Digital Commons Network^™

When Was Dracula First Translated Into Romanian?, Duncan Light

Journal of Dracula Studies

Dracula is one of the world’s best-known books. The novel has never been out of print since its publication and has been translated into about 30 languages (Melton). Yet, paradoxically, one of the countries where it is least known is Romania. The usual explanation given for this situation is Romania’s recent history, particularly the period of Communist Party rule (1947-1989). Dracula, with its emphasis on vampires and the supernatural, was apparently regarded as an unsuitable or inappropriate novel in a state founded on the materialist and “scientific” principles of Marxism. Hence, no translation of Stoker’s novel was permitted during the …

"The Stance Of A Last Survivor": C. S. Lewis And The Modern World (Chapter One Of The Rhetoric Of Certitude), Gary L. Tandy

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "As professor and scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, C. S. Lewis wrote and published well-respected and influential literary criticism. At the same time, following his conversion to Christianity around 1930, he felt a duty to apply his argumentative and philosophical skills to the writing of Christian apologetics-defenses of traditional Christian principles against the attacks of skeptics and religious liberals. More important, Lewis lived in an age largely hostile to his attitudes and thought, both in literature and Christianity. In a period that s.aw such startling literary productions as The Waste Land and Ulysses, Lewis chose to defend traditional …

Notes On The State Of Virginia And The Jeffersonian West., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Believing And Doubting As Hermeneutic Method: Reading And Teaching Paradise Lost, Sheridan Blau

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Using a variation on Peter Elbow's believing game, I help students discover the degree to which Milton in Paradise Lost succeeds in his explicit attempt to justify God's ways to man and in that success also offers us an account of human happiness and misery that is psychologically sophisticated, spiritually illuminating, entirely rational, and supremely wise as a guide to living a humanly satisfying life. Such an approach to Paradise Lost also fosters an experience of the text through which many students undergo a modern version of the spiritual transformation and enlightenment that Milton explicitly aimed to make possible for …

Exploding The Monolith: The Value Of Teaching Appalachian Literature In Inner-City Environments, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Blood Culture And The Problem Of Decadence, Jeffrey P. Cain

English Faculty Publications

This paper examines the commodification of hunting practices via the deterritorializing function of capitalism described by Deleuze and Guattari. It also studies counter trends-- predicted by or consistent with Deleuzean theory--that indicate a subtending authenticity displayed by certain hunting practices apparently resistant to commercial exploitation. "Blood culture" is my term for inauthentic hunting activity--a distinction drawn directly by Deleuze in his televised interviews with Claire Parnet. Aspects of "becoming-animal" and other transversal and cross-disciplinary flows of thought are also of course in play. As in some of my former work, I again argue for a Deleuzean cultural mechanics of the …

Religion And Realism In Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lisa Irene Moody

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A critical approach to understanding the analytical power of realism and its representational claims in the late nineteenth-century is to examine the relationship between realism and a common cultural concern that opposes the very tenets of realism, one that necessarily pervaded all aspects of class, gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, or other classifiable subsets of society typically linked with various schools of literary theory: the subject of religion. In fact, religion, with its disembodied immaterialism, surely the antithesis of realism, represents a unique cultural problem that tests the conceptual biases of the realist mode. One basic issue is that religion …

Review: The Top Of The World: Climbing Mount Everest, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

All Children's Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Alexander In The Himalayas: Competing Imperial Legacies In Medieval Islamic History And Literature, Anna Akasoy

Publications and Research

In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of stories in a volume with the title The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales. The collection includes the short story The Man Who Would be King, in which Kipling's alter ego, a British journalist in India, makes the acquaintance of a pair of adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who demand his help as a fellow Mason. The two shady characters have set out to take advantage of divisions among the natives and are determined to install themselves as kings in Kafiristan, a remote region inhabited by pagans in the north of the …

Infectious Agents: Race And Environment In Nineteenth-Century America, Kristen Renee Egan

Dissertations

This dissertation critically examines the relationship between race and nature in nineteenth-century America by analyzing texts that attempt to discover, create, or preserve a pure national identity. Historical events in the nineteenth-century U.S. - such as mass immigration, Native American displacement, industrialization, westward expansion, and the rise of science - frustrated the quest for a unified American identity. While these events seem various, each one exacerbated a nation already bewildered by one central question. What is the traffic between body and space? Nineteenth-century American literature frequently portrays the American environment as an ideal space in need of preservation and at …

Iranian American Women Writing Their Lives: Poststructuralist Analysis Of Lipstick Jihad, Funny In Farsi And Saffron Sky, Chelsea Ann Thiebaut Delucenay

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This study analyzes Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran, Firoozeh Dumas's Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America, and Gelareh Asayesh's Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America all examined within, against, and through the lens of poststructuralist feminism. Emphasis is placed on issues of hybridity and naming in a dual-cultured, dual-languaged world. Moaveni, Dumas, and Asayesh begin the task of writing a memoir in order to better understand themselves and to attempt to create a solid identity based on both Iran and America. By …

(Im)Possible Encounters, Possible (Mis)Understandings Between The West And Its Other: The Case Of The Maghreb, Tanja Stampfl

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My work deals with what I call (im)possible encounters, possible (mis)understandings between the West and the Rim of the World (in my case The Maghreb). I focus on writers (such as Paul Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Edith Wharton, Tayeb Salih, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Ahdaf Soueif) who stepped across the cultural dividing line to claim a voice of their own; a voice that enabled them to represent and at times misrepresent the host culture they chose to live in, and which acts as a “lieu” and at times “milieu de mémoire.” It is what the late Edward Said aptly called “intertwined histories, overlapping …

A Hand Of Steel In A Velvet Glove: Purpose And Fulfillment Through The Gender Sphere, Sylvie A. Shires

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Modern audiences have come to believe that the nineteenth-century woman was oppressed by a patriarchal society and that until women obtained the vote, they had no voice, and could exert no influence to improve either their lot or that of others. While many scholarly secondary sources, as well as popular culture, strongly support this view, this research challenges it, and posits that this generally accepted interpretation echoes stereotypes that became strong with the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s, but is not representative of nineteenth-century middle-class women in the Anglo-Saxon world.

This research examines the British middle-class woman of …

Resurrecting Speranza: Lady Jane Wilde As The Celtic Sovereignty, Heather Lorene Tolen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Lady Jane Wilde, writing under the pen name of Speranza, established ethos among a poor, uneducated, Catholic populace from whom she was socially and religiously disconnected. Additionally, it raises questions as to Lady Wilde's exclusion from the roster of Irish literary voices who are commonly associated with the Irish Literary Revival, inasmuch as Lady Wilde played a critical, inceptive role in that movement. Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, was an ardent nationalist who lived in Victorian Ireland. She contributed thirty-nine poems and several essays to the Nation newspaper—a nationalist publication—under the …

Rethinking The Historical Lens: A Case For Relational Identity In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Annalisa Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis proposes a theory of relational identity development in Chicana literature. Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera offers an interpretation of Chicana identity that is largely based on historical models and mythology, which many scholars have found useful in interpreting Chicana literature. However, I contend that another text, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, not only illustrates the need for an alternative paradigm for considering identity development, but in fact offers such an alternative. I argue that Cisneros shows a model for relational identity development, wherein the individual develops in the context of her community and is not determined solely …

Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David P. Rando

English Faculty Research

Like Stranger Shores (2000), Inner Workings collects J. M. Coetzee’s recent literary essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books or as introductions. Bound together, they accrue a taste and texture that readers might not have suspected if they encountered these essays in their original publications. Coetzee engages a compelling cluster of twentieth-century writers, including, among others, Italo Svevo, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, V. S. Naipaul, and, likely of special interest to this journal’s readers, Philip Roth. Walt Whitman is the lonely denizen …

A Western Man Of Color: Richard Wright And The World, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations

Richard Wright had become by the mid 50s an analyst of what it means to be ‘of’ the West. He was by now a firmly-established émigré, and had become a French citizen in 1947. His journeys, in a way, had only just become: Europe was a stage or an inauguration into further mappings of the self and society. Those mappings took the extraordinary geo-political shifts of the mid-century as their subject. In the wake of the Second World War, severely damaged economically and in terms of sheer power, European nations were finally forced to give ground to the nationalist movements …

Conquering The Sublime: Terror And Control In Moby-Dick, Matthew William Burkett

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick represents an experiment in Romantic literature. In addition to relying on the works of British Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Melville also applies Edmund Burke's ideas of the sublime to depict the inherent terror of hunting whales on the open ocean. According to Burke, the sublime is anything that inspires fear in the human mind, and Melville describes whaling in sublime terms. Melville also employs the sublime to critique 19th-century American society. The novel attacks humanity's drive to conquer both the natural world and other human beings. I will examine …

Review: Faithfully Yours: The Letters Of Byron Herbert Reece, Julie Camp

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the non-fiction book "Faithfully Yours: The Letters of Byron Herbert Reece," edited by Raymond A. Cook and Alan Jackson.

Introduction: Unrecorded Lives, John C. Hawley

English

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call "subaltern cosmopolitanism." Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as …

Between The City And The Bush: Suburbia In The Contemporary Australian Novel, Nathanael David O'Reilly

Dissertations

Australia's most important national narratives take place in the bush, the outback, and overseas. The dominant representations of Australia, both within the nation and abroad, focus on the outback, the bush and the cities. However, Australia is one of the most suburban societies in the world, and has been since the mid-nineteenth-century. Nevertheless, Australian novels are rarely set in suburbia. Between the City and the Bush examines representations of suburbia in contemporary Australian novels. Focusing on the relationship between colonialism, the physical development of suburbia and the anti-suburban intellectual tradition, my chapters address a number of issues, including immigration, environmental …

The Girls Who Had To Grow Up: Reflections On Motherhood And Dual Identity In Lewis Carroll's Wonderland And J.M. Barrie's Neverland, Theresa Fitzpatrick

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

My thesis explores the world of the "imaginary" in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and its connection to the world of the "mundane" experienced by the typical Victorian housewife and mother. Both are intimately connected within the texts, primarily in the characters' dual roles as dictated by the gendered expectations of Victorian society. While in the imaginary world, both Alice and Wendy experience mini-versions of their future lives. They exist as girl and mother simultaneously. Carroll, by creating a hostile environment, grotesque motherimages, and a confused, argumentative Alice, shows a negative portrait of motherhood, …

Poem No. 99, May 2008, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Artemus Ward : The Gentle Humorist, John Raymond Pascal

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

It is generally accepted that during his lifetime, Mark Twain was considered the preeminent American master storyteller and lecturer of humor. The tsunami that is Twain’s literary achievement can easily overwhelm the earlier vast movement of the American literary scene that led to its creation. The “underwater earthquake” of this movement is Charles Farrar Browne, but his more famous pseudonym is Artemus Ward.

While there were earlier as well as contemporary humorous writers, Artemus Ward was regarded by William Dean Howells as “the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor that characterizes the whole American people” …

Metoikos: Modernism's Resident Aliens, Justin Glen Williamson

Dissertations

This dissertation examines why D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce all conceived of themselves as cultural outsiders and how they used this ostensibly marginal social status to conceal a set of conservative core values they sensed were eroding. This otherwise disparate group shared a sense of cultural alienation, recognized the potentially powerful position of the exile, and demonstrated a keen willingness to exploit its possibilities. Although these writers have long been acknowledged and heralded for their experimentation, their technical and formal innovation, much of their work springs from essentially conservative impulses, beliefs, and values, aimed …

Reviews, Emily E. Auger, Joe R. Christopher, Janet Brennan Croft, Jason Fisher, John D. Rateliff, David Bratman

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

Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language. Ed. Janet Brennan Croft. Reviewed by Emily E. Auger.

The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-Earth. Elizabeth A. Whittingham. Reviewed by David Bratman.

Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration. Gavin Ashenden. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher.

The History of The Hobbit. Part One: Mr. Baggins; Part Two: Return to Bag-End. John D. Rateliff. Reviewed by Jason Fisher.

Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy and Faith in the World of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Amy H. Sturgis. Reviewed by John D. Rateliff.

Song As Mythic Conduit In The Fellowship Of The Ring, Cami Agan

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

Explores the complex layering of history and legend that convey Tolkien’s themes across a wide array of genres within the legendarium, reinforcing the sense of depth of time Tolkien hoped to achieve even within The Hobbit.

The Line, The Crack, And The Possibility Of Architecture: Figure, Ground, Feminist Performance, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

How and where do architecture and performance collide? Theatre studies has been, over the course of the last decade, increasingly interested in the relationship between stage and space; that inter- est, however, has primarily been figured by marrying theories of human geography with studies of theatrical performance. “The Line, the Crack, and the Possibility of Architecture” asks what it might mean to explore the spaces of performance through the lens of another plastic art—the art of building—and investigates what the discourses of architecture theory, both classical and (post)modern, might have to say to those of us who study the vicissitudes …

Eng 3705-001, Linda S. Coleman

Spring 2008

No abstract provided.

The Box, The Glittering Strings, And The Unbearable Hillbillyness Of Being: Warren’S The Cave, Country Music, And Vanderbilt Fugitive-Agrarianism, H.R. Stoneback

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The Fugitive magazine and the evolution of Nashville Agrarianism were exactly coincident and contiguous, geographically and historically, with the Grand Ole Opry and the evolution of hillbilly and country music, yet at Vanderbilt, it was something called traditional balladry or true folksong that was highly respected, and taught in courses in the English Department curriculum. It was from within these contexts that singer/songwriter and then graduate student, H. R. “Stoney” Stoneback, first wrote about Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave. Forty years later, singer/songwriter and now Distinguished Professor Stoneback revisits the question of the guitar, the songs, and the hillbillyness of …