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Contingency As A Barrier To Decolonial Engagement: Listening To Multilingual Writers, Grace Lee-Amuzie

The Writing Center Journal

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of …

The Fall Of Númenor (2022) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Brian Sibley, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of The Fall of Númenor (2022) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley

Vol. 37 No. 6 - Whole No. 219, Eleanor M. Farrell

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Review Of Female Husbands: A Trans History, By Jen Manion, Jeremy Chow

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

This review evaluates Jen Manion's Female Husbands: A Trans History.

Worlds Of Their Own: Narrative World-Making In Eighteenth-Century British Women’S Literature, Lisa Renee Brune

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation argues that female writers in the eighteenth century engaged in fictional acts of world-making. Departing from the new modes of realist writing and the established precedents of romance, such female writers as Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, and Jane Collier created a distinctive mode of utopian writing. They believed that fiction was not restricted to the job of representation but could imagine unrealized social possibilities. The strategies of fictional world-making I analyze include the deployment of romance scripts to change given structures of courtship, the repeated use of romance plot devices and character types to …

Beyond All Worlds: George Macdonald, The Pre-Tolkienians, And The Forgotten Possibilities Of Fantasy, Ethan Patrick Stevens

Masters Theses

The history of modern fantasy has been powerfully shaped by the worldbuilding paradigm so successfully executed in J.R.R. Tolkien's 1954-55 trilogy The Lord of the Rings. However, there were nearly a hundred and fifty years of creative work between the birth of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien’s publication of The Lord of the Rings. By examining the pre-Tolkienian fantasists, we find that Tolkien's way of exhaustive consistency was not, and is not, the only way to write fantasy. Phantastes (1858), the first novel by the influential Victorian fantasist George MacDonald, defies contemporary worldbuilding standards almost constantly in …

Vol. 19 No. 12 - Whole No. 31, David Bratman

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 50 No. 2 - Whole No. 367, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 49 No. 10 - Whole No. 363, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 49 No. 4/5 - Whole No. 357/358, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 47 No. 4 - Whole No. 333, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 47 No. 1 - Whole No. 330, Janet Croft

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton

All Theses

In his 1986 book America, Baudrillard noted that “the most banal suburb…is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” My thesis argues that this monumental shift from the suburbs as enclaves at the outer edges of cultural urban centers to “the centre of the world” is at the heart of Richard Ford’s realist project in his Pulitzer Prize winning Bascombe series starting with The Sportswriter in 1986. Emergent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature scholars have been interested in the schism between the fictionalized representation and the lived experience of suburbia — while …

“I Suppose An Island Dweller Should Expect It To Be So”: The Contradiction And Drama Of Maternity And Islands In Caleb’S Crossing, Shayla Frandsen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Islands have a long tradition of capturing human imagination and functioning as a space that nurtures both magic and mystery. As geographic locations, they seem to avoid easy taxonomy even while behaving easily categorizable: they exist as tourist fantasies separate from everyday landscape even while many operate as an othered land that is still “safe” enough to visit. They are isolated yet capable of nurturing strong cultural identity. They also act as autonomous entities while still being interconnected within larger natural structures, coastlines, and waterways. In these ways and more islands navigate as border spaces of inherent contradiction—contradictions which are …

Opening Pandora’S Box: Charles D’Orléans’S Reception And The Work Of Critical Bibliography: The 2022 Annual Meeting Keynote, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Susannah And Cold Mountain: Examining The Portrayal Of Appalachian Culture In Opera, Savannah Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies qualitative literary analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the portrayal of Appalachia in the operas Susannah and Cold Mountain. The operas were premiered almost 60 years apart, yet they share many themes that epitomize roles, patterns, and stereotypes within the Appalachian region. One theme observed is the role and expectations of Appalachian women and how they have developed over time, as the plots are placed roughly a century apart. The depictions of Appalachian religious traditions and representations of violence are also explored as these themes play a considerable role in Susannah and Cold Mountain. By analyzing …

Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project explores and wades through the implications of mestizaje in the murky depths of Shakespeare’s oceans. Disguises and mistakes in identities and in gender and “race” draw on the hybridity and indeterminacy of the early modern stage and its fluidity and lack of order to reflect an unhomed and unmediated formation of nationhood, diaspora, and (trans)global identities. Drawing on ecocritical and critical race theories, I contend the tragicomic works of Shakespeare expose and dismantle ecoracial fantasies of white male supremacy to curate a space of mestizaje for a new generation of BIPOC scholars.

Graduate Writing Groups: Evidence-Based Practices For Advanced Graduate Writing Support, Wenqi Cui, Jing Zhang, Dana Lynn Driscoll

The Writing Center Journal

Writing centers seek to expand their services beyond tutoring and develop evidence-based practices. Continuing and expanding the existing practices, the authors have adopted graduate writing groups (GWGs) to support graduate writers, especially those working on independent writing projects like a dissertation or article for publication. This article provides an effective model on how to develop and assess virtual graduate writing groups (VGWGs). This replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research applied a mixed-methods design with pre- and postsurveys over the three semesters of running the VGWG. It found that the VGWG offered a full range of writing support that met graduate …

A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper seeks to reckon with the entwined realities of black lives, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene through engagement with Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent critical work on the Black Anthropocenes. Yusoff contends that, “Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum,” (xii). This paper will examine the ways in which Yusoff and Jones are in conversation, and try to elucidate the ways in which the Anthropocene is both built upon and a harbinger of mass death. How …

“Read This Book, And You Will Find All The Grand And Marvelous Things To Be Found”: A Song Of Ice And Fire And Medieval Travelogues, Elisabeth Brander

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

Although travel is one of the most prominent themes in the modern fantasy genre, travelogues are not usually regarded as one of the predecessors of Western fantasy. Yet a close examination of both medieval travel narratives and fantasy novels reveals many shared characteristics. The journeys of fantasy protagonists, which include encounters with foreign cultures, monsters, and marvels, tend to echo the journeys of the medieval missionaries and merchants who ventured into the Far East in the 13^th and 14^th centuries. This article uses George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as a lens through which to …

Notes Of An Inklings Scholar: Musings On Myth And History, Promises And Secrecy, Ethical Reviewing, And The Limits Of Authorial Intent, David Bratman

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

Five mini-essays proposing hypotheses on topics in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis scholarship.

1. The Expansion and Contraction of Tolkien's Imagination: how and why his burgeoning sub-creation began to contract and systematize in his later years.

2. A Hobbit in the Legendarium: Tolkien's original conception of the relationship between The Hobbit and The Silmarillion may have been to have Bilbo visiting a land of fable.

3. Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moore: Lewis's devotion to Mrs. Moore may have been a sense of metaphysical and spiritual obligation.

4. But did he ever read the book?: How Edmund Wilson …

L’Italia, L’Altrove Luoghi, Spazi E Attraversamenti Nel Cinema E Nella Letteratura Sulla Migrazione, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

This monograph is a meditation on how transnational migrations have influenced how the sense of place and the politics of space are represented in literature and film about migration to, from and within Italy. It examines work produced in Italian and English, and it emphasizes how culture and national identity can be reconsidered in a more inclusive way within a world marked by increased mobility. The text is divided into three main sections – “Places”, “Spaces” and “Crossings” – each of which contains two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that bridges, as they are represented in literature, movies and paintings about …

Critical Insights: The Lord Of The Rings (2022), Edited By Robert C. Evans, Mariana Rios Maldonado

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Mariana Rios Maldonado, of Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings (2022), edited by Robert C. Evans

Crime On The Periphery: Tana French’S Criminal Geography, Deirdre Flynn

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

This article will analyze how Tana French conceptualizes spatiality, focusing on her use of liminal spaces, edgelands and peripheries, as the settings for her crime scenes. Instead of more traditional Irish literary urban-rural binaries, French exploits the interface of both places, reflecting a contemporary post-industrial, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In particular, in In the Woods (2007) the untamed woodland behind the housing estate in Knocknaree becomes an interfacial zone between the rural and urban, past and present. In The Likeness (2009), Whitethorn House sits at the edge of the village geographically, politically, and historically. In French’s first two novels peripheral spaces …

Conceptions Of Space, Gender, And Movement Within Literature And Film: An Analysis Of "The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs" & Westward The Women, Stephanie Fishleigh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Often portrayed as static, and neutral, “space,” as it is used in this paper, refers to a literary conception, one which encompasses a sphere of locations as well as settings of events, characters, and objects within a literary narrative. Much to our detriment, humans are often compelled to codify and compartmentalize the world around us, using perceived differences as our epistemological touchstone. This phenomenon extends even to our relationship to space. In examining the interplay between space, geographies, genre, and gender, using two objects of analysis, this paper seeks to further the current scholarship on how gender ideology informs our …

“Strange Faces, Other Minds” Tennyson’S Idylls Of The King And The Alien Other, Rebecca A. Umland

Mythcon

Encounters with the alien other commonly conjure images from science fiction film and literature—advanced spacecraft, alien species in human form from remote places of the galaxy, or in alternate places either in the subterranean realms or on the planet Earth. Varied as they are, a ubiquitous quality of strangeness accompanies these encounters, from those in nineteenth-century writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, through early 20th-century Lovecraft narratives, and in contemporary fiction and film. A writer who may not come immediately to mind is Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of England from 1850 until his death in 1892. …

Common Elements In Ya Mythic Portal Fantasies, Sultana Raza

Mythcon

While Tolkien was inspired by Norse and Anglo-Saxon myths, he incorporated certain plot structures from Greco- Roman myths in Beren and Lúthien and Fall of Gondolin. Contemporary authors continue to be inspired by myths as well. This paper will explore mythic YA fantasy, and common elements mainly in the works of Rick Riordan, Michael Scott, Eoin Colfer, and Cassandra Clare, all of whom use portals to enable their main characters to enter parallel universes. Riordan often uses museums/artefacts as portals to fantastical dimensions. His Percy Jackson series, the Heroes of Olympus series, and the Kane Chronicles are well-researched, while the …

Lgbqt Immigrants Coming To The United States: The Problems They Face, Nya Brewster, John Holman

Immigration Scholarship: History, Trends and Development in Global Immigration

This reading focuses on research specific to Crime Rates against the LQBTQ+ immigrant community in South American Countries during the 2000’s era to current times. It illustrates the difficulties asylum seekers face in the United States while also discussing crimes that happen to immigrants of different sexualities and gender orientations. This emerging topic of gender and sexuality of immigrants will pertain to societal as well as political factors. Typically in rural and communist countries, the government outlaws the LGBTQ community and has the strictest consequences for individuals who are a part of that community . Living with consequences of that …

The Environmental Bioethics Of Space Travel: ‘Alien’ Bodies In C. S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy, Journee Cotton

Mythcon

C. S. Lewis lived through numerous significant historic events. Notably, he was alive during the space race and spoke to the potential philosophical and ethical dilemmas that may arise through space travel, especially concerning contact with ‘alien’ life. While the idea may be found in other parts of his oeuvre, Lewis explicitly considers space travel and contact with aliens in The Cosmic Trilogy. His texts offer unique perspectives on space travel that is not centric to the earth-born ‘human,’ rather it notes man’s destructive attitudes towards progress and the potential harms man may enact on other sentient beings and environments …