Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn

Theses and Dissertations

John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …

Van Gogh’S Yellow Flowers: The Influence Of Post-Impressionism On Mansfield And Woolf, Gabriella M. D'Angelo

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In a letter to Dorothy Brett, Katherine Mansfield responds to Van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers explaining, “That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn't realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does... They taught me something about writing, which was queer—a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free” that she felt after experiencing his painting (O’Sullivan, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 4: 333). The aesthetic emotion resided with her thereafter, as she claimed: “I can smell them as I write” (O’Sullivan, TCLKM, 2: 333). French paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth …

Cultivating A New Educator: Teacher And Students Sharing Growth, Megan Campbell

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is Megan Campell-Looney's final portfolio for her M.A. in English (with a specialization in teaching). It includes a reflective narrative and four revised pieces: "A Murderous Moral Tale: Depictions of the Ideal Victorian in Wilkie Collins' Jezebel's Daughter," "Critical Thinking and Counseling Through the Power of Literature," Developing an American Identity: Syllabus and Assignment Plan," and "Evolving and Adapting Rhetoric and Theory: Indigenous Theory Writing Back." The portfolio focuses on research and study that developed Looney's classroom pedagogy and philosophy. Students and educators both must write back to gain the agency needed for growth.

Perplexed Poetics: Romanticism And The Vortex Of Ideologies, Jaime Luque Lau

Student Theses and Dissertations

In three parts, this thesis explores the tension between the critical and emotional poetics in Romantic poetry, as well as the entanglement of individual will and politics. As a point of entrance, the first part focuses on the major and current trends of scholarly discourses about Romanticism. I will examine Jerome McGann’s influential book of criticism on Romanticism, Romantic Ideology, in juxtaposition with Marc Redfield’s The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. In particular, the discussion of the two books suggest the problems of aesthetic-political and historical discourses; specifically, I argue that McGann’s critical examination of “Romantic ideology” …

Physicality And Spirituality In Riddle 26, Corinne Mccumber

Honors Capstone Projects

Riddle 26, an otherwise-unnamed poem in the 10th-century Old English collection known as The Exeter Book, suggests tension and interplay between its physical form and its meaning. Scholars accept that the riddle’s speaker describes the creation of a religious manuscript, but while physical processes drive the poem’s narrative structure, the speaker ends by focusing on the knowledge that the described religious text contains. As John Hines summarizes, the Old English riddles “demonstrate a keen eye for and dramatically imaginative appreciation of the real world in which the authors and readers lived: both its natural and its manufactured components” (974). …

"Within The Hollow Crown": Performing Kingship In Richard Ii And Henry Iv Part One, Angeline Morris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the parallels and connections between Richard II and Prince Hal in Shakespeare’sRichard II and 1 Henry IV and what the results would be if the characters were cross-cast, or played by the same actor onstage, in performance. Criticism on the plays has often addressed the parallels between the two characters, but as of yet no one has examined ways to show this in performance. This paper acts as a form of critical introduction for a proposed combined performance text of both Richard II and 1 Henry IV, arguing that the textual parallels between the two …

Mansfield Park By Kate Hamill (And Jane Austen), Christopher Nagle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article reviews the world premiere of Kate Hamill's Mansfield Park directed by Stuart Carden and produced for the Northlight Theatre in Chicago in November and December 2018. Hamill’s bold new adaptation is notable for foregrounding the contexts of empire and the slave trade undergirding the novel, and in ultimately offering a feminist fairy-tale of radical self-assertion and self-determination for its heroine.

Review Of Abigail Williams's The Social Life Of Books: Reading Together In The Eighteenth-Century Home, Andrea L. Coldwell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Jane Austen Camp, Devoney Looser

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Austen camp has become prevalent, even omnipresent, today, in visions and versions of her and her fiction, using them as a canvas for zombies, porn, or roller derby. Some of it may be kitsch, but it’s arguably camp. Investigating Austen as camp is a valuable way to understand her humor and her social criticism, as we now understand camp as a positive literary and social practice. But rather than asking if and when camp is “there,” for Austen or for her past readers, we might instead investigate what aspects or elements of her reputation or her writing we notice differently …

Neoclassicism And Camp In Sir William Hamilton’S Naples, Ersy Contogouris

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Susan Sontag, in her now-classic “Notes on Camp” (1964), traces the origins of camp to the eighteenth century (13, 14, 33). And although it is precisely the baroque and rococo art movements against which Winckelmann rebelled that Sontag identifies as camp, it is worth reflecting on whether the notion of imitation that is central to both movements – imitation of ancient works in the case of neoclassicism, and imitation as parody in the case of camp (Meyer 7) – might not bring the two closer. Once the conceptual chasm separating neoclassicism and camp has begun to be bridged, we can …

Sterne’S Sentimental Temptations: Sex, Sensibility, And The Uses Of Camp, Julie Beaulieu

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Laurence Sterne’s lack of commitment to the tenets of sentimentality in A Sentimental Journey—present in his ability to mock and praise the individual capacity to feel, and more precisely, in his satirical reading of the “cult of sensibility,” the new ideological imperative to have and to showcase deep, sentimental feelings—remains as one of the central challenges for readings of the novel. To explore Sterne’s portrayal of sensibility in A Sentimental Journey, I turn to camp sensibility, and the discussions that followed Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” Sterne’s novel could be read as camp, perhaps most notably in his …

Eighteenth-Century Camp Introduction, Ula Lukszo Klein, Emily Mn Kugler

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A blend of the silly and the extravagant that puts the serious into conversation with the ridiculous, camp today is often signified by elements of eighteenth-century Europe with its elaborate hairstyles, exaggerated silhouettes, affected courtiers, and a rise in the consumption of exotic goods, candelabras, masks, and other markers of elite excess (often with a nod to the era’s demise in the form of either the French Revolution or subsequent Victorian strictures). Camp’s relation to queer modes of performance and its prioritization of style over (or in conjunction with) substance offers a queer aesthetic lens to re-evaluate the eighteenth century …

Anne Brontë The Universalist: Religion And Patriarchal Subversion In The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall And Agnes Grey, Ardyn Tennyson

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Anne Brontë (1820-1849) was an English novelist and religious poet, the youngest of the literary Brontë siblings. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë wrote some of the most esteemed novels of the Victorian canon. Children of an Anglican minister, the Brontës were accustomed to clerical life and the conventions of nineteenth-century religious observance. Anne’s faith, however, was unique and radical, an unorthodox form of Christianity called Universalism, which held that all human beings would be saved, not just those chosen by God. This thesis examines her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in the context of …

Pagan Saints In Middle-Earth (2018) By Claudio A. Testi, Jonathan Evans

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Jonathan Evans of Pagan Saints in Middle-earth (2018) by Claudio A. Testi

Application Of The Image Analysis For Archival Discovery Team’S First- Generation Methods And Software To The Burney Collection Of British Newspapers, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Chulwoo Pack, Yi Liu, Delaram Rahimighazikalayeh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

The current study, “Application of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery Team’s First- Generation Methods and Software to the Burney Collection of British Newspapers,” is the first test of our approaches—methods and software—to a different newspaper corpus, specifically the 17th and 18 Century Burney Newspapers Collection. This study stands as the first complete attempt at applying Aida’s software and methods to non-Chronicling America newspapers, as a step toward understanding the potential of our approaches across digitized historic newspapers. In taking this step, our goals were (1) to test how well the software and a classifier model developed on Chronicling America …

Reading The Readers : Analyses Of Shakespearean And Cervantine Characters As (Dys)Functional Readers., Erin Shannon O'Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how the protagonists of Don Quixote and The Tempest perform the act of reading. It explores how the authors create interpretive communities within their works and bring them into conflict in order to foreground the dysfunctionality of particular types of reading. While functional readers are capable of reading among and beyond diverse interpretive communities, dysfunctional readers operate within a single community to the exclusion of other possible interpretations. Chapter One examines Cervantes’s creation of multiple interpretive communities within the first six chapters of Don Quixote, and how Don Quixote acts as dysfunctional reader through his inability …

Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender And Affect In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Gracie Mae Bain

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender and Affect in Victorian Sensation Fiction” explores the interactions between the shock of reading sensation fiction and the affective potential of the genre using Sara Ahmed’s definition of the killjoy and the affect alien. The sensation genre, as explained in its name, is potentially useful when thinking about affective ties in the Victorian period. The first chapter, “Tracing Sensations: Finding and Following the Killjoy” explores the affective footwork that readers of sensation fiction are asked to perform in their sympathetic process with the female villains and fallen heroines. Affective tools employed by sensational fiction create …

“A Woman’S Story”: Lady Macbeth And Performing Femininity In The Early 1600s – Late 1900s, Phyllis Lebert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses gender studies to understand the themes of gender performance further, and more specifically, femininity, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It also explores the many ways feminine gender performance has changed as society has changed. Thus, proving gender is performative rather than innate. It does this by examining first the text within the context of Elizabethan society. Moreover, by examining three pivotal performances of Lady Macbeth through history within the context of their social structures as well. The three performances are that of Sarah Siddons in the Late 18th Century, Ellen Terry in the 19th Century, and Judy Dench in …

"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In “‘We Are Strangers in this Life’: Theology, Liminality, and the Exiled in Anglo-Saxon Literature,” I analyze the theme of exile in the theological literature of the Anglo-Saxon era as a way of conveying the spiritual condition of eschatological separation. The anthropological theory of liminality will be applied in this dissertation as a way of contextualizing the existence of the exiled, and the multiple ways in which exile is enacted. The intervention of the theory of liminality in this dissertation offers a methodology and vocabulary for assessing what exile means in terms of a spiritual identity, how it operates in …

On The Variations Of 'Occupatio' In "Richard Ii", William Kelly Reeder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholarship of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been interested in or preoccupied with its historical relations. Particularly the plays association with the Essex Rising of 1601, and the censorship of the deposition scene, both of which seem to resonate for history with Elizabeth’s enigmatic comment expressing her identification with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

This paper proposes to resolve the question of the play’s censorship by interpreting the deposition scene as a dramatization of transubstantiation, perhaps triggering Elizabethan censors.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine by which the Catholic Church interprets the Eucharist using the distinction between substance and accidens (eternal and …