Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

Music, Shakespeare, And Redefined Catharsis, Megan Jae Hatt

Student Works

The definition of catharsis has changed since the time of Aristotle. A person does not only experience catharsis out of pity or fear from theatric tragedies; they also experience it through laughter, love, and simply immersing themselves into the emotions presented by different forms of media. This essay reviews the catharsis one can experience through contemporary music and Shakespeare as they become submersed in the emotions and spectacle of each respective media. In this essay, I compare and contrast contemporary music and Shakespeare text and performance in order to relate them to this new definition of catharsis by including different …

“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.

Children As The Power Of Shakespeare, Samantha Rowley

Student Works

An dive into how children are used in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. While there has been some extensive research on numerous of Shakespeare’s minor characters, some of his other characters, the minors, have been focused on less. Because they fly under the radar, Shakespeare uses these “minor” characters in order to subtly manipulate his audience, using them as a source of pathos in much the same way adults use children to manipulate audiences while silencing the actual opinions of the children they claim to represent. However, though he may often use children for this effect due to their fragility, Shakespeare …

Politicized Identity In Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl And The Fortunes, Savanna S. Batson

English Department Theses

This thesis explores the effects of politicized identities on the basis of particular aspects of an individual’s being, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality in Peter Ho Davies’s novels The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016). By carefully studying each of his protagonists within the context of the particular time and place in which they have come of age, and are now living, this thesis demonstrates how Davies engages with themes of identity, community, and alienation relative to the specific socio-cultural matrix that informs the politicization of identities at their time. It explores how Davies’s characters undergo the process …

Beyond Marital Bliss: A Redemption Of Motherhood In Jane Austen, Destiny Cornelison

English MA Theses

Though the mother figures in Jane Austen’s novels are often written off as ridiculous or unlikeable, this thesis posits that the mothers of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park are written as they are in an intentional effort on Austen’s part to condemn the society that forced them into roles of ridiculousness or stinginess. Their inconsistencies highlight the unattainable standards placed on mothers by society as a whole and their eccentricities are the result of a lack of outlet for feminine energy. Character studies of the women of these novels illustrate that they are not …

The Divinity That Shapes Our Ends: Theological Conundrums And Religious Scepticism In Hamlet, Kyler Merrill

Student Works

This paper proposes that Shakespeare deliberately incorporated speculative theology into Hamlet to stimulate religious scepticism. It explores the troubling implications of the ghost’s behaviour, cinematic adaptations of the murder testimony, and the characters’ moral failings in the purportedly Catholic cosmos of Elsinore.

On The Shoulders Of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation And Scholarly Perception Of Edith Tolkien, Nicole M. Duplessis

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In his obituary for Carpenter, Douglas A. Anderson reviews Carpenter’s “long and complex” involvement with the subject of his 1977 authorized biography, indicating that “with [Carpenter’s] passing it is time to begin to assess his changing perspectives on Tolkien and on his own Tolkien-related work.” Since its publication, Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, which Anderson calls “an excellent book. . . unusually accurate more than a quarter of a century after it was written, despite many advances in Tolkien scholarship” remains a largely unquestioned authority, its influence so entrenched as to be virtually invisible. As a result, scholarship on Tolkien, from …

Gunslinger Roland From Yeats’S Towers Came(?): A Little-Studied Influence On Stephen King’S Dark Tower Series, Abigail L. Montgomery

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This essay has two major goals. Its general aim is to join the growing body of scholarship that takes Stephen King’s work seriously as literature in its own right and in conversation with other, traditionally canonical, works. This essay specifically does so by examining the apparent, though unreferenced, influence of William Butler Yeats’s poems “The Tower” and “The Black Tower” on King’s longest, strangest, most challenging and most self-referential work—the Dark Tower series. King references Yeats elsewhere in his fiction, and a rich, non-linear intertextuality connects the Dark Tower series to much of the rest of King’s work. Taking this …

Binding Them All (2017), Ed. By Monika Kirner-Ludwig, Stephan Köser, And Sebastian Streitberger, Anna Smol

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Anna Smol of Binding Them All (2017), ed. by Monika Kirner-Ludwig, Stephan Köser and Sebastian Streitberger

Raising Cain: Interrogating Monstrosity In Beowulf, Victoria Pan

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

In this paper, I explore the implications of the narrator in Beowulfdescribing Grendel as the "son of Cain." I use this reference as it applies to Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel's mother, to interrogate what exactly it means to be a monster, and who gets to place this designation on others. What I find is ultimately, there is no true system behind who is the monster and who is the hero: one is simply favored by society, accepted as part of their "normal," and one is not. By walking through a series of parallels between Beowulf and Grendel, who both inherit …

Subverting The Patriarchy And Its Ties To Feminism: Du Maurier And Her Adaptations, Samantha Koller

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

This paper describes the common (mis)reading of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca as upholding Victorian patriarchal values and attempts to demonstrate that the novel is indeed feminist and acts as a critique and subversion of those patriarchal standards; it then examines the film and stage adaptations of Rebecca, demonstrating via comparison to the original medium that feminism has begun to affect other cultural interpretations and depictions of the narrator, Mrs. Danvers, and Rebecca herself.

“‘Hel-Heime!’: The Daring Love Between Men In Dome Karukoski’S Tolkien”, Christopher Vaccaro

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article briefly summarizes the homo-amorous connections between members of the T.C.B.S. in the Karukoski's film, Tolkien.

The Shapes Of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History, Eric Weiskott, Irina Dumitrescu

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they …

Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

Milton’s youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady’s movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton’s understanding of virginity’s poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise …

Deforming Normalcy: Deformity And Disability In William Blake's Art, Seolha Lee

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines William Blake’s verbal and visual art from the perspective that disability is a physical and mental condition that is viewed by society as deviant. Prior to modern conceptions of disability in Britain, the deviation was labeled as “deformity.” This thesis demonstrates various ways in which Blake illustrates deformity, and through this, prefigures the modern sense of disability in his art. I argue that Blake’s representation of deformity in his poetry and drawings is intended to reveal the precariousness of the “normal” human body and inform the reader and viewer that normality is an illusion. The age of …

Englands Happie Queene: Female Rulers In Early English History, Emily Benes

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This paper examines the historical records and later literature surrounding three early mythic and historical British queens: Albina, mythic founder of Albion; Cordelia, pre-Roman queen regnant in British legend; and Boudica, the British leader of a first-century CE rebellion against the Romans. My work focuses on who these queens were, what powers they were given, and the mythos around them. I examine when they appear in the historical record and when their stories are expanded upon, and how those stories were influenced by the political culture of England through the early seventeenth century. In particular, I examine English attitudes toward …

Enchantment: A Teleology, Nathanael S. Toth

Senior Honors Theses

Despite the highly developed nature of his fictional world, Middle-earth, Tolkien never formally laid out a tabulated magic system for his fantasy creation. Nevertheless, unlike many stories by others in the fantasy genre, the magic he does include is far from just a shallow, world-building mechanism. Instead, it encapsulates the core theme of his fiction and the purposes which Ilúvatar (the God of Middle-earth) has given to the story’s many characters.

This paper will examine the nature and function of this magic from many angles: the identification of good magic with art and evil magic with domination; the delineation between …

Writing Early Ireland: A Panel Discussion, Laura Steblay, Caroline Vodacek, Rachel Larsen, Corinne Mccumber, Bailey Kemp

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2019

In past decades, early Irish literature has received relatively little scholarly attention. However, works such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Edmund Spenser’s Book Five of The Faerie Queene, and Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland provide unique and important representations of early Irish culture. In this five-person panel, we will examine these works and our collective analyses of Irish cultural and literary representations within them. Specifically, we will critique problems of colonialism and portrayals of gender, and we will affirm the importance of the landscape and of literary intersections with archaeology and …

“Indeed, It Is A Strange-Disposed Time:” Julius Caesar, A Game At Chess, And The Politics Of Staging, Gabriel A. Rieger

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.