English Language and Literature Commons^™

"Lewis Dodged": T. S. Eliot's Silence, C. S. Lewis's Critique (1931 - 1947), Hannah F. Roux

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"Most agree that Lewis’s critique of Eliot’s work is important to his literary scholarship—whether they think that critique changes or not. There is no academic book of Lewis’s from the 1930s and 1940s in which he does not at some point engage with Eliot by name. The opposite question—whether Lewis’s work was important to Eliot—is comparatively neglected. This paper investigates this neglected question."

What Did Tolkien Really Think About Narnia?, Holly Ordway

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"We are presented with two questions: “what did Tolkien really think about Narnia?” and “how did the idea that Tolkien hated Narnia become accepted as common knowledge?” In this essay, I will address both questions and conclude by suggesting why they matter for Inklings scholarship. At the outset, I will merely observe that since Tolkien and Lewis are two of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century, it is worth knowing what one of them thought of the other’s work. …I have drawn my primary evidence from Tolkien’s published Letters (in the Revised and Expanded Edition), unpublished letters, and …

Frontmatter (Volume 19 Issue 2), Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

No abstract provided.

Unsex Me Here: Gendered Psychology In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies And Comedy, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how gender shapes psychological experience across five of Shakespeare’s major plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Existing scholarship treats Shakespeare’s tragic women, tragic men, and comic heroines as separate problems; this article asks whether one framework connects them. Its starting point is the reversal in psychological positions between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: he resists killing on moral grounds and then grows recklessly violent, while she plans the murder with cold resolve and is later overwhelmed by guilt. The study asks whether this pattern recurs more broadly, and why. Drawing …

"T.S. Stribling" And "T.S. Stribling's Ties To Lauderdale County", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The articles offer an overview of Pulitzer-prize winning author and Florence Normal College alum T.S. Stribling, as well as his connections to Lauderdale County, Alabama.

The Bridwell Quill, April-September, Issues 92–97, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Publications

No abstract provided.

Possibilities Of Being: Black Women's Storytelling As Archival Undoing, Dasharah Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a discursive genealogy of Black women’s storytelling, positioning its art and aesthetics as a form of colonial archival undoing. Each chapter explores how transmission and documentation can transform—and circumvent—traditional colonial archives. Beginning at the start of the twentieth-century to present, this project traces the discursive legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Staceyann Chin, examining each writer as a site of becoming as they individually (and collectively) seek to articulate an expansive idea of a Black world that constitutes a broader understanding of Black freedom. They each share a common goal of creating a …

Tolkien Fanzine Dataset, 1967-2017 [Bulk 1969-1979], Robinson Ensz, Gabriel Marotto, Aidan Oakey, Ivy Stanich, Ethan Thomas

Tolkien Resources

This dataset reveals the heretofore hidden contents of fan magazines (fanzines) related to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien that were created from 1969 through the publication of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion in 1977. It supplements the earlier Tolkien Fandom Review by S. Gary Hunnewell that discussed fanzines created through 1968. The dataset provides an item level index of the fanzines’ content and is intended to aid researchers in Fan Studies. It is accompanied by an inventory document that lists the fanzine titles and provides brief notes about some of them. Data was drawn from Marquette’s large holding of Tolkien fanzines, including …

Tolkien’S Medievalism In Ruins: The Function Of Relics And Ruins In Middle-Earth (2025) Edited By Nick Katsiadas And Carl Sell, Deborah Sabo

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Deborah Sabo, of Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth (2025) edited by Nick Katsiadas and Carl Sell

Somewhere Far And Somewhere Near: A Short Story Collection, Jizelle Villegas

English Honors Projects

Somewhere Far and Somewhere Near is a short story collection that positions body horror, “where corporeality constitutes the main site of fear, anxiety and disgust,” alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad, or “see[ing] deeper realities within surface phenomena,” which is heightened in the Latina body. Stories range from depicting realistic body horror like cancer and disordered eating to the grotesque and supernatural, like spirits and vampires. I draw on Latina speculative fiction writers, Tejana scholars and my own lived experiences to explore how location and identity presses upon the emotional and psychological stakes of my Latina characters

Seventeenth Century Poetry And Music: A Syllabus (English 721), Carrie Hintz

Open Educational Resources

A syllabus for my fall English 721 class (Seventeenth Century Literature: Poetry and Music).

The Dream Itself Was Home”: Imaginary Homelands As A Model For Analyzing Contemporary African Return Narratives, Renee King

Masters Theses

Although contemporary African return narratives featuring female protagonists explore a wide range of themes, they consistently portray women who struggle to situate themselves within an increasingly globalized world. In these narratives, the homeland initially functions as a stabilizing anchor that emboldens the protagonist to pursue education or employment abroad, yet works such as Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah reveal that the homeland the protagonists once treated as immutable ultimately exposes itself as a dream. This destabilization unsettles the notion of an unshakeable cultural identity and demonstrates how migration reshapes both the self and the meaning of home. …

Remixing Dialogue: A Case Study On Perceptions Of Hip Hop Pedagogy In A Professional Learning Course, Kelly J. Thelen

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This qualitative case study examines how teachers’ decision-making and professional autonomy shift while participating in a Hip Hop Pedagogy Professional Learning course supported by structured FIXIT (Lo & Wachter, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; Wachter & Lo, 2024) game-facilitated dialogue in a rural, culturally and linguistically diverse Midwest community. Grounded in Freire’s (1970) Critical Pedagogy, Ladson-Billings’ (1995) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris and Alim, 2017), and Adult Learning Theory (Knowles et al., 2005), the study explores the reclamation of agency by teachers in a time of constrained creativity and educator autonomy shaped by strict policy environments, an emphasis on …

Secondary English Teachers' Experiences Of Supporting Literacy Using Books That Support Diversity And Inclusion: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Tremonisha L. Putros

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the use of supporting BIPOC students’ literacy with books that support diversity and inclusion for secondary English teachers in the United States. The theory guiding this study is Bandura’s social cognitive theory, as it stresses personal student engagement in individual learning tasks. The Central Research Question asks: What are the lived experiences of secondary English teachers who support BIPOC students’ literacy with books that support diversity and inclusion by teaching a novel with a BIPOC protagonist in a predominantly BIPOC class? Employing a qualitative methodology, this hermeneutic phenomenology examined the …

Nice White Ladies: Exorcising The Ghost Of Lady Bountiful, Renee Lynch

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This article explores how individuals with racial privilege can both acknowledge and start to move beyond the ways they are implicated in systemic injustices in internationalization through collaboration. The study examines how the author acted in complicity with colonial power in an international collaborative research project in English language education at a university in Tanzania. Critical ethnographic data was analyzed using positioning theory and applying the archetype of Lady Bountiful - a “nice white lady” who graciously participates in the civilizing work of colonization. This construct illuminates how the author perpetuated colonialism at the intersection of whiteness and femininity while …

Grieving And Attentiveness: Perception As Flourishing In Ocean Vuong And Mary Oliver, Madison Smith

Papers

The paper argues that poets Ocean Vuong and Mary Oliver treat grief as something formative to one's life and character rather than purely destructive; through their suffering, the subject has the opportunity to cultivate a sense of attentiveness that transforms perceptions of the self, others, history, and the natural world.

This project was an output for The Belmont Formation Scholars Cohort for Character Research and Writing, which received generous support funding from The Kern Family Foundation.

I gratefully acknowledge peer review feedback on this project, and I am accountable for writing of this product without generative AI and in alignment …

Cardinal Vices In Middle-Earth (2025), By Martina Juričková, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of Cardinal Vices in Middle-earth (2025), by Martina Juričková.

The Narrative In The Algorithm: Storytelling, World Literature, And The Smartphone, Chad Szalkowski-Ference

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I interrogate the role algorithms, artificial intelligence, and smartphone technology play in contemporary world literature. My analysis begins with the post-truth condition, which speaks to the contemporary era’s embrace of alternative facts, authoritarianism, and conspiratorial thinking. I draw on narrative theory and paradigms of world literature to show how “algorithmic reasoning” has led to a state of paranoid persecution. This reasoning has forged new collectivities across traditional borders. Additionally, I show that these new collectivities and new technologies have produced new narrative points of view: the algorithmic first- and third-person, allowing narratives to retain the intimacy and …

Postmodern Fantasy & Its Twin Traditions, Skyler J. Alexander

Honors Thesis

Fantasy literature is diverse and difficult to categorize; nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century two main subgenres emerged: sword-and-sorcery and high fantasy. This thesis examines the differences and similarities between these two traditions, how contemporary examples of the genre fit into or diverge away from the traditions that influenced them, and proves in the negative what and how much of contemporary fantasy fiction is original to itself, with no prominent antecedent. The analysis was performed by comparatively reading two contemporary fantasy novels, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan and A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, with …

A Case For Societal Provenance: Marguerite Harper As Told By The Men She Represented, V. Emily Cranwell Deinert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper argues for making societal provenance the grounding framework for archival descriptive standards to ensure that important voices already present in archives are no longer buried. This study reclaims from archival obscurity the career of literary agent Marguerite E. Harper to illustrate the need for this expansion. Harper proves strikingly absent from some of the archives for the authors she represented. Likely an unwitting omission from archivists that uncritically accepted the narratives of these male authors, Harper’s erasure provides a potent example of the ways that archival descriptive standards may unintentionally further silence historically marginalized voices within archives. The …