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The Rhetoric Of The Road: The Romantic Journey As A Map Of Myth, Memory, And Majesty, Joe R. Christopher Oct 2026

The Rhetoric Of The Road: The Romantic Journey As A Map Of Myth, Memory, And Majesty, Joe R. Christopher

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

Scholar Guest of Honor Address at Mythcon 54, Weatherford OK, July 2026.


Race, Identity, And The Classroom: How Young Adult Literature Can Help Students And Teachers Explore Belonging In The School Environment, Madyson A. Mcray Oct 2026

Race, Identity, And The Classroom: How Young Adult Literature Can Help Students And Teachers Explore Belonging In The School Environment, Madyson A. Mcray

Virginia English Journal

Contemporary classrooms are not necessarily reflective of the curriculum written to support them. Classroom demographics have shifted and student populations are more diverse. Because of this, the implementation of dominant white-narrative curricula has become ineffective in keeping students engaged with the material. Teaching “the classics” becomes irrelevant when students cannot see themselves represented in the text. Young adult literature, however, allows students to relate their own experiences to the text to engage more deeply in content. This paper examines four novels: New Kid by Jerry Craft, This is My America by Kim Johnson, The Secret Battle of Evan Pao by …


The Fragmentation Of Helcar: A Paratethyan Model For Rhûn, Núrnen And The Dead Marshes, Federico Manzoni Sep 2026

The Fragmentation Of Helcar: A Paratethyan Model For Rhûn, Núrnen And The Dead Marshes, Federico Manzoni

Journal of Tolkien Research

This work proposes a conjectural paleogeographic model linking the Sea of Rhûn, Núrnen and the Dead Marshes to the former Sea of Helcar. Beginning from Christopher Tolkien's suggestion that Rhûn may represent Helcar ``vastly shrunken,'' the study combines textual evidence, the Ambarkanta, Fonstad's cartographic reconstructions, and terrestrial analogues drawn from the evolution of the Paratethys, the Messinian Salinity Crisis and other endorheic basins. Helcar is interpreted not merely as an isolated body of deep water but as the centre of a broader hydrological province subsequently partitioned by relief change, sedimentary infilling, basin isolation and drainage reorganization. Within this model, Rhûn …


How The African American Contribution To Early American Literature Aided In Shaping The American Literary Identity, Jennifer E. Thompson Sep 2026

How The African American Contribution To Early American Literature Aided In Shaping The American Literary Identity, Jennifer E. Thompson

Masters Theses

This study argues that Jupiter Hammon’s early African American literature actively helped shape American literary identity rather than just mirroring it. By blending Christian morality with human rights, Hammon challenged Eurocentric narratives, validated Black humanity, and established a foundational tradition for anti-slavery writing. Traditional theories often contest this national inclusion through critical viewpoints. These views treat slavery as a distinct model, arguing that these texts represent separate responses to bondage rather than unified contributions to a shared national canon. This research redefines the American literary canon by showing how Hammon's historic publications dismantled eighteenth-century racist ideals about intellectual capacity. His …


Finding The Numinous: An Ecocritical Look At “Dune” And “The Lord Of The Rings” (2025), By Willow Wilson Dipasquale, Douglas Charles Kane Sep 2026

Finding The Numinous: An Ecocritical Look At “Dune” And “The Lord Of The Rings” (2025), By Willow Wilson Dipasquale, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas Charles Kane, of Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at “Dune” and “The Lord of the Rings” (2025), by Willow Wilson DiPasquale


Possibilities Of Being: Black Women's Storytelling As Archival Undoing, Dasharah Green Sep 2026

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’S Medievalism In Ruins: The Function Of Relics And Ruins In Middle-Earth (2025) Edited By Nick Katsiadas And Carl Sell, Deborah Sabo Aug 2026

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


The Dream Itself Was Home”: Imaginary Homelands As A Model For Analyzing Contemporary African Return Narratives, Renee King Aug 2026

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. …


Orc Road Trip; Or, We’Re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard!, Robert T. Tally Jr. Jul 2026

Orc Road Trip; Or, We’Re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard!, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Mythcon

“Leg it!” Ever wanted to “foot it through the Horse-country” with Uglúk? Cross the Great River with Grishnákh? Travel with goblin messengers “to and fro between all their cities, colonies, and strongholds,” by “tunnel or under dark,” to “Gundabad of the North,” their “capital”? Or perhaps you can “slip off” with Gorbag and “a few trusty lads” to places “where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses”? It might be enough to join those who’ve just “come all the way from the Mines” to “avenge our folk” and “then go back north”? And if you’re feeling a …


“He Had Named Himself The Stranger”: From 'Germanic' Heroic Hospitality To Elvish Memorial Mediation In Tolkien’S Book Of Lost Tales, Paolo Pizzimento Dr. Jul 2026

“He Had Named Himself The Stranger”: From 'Germanic' Heroic Hospitality To Elvish Memorial Mediation In Tolkien’S Book Of Lost Tales, Paolo Pizzimento Dr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines the narrative functions of strangeness and hospitality in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales, focusing on Eriol’s transformation from foreign traveller into listener, witness, and transmitter of Elvish tradition. Through a comparative reading of selected Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon texts—particularly Hávamál, Gylfaginning, and Beowulf—it identifies recurrent literary configurations in which hospitality regulates admission, identity, reciprocity, danger, and access to knowledge. The comparison is morphological rather than genetic: it does not posit direct derivation or a uniform Germanic code. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, the article argues that Tolkien redirects …


From The Forests With Hopes Of Paradise: Malay Muslims In The Victorian Imagination In Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, M Irfan Zamzami, Rifka Pratama Jul 2026

From The Forests With Hopes Of Paradise: Malay Muslims In The Victorian Imagination In Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, M Irfan Zamzami, Rifka Pratama

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This article examines how Lord Jim constructs and reconfigures Muslim identities within the discourse of British imperialism. While previous scholarship has explored the novel’s colonial politics, less attention has been paid to how its representations of Malay Muslims reveal the instability of Orientalist categories. Using Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial ambivalence, the study applies close textual analysis of two key narrative moments: the omniscient narrator’s description of the Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna and the depiction of Malay Muslims in Patusan. The analysis demonstrates that the Patna pilgrims are initially represented through familiar Orientalist …


Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens Jun 2026

Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens

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

Digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that applies digital methodologies and technologies to the humanities, is an excellent lens through which to approach the eighteenth century.  I integrate digital humanities tools and workshops alongside primary source readings in all of my eighteenth-century British literature classes to help students better understand those texts and the world in which they were created.  In my upper-level undergraduate class on late eighteenth-century literature, I teach four digital humanities tools to students, two of them (StoryMapJS and Voyant) in connection with Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). These tools train students how to uncover historical and geographic contexts …


Extracurricular Video Game Use And Academic Achievement: A Systematic Literature Review, Christina Hartman, Theo Makanoa, Lucas Thoms, Aidan Lowry, Kaleb Chandler Jun 2026

Extracurricular Video Game Use And Academic Achievement: A Systematic Literature Review, Christina Hartman, Theo Makanoa, Lucas Thoms, Aidan Lowry, Kaleb Chandler

English Student Research

A good deal of research exists on the relationship between student use of video games outside the classroom and academic achievement. Our systematic review aims to identify what patterns exist across research conducted in the last 20 years. We examined 62 research studies that dealt with academic achievement and extracurricular video game use and found that most studies identify a negative association between the two. However, this isn’t the case for all students. We identified three important variables (the amount of time spent playing video games, the time of day or week spent playing, and the age of the students) …


“A Natural Human Activity”: The Split Attraction Model As A Tool For Reading Tolkien’S Legendarium, Sarah Courtis Jun 2026

“A Natural Human Activity”: The Split Attraction Model As A Tool For Reading Tolkien’S Legendarium, Sarah Courtis

Journal of Tolkien Research

The works of J.R.R. Tolkien have long been a refuge for readers seeking escape; a world of eucatastrophe where difference is celebrated, and friendship lauded. Despite his egalitarian themes, gatekeepers attempt to bar those living at the margins and intersections from reading themselves into the texts, denying that applicability which Tolkien called for in his own works. One such applicable interpretation of the legendarium is through the lens of asexuality and aromanticism. As there are no graphic sex scenes (though contrary to GRR Martin’s claims sex does exist in the world and is expanded upon in The Nature of Middle …


Atomized English: Fewer Whole Books, More Isolated Learning Experiences, Andrew Newman, Jonna Perrillo, Jeremiah Piña Jun 2026

Atomized English: Fewer Whole Books, More Isolated Learning Experiences, Andrew Newman, Jonna Perrillo, Jeremiah Piña

Department of English Faculty Publications

This white paper presents findings from the State of Literature Instruction National Survey, administered online to secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teachers during the 2024-25 school year. An analysis of approximately 1250 responses demonstrates three key findings: 1) Classes that read whole books are associated with more “social learning” pedagogies; 2) Classes under test pressure are less likely to engage in social learning pedagogies and more likely to offer atomized learning experiences, emphasizing individual, decontextualized skill development; and 3) Digital texts are more likely to be assigned in classes that experience test pressure. We find equity gaps between student identity …


Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies And Southwest Cities In The Mexican American Spatial Imaginary, Jorge A. Hernández Jr. May 2026

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies And Southwest Cities In The Mexican American Spatial Imaginary, Jorge A. Hernández Jr.

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies and Southwest Cities in the Mexican American Spatial Imaginary examines how Mexican American writers from Tucson, San Antonio, and Albuquerque narrate, critique, and reimagine urban space across the U.S. Southwest in the twentieth century. Integrating literary studies, cultural geography, urban history, and critical regionalism, the project analyzes responses to racialized development, urban renewal, and gentrification that have displaced Mexican American communities from historic downtowns. Moving beyond borderlands and transnational models, it advances a critically regional approach attentive to local histories, municipal policies, and community pressures shaping urban life. Through close readings of creative and nonfiction texts …


Tell Thy Story: The Jew As Other In "Pericles", Dov B. Rabinowitz May 2026

Tell Thy Story: The Jew As Other In "Pericles", Dov B. Rabinowitz

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper attempts to address a perceived blind spot in criticism of early modern literature, namely, the lack of critical race readings centering the othering of Jews in early modern drama. Shakespeare’s Pericles is used as an example of characters being othered, or Judaized, as they pass through city to city. Historical data, such as the history of the Domus Conversorum in England where converted Jews were kept, is used to bolster this argument, with Thaisa being read as othered in a Judaized way by being kept in a religious institution and never truly accepted by the people of Ephesus. …


Mouth, Sex, And Hungry Heart: Anatomy Of The Short-Form Fairy Tale Retelling, Emma M. Murray May 2026

Mouth, Sex, And Hungry Heart: Anatomy Of The Short-Form Fairy Tale Retelling, Emma M. Murray

English Honors Projects

This project traces the past fifty years of short-form fairy tale retellings authored by women, identifying formal and thematic continuities that define the mode. Building on Adrienne Rich’s concept of “revisioning,” it argues that the political work of these intertextual tales has evolved alongside feminist and queer theory, the emergence of fairy tale studies, and the cultural dominance of children’s fairy tale media. It delineates the short-form retelling as a distinct genre, highlighting its subversive feminist tendencies, and draws on affect, aesthetic, and queer theory, and genre studies to show how these texts reshape narrative expectations and cultural norms.


Dis/Remembrance: Expressions Of Intergenerational Memory And Where Legacy Lingers: American Warfare, 50 Years From Saigon, Eli(Se) Davidson May 2026

Dis/Remembrance: Expressions Of Intergenerational Memory And Where Legacy Lingers: American Warfare, 50 Years From Saigon, Eli(Se) Davidson

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Over fifty years from the Fall of Saigon, the United States continues to question its participation in unjust warfare, both as a nation and as a people. This study examines the transmission of war stories amongst families: specifically, what becomes negotiated in the thresholds of memory and narrative, and what might become of those spaces across past, present, and future. While prior discourse has centered on the authority and authenticity of war memory through political discourse, historical narrative, and public memorialization, the role of storytelling within families remains underexplored. This research addresses that gap through interdisciplinary inquiry and qualitative ethnography …


Uncanniness In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Seth L. Callor May 2026

Uncanniness In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Seth L. Callor

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis explores how Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye has a feature called the uncanny. Uncanniness, as originally explained by Sigmund Freud, is when something that was familiar becomes unsettlingly unfamiliar in a way that was likely once repressed. Other thinkers have since talked about how the uncanny is used in stories to question how their demographics are oppressed. Following their example, this thesis explains how The Bluest Eye is an example of using the uncanny to question harmful ways of seeing. Through demonstrating how The Bluest Eye uses obviously uncanny things like dolls and moves to more …


“Under The Fig-Tree”: Post-Revolutionary Literature Influences American Government, Clara Kernodle Apr 2026

“Under The Fig-Tree”: Post-Revolutionary Literature Influences American Government, Clara Kernodle

Honors Theses

The literary context of post-Revolutionary America developed a broad sense of the American character as virtuous, hardworking, and responsible. In the 1780s, three American writers, representing these three categories of literature, penned their perspectives on human character and society, to much commercial success. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Royall Tyler, and Philip Freneau described their situations and opinions with candor and wit, helped spark a broad sense of the American character, and influenced the authors of the nation’s founding documents. At the end of that same decade, Anti-Federalist political philosophy drew from an established literary conception of the American …


The Fantasy Of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia And The Recovery Of Creation By Robert J. Dobie, Hayden Bilbrey Apr 2026

The Fantasy Of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia And The Recovery Of Creation By Robert J. Dobie, Hayden Bilbrey

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

A chapter by chapter review of Robert J. Dobie's 2024 book The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation. The review gives a chapter by chapter breakdown and asserts that though the book is more likely for academics, its approachable coverage of Tolkien's work and philosophical ideas also makes it a great read for anyone who is a fan of Middle-earth.


“As Though You Could Never Sink”: Gender Euphoria Through Aquatic Embodiment In The Sun Also Rises, Devan Edwards Apr 2026

“As Though You Could Never Sink”: Gender Euphoria Through Aquatic Embodiment In The Sun Also Rises, Devan Edwards

Honors Theses

Recent scholarship in disability studies and queer theory (2007-2024) reveals that Jake Barnes's war wound in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises functions as something more complex than tragic loss. This paper argues that Jake's swimming and fishing scenes constitute moments of gender euphoria, a term borrowed from contemporary transgender studies, enabled specifically by aquatic embodiment. In these scenes, water functions as the physical and symbolic medium through which Jake's war-wounded body transcends the performative demands of 1920s heteronormative masculinity. Building on Michael Anesko's provocative reading of Jake as "accidentally transgendered" (Literature and Medicine, 2015) and Martina Kübler's argument that impotence …


Saltfish And Seedcake: Examining Fantasy Through Food Studies, Isabella Martins-Simonsen Apr 2026

Saltfish And Seedcake: Examining Fantasy Through Food Studies, Isabella Martins-Simonsen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Although mundane and often overlooked in reality, in fantasy, food, like all other things, is entirely symbolic. Therefore, considering food closely when analyzing a fantasy text offers unique insights into the world being developed, the characters within that world, and the author’s own understanding of both the real and “secondary” world. In this paper, I consider the foods of Earthsea, Narnia, and Middle Earth to offer various perspectives on the worldbuilding and examine the implications of different foods in these well-known settings. For example, the tea served in Narnia creates a fantasy world that is more normal than the strange …


Interview With Orca Award Winner Paul Olson, Unl English; Literature, Curricular Reform, Great Plains Studies, Mark A. Griep, Paul A. Olson Apr 2026

Interview With Orca Award Winner Paul Olson, Unl English; Literature, Curricular Reform, Great Plains Studies, Mark A. Griep, Paul A. Olson

UNL ORCA Interview Series

Paul Olson was awarded the ORCA in 1984. He was born in 1932 in Washburn, Wisconsin. During his youth, his family also farmed in Nebraska and South Dakota. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. Next, he earned a master’s in English from the University of Nebraska, had a Fulbright fellowship to spend a year at London University in England, and earned his doctorate in medieval and Renaissance studies from Princeton University in New Jersey. In 1957, he joined UNL as an assistant professor of English and was soon promoted to full professor. One of his …


“Where All Is Playtime And Pleasure”: Feeling The Otherworldly In Late Medieval Literature, Anna K. Mcgill Mar 2026

“Where All Is Playtime And Pleasure”: Feeling The Otherworldly In Late Medieval Literature, Anna K. Mcgill

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present intra-, inter-, and extra-textual felt responses to encounters with the otherworldly as described in Late Medieval texts as a lens through which to consider personal, social, and national imaginative potential surrounding contemporary issues across genres and disciplines. I argue that the use of otherworlds and otherworldly agents as both personally and rhetorically compelling analogues through which contemporary issues can be explored. I start my discussion of the felt impacts of encounters with the Arthurian otherworldly, with a particular focus on Glastonbury and Arthur’s alleged grave there, and how they transmit affects of sovereign authority. Next, …


Through Peaks And Troughs: Visualising The Rhythmic Sentiment Of The Lord Of The Rings, Dimitra Vogatza Mar 2026

Through Peaks And Troughs: Visualising The Rhythmic Sentiment Of The Lord Of The Rings, Dimitra Vogatza

Journal of Tolkien Research

This study offers a fresh look at the widely discussed binaries in The Lord of the Rings and examines whether their structure can be visualised. Building on previous research that identifies Tolkien’s prose as structured by emotional and moral shifts, this study makes visible how these changes happen throughout the trilogy, through quantitative means. A transformer-based language model was employed and fine-tuned on a Tolkien-specific corpus to align with Tolkien's semantics and symbolism. The primary methodology for highlighting these binaries is a Tolkien-specific sentiment analysis. A semi-guided approach, selecting positive and negative sentences from the work as contextual reference points, …


Korean Words In The Oed: Race, Gender, And The Modern English Speaker, Elaine W. Chun Mar 2026

Korean Words In The Oed: Race, Gender, And The Modern English Speaker, Elaine W. Chun

Faculty Publications

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I …


Numenor, The Mighty And Frail: Proceedings Of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 (2025), Ed. By Will Sherwood, Douglas Charles Kane Feb 2026

Numenor, The Mighty And Frail: Proceedings Of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 (2025), Ed. By Will Sherwood, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas Charles Kane, of Numenor, The Mighty and Frail: Proceedings of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 (2025), ed. by Will Sherwood


The Tower And The Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’S Creation (2025) By Michael D.C. Drout, Nicholas Birns Feb 2026

The Tower And The Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’S Creation (2025) By Michael D.C. Drout, Nicholas Birns

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Nicholas Birns, of The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation (2025) by Michael D.C. Drout