Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Music In Tolkien's Works And Beyond (2019), Edited By Julian Eilmann And Friedhelm Schneidewind, William Sherwood

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Will Sherwood, of Music in the Works of Tolkien and Beyond (2019) edited by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind

Dyed In Mummy: The Stratford Festival’S Modern Orientalist Approach To Shakespeare’S Othello, Daisy E. Lupa

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Tolkien And The Classics (2019) Edited By Roberto Arduini, Giampaolo Canzonieri And Claudio A. Testi, Luke Shelton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Luke Shelton, of Tolkien and the Classics (2019), edited by Roberto Arduini, Giampaolo Canzonieri and Claudio A. Testi

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Awful Nearness: Rape And The English Novel, 1740–1900, Erin A. Spampinato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Awful Nearness: Rape and the History of the English Novel, 1740-1900,” argues that representations of rape and sexual violence have played an unrecognized role in the history of the novel, indeed that such plots epitomize the most important epistemological questions with which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel grappled. This project is both literary historical and presentist; while it describes a new genealogy of the British novel, it also traces how representations of rape have substantively shaped our contemporary understanding and rhetoric of sexual violence.

Drawing on the work of a wide array of feminist thinkers, I argue that novelistic rape …

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …

The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project puts forth the argument that when the late eighteenth century’s taste for nature and picturesque tourism had peaked, writers following in the picturesque tradition grappled with the limitations and confines of these aesthetic categories. In the chapters that follow, I present three authors, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, who are all dissatisfied with the conventions of the picturesque. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) demonstrates the nuances of the picturesque instability where distinctions between nature and the cultural production of nature have become muddied. I then examine three tour narratives in order to draw attention to how …

The Leap And The Gap: Writing Suicide In Modernist Britain, Aaron Botwick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suicide is integral to the history of British literature, and yet the subject has yielded scant scholarly attention. This study attempts to partially rectify the absence by identifying a transformation in English suicide discourse between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue that, informed by both rationalism and cause-and-effect reasoning, Victorian literature—including poems, triple-decker novels, broadsheets, and sermons—largely conceived of suicide as a public phenomenon. The action, rather than the actor, is the object of study, and as a result what Andrew Bennett calls “the phenomenology, the lived experience … of suicide” is abandoned in favor of social …

Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the development of Jewish fantasy rhetoric in post-WWII British and American literature, focusing on three genres: kabbalistic Beat poetry, children’s fantasy, and graphic novels/comics. Despite increasing scholarly attention to all these areas, little work has focused on fantasy rhetoric or issues of gender and sexuality within non-canonical Jewish literature, or on interplays of religion and fantasy in children’s literature. Jewish kabbalistic poetry and children’s fantasy speak to each other in their mutual engagements with the otherworldly, mystical and monstrous, interrogations of gender, and complex portrayals of feminist theological potentialities. I identify and analyze Jewish-hermeneutic themes and methodologies …

Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, And Fantasies Of National Identity In Early Modern England, Sydnee Wagner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the arrival of Romani people in England in the 16th century, the figure of the Gypsy has been a staple of English literature and culture. My dissertation, Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, and Fantasies of National Identity in Early Modern England, argues that representations of Gypsies, from Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra to Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, served as a foil for English writers to create a distinctly white early modern English subject. By investigating the racialization of the Gypsy, this project considers technologies of race that lie within the parameters of England itself. Though the English …

Postcolonial Urban Vernacular Narratives In Contemporary Britain, Kathryn N. Moss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the ways in which three postcolonial writers in Britain (Samuel Selvon, James Kelman, and Suhayl Saadi) have used the vernacular as a medium for third person narrative fiction. In doing so, they have emphasized the legitimacy, beauty, and utility of languages sometimes considered debased and ugly even by their own speakers. I argue that this shift from the margins to the center of dialect or minority language in fiction is a radical—and relatively recent—one, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. By utilizing the vernacular as a medium for third person narratives, these authors are bringing non-prestige vernacular voices …

Material Culture And Remembering The 1857 Indian Uprising, Danielle Nielsen

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Remembering the 1857 Indian Uprising in Civic Celebrations

A Personal Reflection On Colin Manlove And Stephen Prickett, John Pennington

North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies

No abstract provided.

Letters From The “Gentlemen Of The Press,” 1810-1845, David E. Latane

English Publications

A collection of letters by men and women associated with the periodical press in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, transcribed, annotated, and presented with scans of the original letters. Notable contributors include Times editors Thomas Barnes and John Delane, Fraser's Magazine writers William Maginn and John Heraud, Charles Molloy Westmacott editor of The Age, Stanley Lees Giffard of The Standard , and Mary Russell Mitford.

Living Words; Dying Flesh: The Truth And Testimonies Of Desdemona In Othello And Pompilia In The Ring And The Book, Martha Clare Brinkman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603/4) and Pompilia in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) exemplify female characters whose testimonies highlight their souls’ salvation and demonstrate that they ultimately transcend their domestic roles. This thesis engages historical scholars who discuss the tensions between the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and the state in early modern and Victorian England, and literary scholars who focus on Desdemona and Pompilia as either submissive or possessing agency. This thesis includes the work of developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan, to show how Desdemona and Pompilia emphasize care …

Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies In Early Modern England, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This essay tracks the emergence of ‘debt letters’, an epistolary sub-genre in seventeenth-century letter-writing manuals. Debt letters ask for money, offer funds and excuse the inability to make (or repay) loans. The rhetorical strategies evident in sample debt letters point to a cultural emphasis on friendship as a site of financial stability through reciprocal lending. Moreover, these rhetorical strategies serve multiple goals, which at times conflict: the short-term goal of navigating particular debt arrangements, and the long-term goal of maintaining an amicable bond over time.

The Miseducation Of Marianne Dashwood: Jane Austen’S Politicization Of Sentimental Discourse, Kevin Frazelis

Dissertations and Theses

Examining the love triangle between Marianne Dashwood, Colonel Brandon, and John Willoughby provides new insight into how Austen decided to politicize the notion of the novel to demonstrate the inherent flaw in how sentimental novels to depicted romances bared a threat to women. I work against the conventional opposition of "good" versions of masculinity versus "poor" versions to posit a notion that instead, most masculinities are unstable and a detriment to the fairer sex. In this essay, I will argue that Sense and Sensibility disclose Austen's anxieties regarding sentimentalism because, from this perspective, Marianne Dashwood's character arc illustrates the author's …

Milton's Plant Eyes: Minimal Cognition, Similitude, And Sexuality In The Garden, Perry Guevara

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

This essay turns to minimal cognition, a theoretical extension of embodied cognition, to argue for plant sentience in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton imagines plants as minimally cognitive beings within an affective ecosystem, where they readily enter into the epic poem’s complex circuits of desire with appetites of their own. Specifically, the essay claims that botanical cognition arises at the convergence of two seventeenth-century philosophical systems: the first, Milton’s materialist monism, and the second, Paracelsian medicine, which avers a plant’s therapeutic effect on a human body part sharing morphological resemblance. The essay concludes that Milton’s eroticization of similitude enables a …

Syncretic Immersion: Tolkien’S Languages As History, Artifacts, And Meta-Narratives, Stewart Raymond Zdrojowy

Online Theses and Dissertations

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth has been dissected and researched by philologists, medievalists, and literary theorists for decades. Though his work with languages (both historical and invented) has garnered attention over the past few decades, few scholars have looked at his languages in terms of their rhetorical functions within the narrative (as history), with the narrative (as artifacts), and without (as cultural participation). Mark Wolf’s theories on immersion is applied to Tolkien’s legendarium and illuminates his works as uniquely fixated in several modes of immersion at once. Narrative immersion is utilized to understand Tolkien’s works as a furthering of cultural values, languages, …

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …