), Finnegans Wake has been an inspiration for the theories of figures like Kristeva and Derrida to reveal the structural and linguistic operations of texts generally. In defamiliarizing the processes of word formation, the Wake compels us to attend to morphology’s structuring role in a work. My project focuses on Phillipe Sollers and Stephen Heath’s French translation of part of the concluding section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to observe how the attempt to approximate Joyce’s interlingual morphology in translation contributes to …

‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian

Scripps Senior Theses

“I have had my vision,” Lily Briscoe declares in the triumphant culminating line of To the Lighthouse, indicating the fulfillment of her artistic vision on a project over ten years in the making. In her success, Lily Briscoe disproves those who have told her “women can’t write, women can’t paint” and actualizes her ability to create, all the while rejecting gendered and heteronormative expectations which prioritize heterosexual marriage over her artistic pursuits (Woolf, TL 86). Strikingly, this language of vision also recurs throughout The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a text published 22 years after To the Lighthouse, …

Fantastical Worlds And The Act Of Reading In Peter And Wendy, The Chronicles Of Narnia, And Harry Potter, Grace Monroe

Master’s Theses

My thesis explores the relationship between the child reader and the protagonist within fantasy children’s literature. By examining the experience of the protagonist in the text, I am complicating the notion of escapism in children’s literature and offering a new way to look at how children read. Using narrative theory and Freud’s fort-da, I detail how the events within a novel, the danger and catharsis within the plot, show how both the protagonist and the reader use narrative to better understand and cope with anxieties in their worlds. The novels and series that I discuss, Peter and Wendy (1911), …

Enter Invisible: Atavistic Dualism In Shakespeare, Donne, And Milton, Andrew Scott

Master’s Theses

This thesis explores the different ways in which either dualistic or monistic points of view are represented in select works of William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. I am relying principally on the broad definition of dualism Ioan Couliano utilizes in his book The Tree of Gnosis. Per Couliano, dualism is not necessarily a discrete tenet of a systematized belief; rather, he means by the word to indicate an intellectual tendency toward splitting certain complex ideas—body and soul, God and man, evil and its opposite, etc.—into separate, sometimes opposing parts. This in contrast to monism, which brings into …