English Language and Literature Commons^™

Introduction: Spatial Humanities And Scottish Studies, Eric Gidal, Michael Gavin

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the 2016 SSL Symposium on Spatial Humanities and Scottish Studies, reviewing recent discussion on the spatial understanding of Scottish history and culture and providing extensive references to relevant geographical and digital humanities scholarship.

Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant And The Welsh And Scottish Tour (1760-1820), Alex Deans, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the digital mapping element in a collaborative AHRC-funded project Curious Travellers, that combines the editing and critical interpretation of early Romantic-period travel writing with cartographical work involving digitized historic maps, especially in the correspondence and manuscript and published travel journals of the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and provides examples of the issues involved in matching texts and maps, particularly for Gaelic place-names.

Digital Literary Geography And The Difficulties Of Locating 'Redgauntlet Country', Christopher Donaldson, Sally Bushell, Ian N. Gregory, Joanna E. Taylor, Paul Rayson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents a case study about Sir Walter Scott's Jacobite novel Redgauntlet (1824), drawn from larger grant-funded projects in historical geographical information systems based at Lancaster University, reviewing a variety of other historic literary mapping projects, describing the text corpus of Lake District sources and models used in the larger projects, and contrasting the location of Scott's fictional geography and places in the Solway Firth area of South-West Scotland with the historic places, largely across the border in North-West England, to which he also refers.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

Imagining Evil: George Macdonald's The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875), Colin Manlove

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses a neglected and uncharacteristic children's story, The Wise Woman, by the Victorian Scottish novelist and fantasy writer George MacDonald, setting it in the context of MacDonald's own development and of other Victorian children's moral fantasy, concluding that "The Wise Woman is not simply a story of the attempted correction of two children, but a vision of good and evil in the mind and in God’s creation.... In its moral and spiritual complexity, and its picture of divine grace all about us if we will open our hearts, The Wise Woman has a profundity and a lucidity that …

English Literature And Scottish University Reform: David Masson's State Of Learning In Scotland, Jack M. Downs

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the role of the Victorian critic David Masson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, in the mid-Victorian reform of the Scottish university curriculum, as mandated by the Scottish Universities Act (1858), in light of the late George Elder Davie's influential study The Democratic Intellect and subsequent scholarship, and examines Masson's two inaugural lectures, particularly his State of Learning in Scotland (1866), and his inclusion in his Edinburgh lectures of Scottish literature within a British teaching canon.

Authority And The Narrative Voice In Stevenson's Weir Of Hermiston, Gillian Hughes

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses and analyzes Robert Louis Stevenson's use of the narrator's voice in his short, unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, comparing his narrative strategies with those of Walter Scott, George Moore, George Douglas Brown, D.H. Lawrence, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, concluding that "Stevenson’s fictions are experimental works," that "respond ingeniously to the dominant and quasi-official formulae and assumptions of writers of classic Victorian novels, and in turn establish an important model from which subsequent British novelists ... could learn."

Writing Scotland's Future: Speculative Fiction And The National Imagination, Timothy C. Baker

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the fictional treatment of future Scotlands in the wake of the 2014 Referendum, through discussion of varied speculative novels or stories by Graham Dunstan, Paul Johnston, Ken Macleod, Matthew Fitt, Julie Bertagna, Momus, Andrew Crumey, A.L.Kennedy, Michael Faber, and Sarah Hall, arguing that "the relation between Scottish literature and Scottish politics is more complex than is often thought," that "rather than simply commenting on current political situations, much contemporary Scottish fiction offers a rethinking of politics entirely," and that "Scotland’s future is not, and cannot be, confined to a single narrative."

William Reid And The First Newspaper And Chapbook Publication Of Robert Burns's "Written In Friar's Carse Hermitage", Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Traces the first newspaper and chapbook publication of Robert Burns's poem "Written in Friar's Carse Hermitage," written in 1788 and first published in September 1791 in the Glasgow Courier; links the publication to that of Burns's "Ode to the Shade [or in Memory] of [James] Thomson," written for the Earl of Buchan's Thomson commemoration that year; and connects publication in both formats to Burns's friend the Glasgow publisher William Reid, although this date for the chapbook antedates by several years the date usually given for the first chapbook publications by the firm of Brash and Reid.

Books Noted And Received, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Short reviews or brief notices of seventeen books published or received since publication of Studies in Scottish Literature, 42:1 (Spring 2016).

Spatial Humanities And Memory Studies: Mapping Edinburgh In The First Age Of The Enlightenment, Murray Pittock, Craig Lamont

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the first phase of a digital project mapping social and cultural relationships in early 18th century Edinburgh, Scotland, part of a larger AHRC grant-funded study Allan Ramsay and Edinburgh in the First Age of the Enlightenment; explores interrelations between urban history, digital mapping, and emerging interest in the field of memory studies; and suggests links between the heterogeneous and cosmopolitan nature of housing in early 18th century Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment culture of innovation.

Contributors To Ssl 42:2

Studies in Scottish Literature

Brief biographical notes on the literary scholars and digital humanists contributing to the volume.

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman: From The Categorical To The De-Centering Literary Subject In The Black Atlantic, Jarad Heath Fennell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My goal with this dissertation was to discover more about how the Bildungsroman genre in English or the coming-of-age story became a staple of post-colonial and ethnic minority writing. I grew up reading novels like these and feel a great deal of affection for them, and I wanted to understand how authors writing in these other traditions represented a broader response to colonialist Western culture. My method was to survey philosophical approaches to subjectivity and subject-formation, read a wide variety of texts I understood as engaging with the Bildung tradition, and examining how they represented subject-formation.

While I originally saw …

Hospitable Climates: Representations Of The West Indies In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Marisa Carmen Iglesias

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

British expansion to the West Indies in the eighteenth-century resulted in vast economic growth for the British Empire and a rise in literature set in the region. Examining the literature allows for an in-depth exploration of how the Caribbean has become associated as a place of relaxation and escape though its early history of colonialism is fraught with violence. My study builds on the understanding of the Caribbean region in the eighteenth-century and utilizes hospitality theory to articulate the role that cultural exchange and physical setting play in the texts and in the formation of national identity, both in the …

“A Right Judgment”: Rape Trial Conventions Revisited In Joseph Andrews And Tom Jones, Melissa Bloom Bissonette

English Faculty/Staff Publications

This article argues that in both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), Henry Fielding, who practiced law and wrote novels when both were undergoing significant transformations, takes what could have been archetypal scenes of rape and rescue and makes them illuminating explorations of how juries determine the truth. In presenting these attempted rape scenes within the implicit format of a contemporary rape trial, Fielding directs the reader to observe the missteps in the process of judicial decision-making, as well as the steps and missteps in his or her own determination of the trustworthiness of characters and their testimony.

Chicana Feminist Acts: Re-Staging Chicano/A Theater From The Early Twentieth Century To The Present, Natalie M. Kubasek

English Language and Literature ETDs

Chicana Feminist Acts intervenes in the patriarchal forces that negate the historical presence and social agency of Chicanas on the stage of U.S. literature by recovering the transformative power of Chicana drama to enact feminist change. I position early playwrights Josephina Niggli, Estela Portillo Trambley and Teatro Chicana, alongside contemporary feminist playwright Cherríe Moraga, as part of the rich and varied history of feminist cultural production in the U.S. that challenges the systematic sexist oppression of Chicanas. My thesis is that Chicana theater stages a series of feminist “acts” that continuously re-stage Chicana subjectivity to resist fixed patriarchal and nationalist …

"One Accord Of Sympathy": The Relationship Between Narrator, Reader, And Puritans, Brianna E. Taylor

Scholars Week

Ambiguous narration in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter creates a reader that is simultaneously an insider privy to uncertain narrative report and an outsider sympathetic to Hester’s ignominy. While current reader response criticism explores narrative techniques of ambiguity and sympathy in isolation, this paper analyzes how these techniques are used in conjunction to establish a relationship between narrator and reader. The narrator’s role as storyteller and gossip, accepting explanations of a rational contemporary audience and superstitious Puritans, both defies Puritan inflexibility and creates intimacy that includes readers in this community. At the same time, a sympathetic relationship with Hester distances …

A Critique Of Puritan Values And Social Restrictions, Laura Guebert

Scholars Week

This paper outlines and discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter through the lens of feminist and social critiques. It attempts to draw attention to the fates of both male and females characters in the story according to their personality and status. Therefore, by examining the complex treatment and relationships between the four principle characters of The Scarlet Letter and their author, Hawthorne’s use of a feminist critique can be understood as a wider criticism of Puritan and, by extension, mid-nineteenth century social and moral restrictions and expectations.

Of Mermaids, Metal, And Maine: An Illustrated Memoir, Mercedes Mclean-Wheeler

Honors Theses

This creative literary thesis consists of the first chapters of a memoir, offering readers a glimpse of my childhood world and self in rural Maine. The memoir's overarching theme is the interplay between person and place. The work also explores the ability of memory and imagination to shape perception. Included are several of my own drawings to help illuminate my imaginative and lived experiences, evoking the odd but artful whimsy of childhood. While still rooted firmly in memoir, the project draws from fantasy, magical realism, and graphica, reflecting modern literature's inclination to transcend traditional boundaries of genre and style.

October 28, 2016: Elizabeth Wardle Next Visiting Speaker In Ellis Speaker Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Elizabeth Wardle