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Tolkien’S Animals: A Bibliography, Kris Swank

Journal of Tolkien Research

Bibliography of scholarly and popular science research on Tolkien’s various animal species includes more than 100 English-language entries from literary, mythological, cultural, historical, philological, psychological, religious, and scientific perspectives. Includes entries on animal sentience/personhood, general surveys of animals, and analysis of specific species: bats, bears (including Beorn), birds, cats, cryptids, deer, dogs (including wolves and foxes), dragons, elephants, horses, sea-life, and spiders.

Of Foxes, Dancing Bears, And Wolves, John Rosegrant

Journal of Tolkien Research

When in “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien expressed his Faërian wish to understand the proper speech of animals, he was longing to relate with animals in a way that combined communion with them and respect for their separate natures. But the exuberance with which Tolkien expressed this wish changed over time. His early writings are rampant with talking animals and other forms of human-animal condensation in which the animals nevertheless retain their own agency; later in life he grew uneasy with what he now believed to be unrealistic and un-Catholic formulations. Nevertheless, the Faërian wish was so important to him that he …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

Gen Z And Millennials How They Use Public Libraries And Identify Through Media Use, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Gen Z and millennials have some surprising attitudes and behaviors regarding media consumption and library use. 54% of Gen Z and millennials visited a physical library within a twelve-month period. Libraries attract even Gen Z and millennials who don’t identify as readers. This report examines Gen Z and millennials' book-related behaviors (such as borrowing, buying, downloading and socializing) and and how media use shapes Gen Z and millennials' identity claims as Readers, Gamers, Fans and Writers. The report is intended for specialists such as librarians and book publishers, and broad public audiences.

Tending The Heart Of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken A Child’S Moral Imagination, Second Edition, By Vigen Guroian, Sarah O'Dell

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

No abstract provided.

Inkling, Historian, Soldier, And Brother: A Life Of Warren Hamilton Lewis By Don W. King, David Bratman

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

No abstract provided.

Mythos To Myth To Mythopoeia: A Cyclical Process, Ashna Mary Jacob, Nirmala Menon

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

The paper predicates the prospects of mythopoeia in the mythical tradition. An authorial construction of mythopoeia, when internalized into the collective consciousness can evolve into mythos. This mythopoeia turned mythos in the course of time and space may regress into myth. The fragments of the myth may then result in the making of another mythopoeia. Mythopoeia to mythos to myth is a cyclical process in mythical tradition. The paper establishes this argument with J. R. R. Tolkien’s conception of mythopoeia. It explores similarities between mythopoeia and conlang. It contends that just as conlang can evolve as language, mythopoeia can also …

"A Bleak, Barren Land": Women And Fertility In The Lord Of The Rings, Dylan L. Henderson

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

Critics, and even the general public, have noted the absence of women in The Lord of the Rings, an absence so glaring that it could hardly be overlooked. Many feminist scholars have, as a result of this deficiency, denounced J.R.R. Tolkien, interpreting this lack of female characters as indicative of repressed misogyny. Others, however, have defended the author, pointing out that the female characters that do exist could be considered role models. This essay offers an alternative interpretation and contends that the absence of women in the novel, though potentially reducing its appeal to modern readers, reinforces one of …

"It Is 'About' Nothing But Itself": Tolkienian Theology Beyond The Domination Of The Author, Tom Emanuel

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

There is a broad stream of Christian interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, especially The Lord of the Rings, which views it as the intentionally, essentially Christian work of an intentionally, essentially Christian author. This reductive, exclusivist approach does not do justice to the complex, generative interactivity between Tolkien’s faith, the faith of his readers (or lack thereof), and the text itself. Building on work by Veryln Flieger, Michael Drout, and Robin A. Reid, this paper interrogates how Christian Tolkien scholarship drafts Tolkien the human sub-creator to perform Foucault’s author-function by suppressing his contradictions and painting a figure whose life …

The Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Of Frodo Baggins, Bruce D. Leonard

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

J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings accurately portrayed the signs and symptoms of what is currently labeled Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Frodo’s condition logically follows his experiences of less than a year in the War of the Ring. Tolkien did not have access to a diagnostic manual but apparently used his keen observations from both World Wars to inform his narrative. No fantasy is employed to describe Frodo condition after the Ring is destroyed. His condition is that of a vet with PTSD. Evidence from the History of Middle-earth demonstrates the deliberate steps taken to show Frodo as …

Law And Its Limits: Ethical Issues In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, David S. Caudill

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The law and literature movement is frequently associated with the use of literary images of law as a point of reflection upon the ethical obligations of lawyers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—the story of a young scientist whose unorthodox experiments end up creating the famed “monster”—is not, at first glance, a likely candidate for that enterprise. However, Dr. Frankenstein’s ambition and ruthless pursuit of knowledge has become a contemporary image of science out of control and the need for ethical limitations on scientific progress. Consequently, the novel raises currently important issues of regulating science and technology. Given the lawyer’s ethical obligation …

Darkness Leaping Out Of Light: Anti-Metaphysics And The Paradoxical Negative Affix In Moby-Dick, Bryce N. Wallace

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This paper argues that the varied philosophical beliefs that are present in the discourse of Moby-Dick’s characters are met with discursive resistance at the level of the novel’s form. Though a range of metaphysical arguments are posited by the characters as they explore the unknown, Melville’s use of negative linguistic constructions refutes the entire range of metaphysical beliefs by displaying the paradoxical and impossible nature of the primary subject that metaphysicians ponder—the unknown. I propose that in trying to comprehend “the unknown” humans unavoidably create something out of nothing then deem it unknowable and therefore fail to grant it …

Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …

Marginalized Students Need To Write About Their Lives: Meaningful Assignments For Analysis And Affirmation, Nancy G. Mack

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

Abstract: The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered. Culturally sustaining pedagogy explores, extends, and examines the experiences of students. Meaningful, experience-based, narrative writing assignments are suggested: memoir essays, ethnographic research reports, and multigenre interview projects. Analysis activities challenge students to examine a chosen experience through several scholarly lenses. By adding complex analysis to their writing, students gain a challenging new experience …

I Was Crazy Once: An Examination Of Elizabethan Insanity In Shakespeare’S Work, Hope L. Kobus

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

William Shakespeare wrote numerous works, diving into the common motifs of love, revenge, power, but most importantly, madness. While Elizabethan audiences were more accustomed to seeing madness as a ploy for comedy, Shakespeare changed the appeal through shows such as King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He presents the power and ambition of women, as well as the failings of the upper-class, but he disguised them through the idea of insanity. At a time when the public had little understanding of mental health, it was easy to blame madness on gender, social status, and even the supernatural. Through …

'Poor Unfortunate Souls': Acculturation And Reception Of Womanhood In Fairy Tales, Dalton C. Whitby

Fall Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

This essay examines traditional fairy tales, symbolized by Perrault’s “Blue Beard,” and contemporary ones, illustrated by Disney’s animated film Brave (2012), with the implementation of ideas from theorists Marcia Lieberman and Hans Robert Jauss, to demonstrate that dated conceptions of womanhood prevail in these stories and continue to be received and acculturate children today. Although it is reasonable to assume social changes brought on by feminism would echo in twenty-first-century fairy tales, an investigation of Disney's animated fairy tale films, the modern storyteller aimed at acculturating children, reveals that these stories subversively persist in presenting traditional ideas of womanhood, depicting …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

Jane Eyre, The Invisible Bisexual: Bisexual Erasure In Historical Literature, Christine L. Roland

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

The purpose of this article is to reveal Charlotte Brontë’s canonized heterosexual character Jane Eyre as bisexual and explain why critics unintentionally erase bisexuality in historical literature. Homosexuality emerged as a species in the 1800s, but the heterosexual-versus-homosexual binary scale overlooked bisexuality. Yet, bisexuality existed—and Victorian society encouraged it between women. Lesbianism and female “friendships” were promoted within female boarding schools and between women in heterosexual marriages; the precise relationships exemplified in Jane Eyre. Though Jane marries a man, her heterosexual “familial” marriage emerges only out of her bisexual nature, for she does not marry Rochester until he becomes effeminate. …

The Zone Of Proximal Development And Content Area Instruction For Middle School English Language Learner Students: A Phenomenological Study, Amy Lundgren

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the lived experiences of middle school content area instructors (CAIs) who teach English language learners (ELLs) in public schools in ELL-heavy districts. The theory guiding this study was Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), as research studies indicate the ability of ELLs to access content area instruction when teachers effectively scaffold them in their ZPD to use discipline specific literacy strategies. Data were collected using one-on-one interviews with 10 content area teachers in six ELL-heavy public-school districts to participate in the study. Further data collection was completed using …

Narrating Egyptian Women’S Prison Experiences - El Saadawi And Bakr, Nour El Captan

The Undergraduate Research Journal

The research attempts to discover what Egyptian women prisoners’ experience was like in the 1980s and 90s through studying two major texts which fall under the genre of prison literature: Twelve Women in a Cell by Nawal El Saadawi and The Golden Chariot by Salwa Bakr. Through a thorough reading and analysis of the works, similar tropes and different attitudes can be found in the texts. Both works discussed class, comradery, and the patriarchy but differences exist when it comes to their different portrayals of prison.

Transhuman Bodies: A Survey Of Three Avenues Of Societal Critique From Literature With Cyborg, Android, And Clone Subjects, Wesley Sanders

Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore three different avenues of societal critique using works in Science Fiction which have as their subjects cyborgs, androids, or clones. In the thesis, I begin by addressing the unique way SF literature comments on gender politics through the use of objectified cyborgs and androids, typically with male creators and would be male masters. Following this, I explore the concept of a semiotic liminality surrounding cyborgs and androids and illustrate how that liminality complicates conceptions of what constitutes a living creature. Finally, the thesis shifts to the commodification of the cyborg where I attempt to illustrate …

Does Shakespeare Believe In Sudden Conversions For His Villains?, Robert B. Pierce

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Nostalgia's Complicated Role In Contemporary Pop Culture, Ethan Clawsie

Pop Culture Intersections

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing trend of nostalgia in popular culture, with the number of remakes, reboots, and revivals of classic films, television shows, and music at an all-time high. Dozens of old TV shows have also been rebooted in the past few years, old movies are being remade, much of the music that’s been released lately has been engineered to sound like it came from the past, and a subset of recent video games either build upon old games (like Pokémon GO), or are made to look and feel like old games (like Flappy …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Emi (English-Medium Instruction) In South Korean Elite Universities, Kingsley Bolton, Hyejeong Ahn, Werner Botha, John Bacon-Shone

English Faculty Publications

This article provides an extensive review of previous research on English-medium instruction (EMI) in South Korean higher education. It then goes on to discuss the findings of a 2017 survey at four elite universities in South Korea, which were Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). While some of the results could be regarded as predictable, there were a number of findings which extended previous research. Despite the extensive complaint tradition about English in South Korea, many of the students in our sample rated their proficiency rather highly. Notwithstanding the extensive …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

You Don’T Even Need The Ghosts: A Writer’S Look At The Turn Of The Screw, Andrea M. Schenkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898 as a serialized novel in Collier's Magazine. The short novel is characterized by its concise language. James chooses words carefully and consciously. The linguistic compression forces the reader to deal intensively with the main protagonists of the novel: the Governess, the children, Miles and Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Nothing is as it seems. James aims to challenge the reader by forcing them to constantly question what they read.

Countless essays have been written about the text since the novel was published. The figures, especially those …

A Feminist Icon Or A Homicidal Coward: Medea’S Revenge On Patriarchy, Beyza Ertugrul

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Medea, the alleged epitome of sophistication, does not deserve her title of the flawless feminist icon as she is praised to be. For context, Euripides’ Medea, first performed in 431 BC, portrays a young sorceress whose abusive husband abandons her for another woman and who takes revenge by murdering her own children to spite him. Throughout the tragedy, Medea speaks out on gender inequality, and by definition, such uncommon and advanced statements can be described by the modern term of feminism as the “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster). Especially …

The Rise Of The Machine: The Annihilation Of Human Connection In "The Rainbow", Elizabeth Miller

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay analyzes the growth of industrialization in England at the turn of the century by examining D. H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel, The Rainbow. More specifically, this essay will focus on the role of machine culture and how the growing presence of industry acted as a catalyst for societal destruction. I argue that Lawrence defines machine culture as the worship of the machine, roboticism, the erasure of memory, and misogyny. These social constructs are exposed through the male characters in the novel to express Lawrence’s attitude toward the destructiveness of industrialization. He uses these characteristics to represent the type of …