Digital Commons Network^™

Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog Of Published Accounts By Africans Enslaved In The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices.

Review Of Teaching The Way: Using The Principles Of The Art Of War To Teach Composition By Steven T. Nelson, Christian Smith

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

First, an admission, or perhaps a confession: my enthusiasm for teaching composition has been waning in the last year or two. I don’t know if it was the pandemic coupled with the resulting year on Zoom or the cumulative effect of teaching writing for the last decade and a half, but somewhere along the way it became a different experience. All too often after grading or having a lesson plan fall flat, I would repeat the first two lines from Geoffrey Sirc’s underappreciated review article, “Resisting Entropy,” when he says “Teaching writing is impossible. You have ten to fifteen weeks …

Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain

Theses and Dissertations--English

Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature examines the resurgence of didactic political literature in the United States during the 21st century, specifically adaptations of early 20th century American leftist protest works by authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Richard Wright. While the most political aspects of these writers’ fiction are often either criticized as too politically overt – such as Sinclair’s The Jungle and Wright’s Native Son – or forgotten in favor of an author’s perceived literary merit – London’s The Iron Heel in comparison to his other works like Call of the Wild …

Fantasies Of Race And Place: White Nationalist And Alt-Right Undercurrents In Fantasy Roleplaying Games, Mark Hines

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of fantasy settings in roleplaying games often draw upon understandings of the medieval and early Renaissance world. This dynamic often extends to racial politics in such worlds. For the contemporary roleplaying game, this often means that game mechanics are built around race, species, or gender. Often, players interpret such mechanics as a means of bioessentializing race or practicing stereotypes rooted in Eurocentric morality and values.

This thesis examines the underlying rhetoric and implicit stakes by which race in fantasy worlds overlaps with the rhetoric and proposed stakes of White Nationalist and Alt-right actors. As fantasy roleplaying games, and especially …

Gambling: The Dialogue Of Excess In Lanval And The Franklin’S Tale, Fanrui Shao

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Marie de France’s Lanval and Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale are two medieval stories based on the Breton form of poetry called the lai. Both texts focus on rash actions, in particular thoughtless utterance, committed by virtuous foreigners, and the consequences that ensue. On the surface, the outsiders suffer xenophobia and the disfavor of the local patriarchy. But their true problem is the “excess” that they carry with them. Communities censor the circulation of this excess, i.e., all people, objects and relationships that either come from outside or deviate from local norms. Reading excess in these tales through the lens …

The Tragedy Of Caspian: C. S. Lewis And His Trauma, Chandler Hanton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis reconsiders C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a type of scriptotherapy that enabled Lewis to process and come to terms with a life full of serious and significant traumatic events. Trauma theory offers a vehicle for us to consider the alignments and connections between Lewis himself and his fictional creation, Caspian. In the specifics of both characterization and incident, Lewis mirrors the events and relationships that instilled and healed the trauma in his own life. In situating Caspian as his alter-ego, Lewis allowed his writing to function as a gender-specific therapeutic process for addressing the effects of his …

The Value Hierarchies Of J.R.R. Tolkien And His Legacy: A Reimagining Of Fantasy Fiction And The Propagation Of Colonial Racism, Alexander Richburg

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

J.R.R. Tolkien’s impact on modern fantasy fiction is remarkable. However, while some of the changes to the genre ushered in by Tolkien’s work are positive, other aspects of his legacy are more problematic. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are based on his colonial worldview. They are biographical in that Tolkien draws heavily from his life experience to tell his stories. The biographical influence manifests in a hierarchical representation of everything from trees and their ancestry to the elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs that populate his fiction. The hierarchies are value structures and the …

Heathen Husband: The Corrupting Patriarchal Hierarchy In Shakespeare’S Othello And Its Absence In Cinthio’S Gli Hecatommithi, Heavyn Renee Lester

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis places William Shakespeare’s Othello within cultural context to examine the moral corruption that Desdemona and Othello undergo once they fulfill marital roles within a patriarchal hierarchy that reflects the hierarchy religious conduct literature calls on Christians to maintain within marriage. At the same time, this thesis contrasts Shakespeare’s Othello with the Italian story of Disdemona and a Moorish captain within Decade Three of Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi. Hecatommithi does not ascribe a corrupting power to patriarchal hierarchy or explore Othello’s downfall in relation to his Christian faith. This thesis determines that the alterations Shakespeare makes to Othello’s source material …

"These Jests Of God": Arrowsmith And Tropical Medicine’S Racial Ecology, James Fitz Gerald

English and Media Studies Faculty Publications

This essay examines Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) through the ethical and ecological contingencies of U.S. tropical medicine in the early twentieth century. With an eye kept on the novel's well-known "St. Hubert " chapters, the essay elaborates the dangerous compromises that even the most well-intentioned medical professionals make in the name of scientific progress. The novel, I argue, summons and yet moves beyond the traditional outbreak narrative to unravel the various political, economic, and cultural strands of U.S. imperial medicine. The novel's platform for applied sanitary science helps me revisit famed public health campaigns, particularly those from Cuba and Panama, …

How “Interested” Criticism Fueled The Formulation Of Nineteen Eighty-Four’S Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch

All Theses

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a “cultural afterlife” as a result of “interested” criticism, which has a set political/practical barometer or motive. While everyone agrees that the novel presents a frightening dystopia, many also consider it a prophetic piece that illuminates the possible corruption of executive power of a nation thanks to this cultural afterlife; the modern and popular term “Orwellian” resulted from these sorts of analyses and have only escalated in the years since its inception. As a result, within the past decade, multiple scholars, analysts, and journalists have referenced Orwell’s novel as a factual representation of this executive …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Index To The Journal Of Tolkien Research Volume 1 Through Volume 13 Issue 1, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 1 through Volume 13 issue 1

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

Boswell’S 'The Cub' And The Shadow Of Augustan Satire, Robert G. Walker

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reassesses James Boswell's satiric poem, and self-portrait, "The Cub" (1762), and Boswell's known affinity for the writings of Sterne, arguing for a wider satiric context in early Augustan satiric poetry, in Pope and especially Swift, and analysing the poem's multiple shifts of satiric viewpoint and allusion.

This Ain't Yo' Mama's Composition Class: Addressing Anti-Blackness By Implementing Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Sharanna B. Brown

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Kyoko Kishimoto writes that those who practice anti-racist pedagogical practices are not only required to teach about race, but instead "teach about race and racism in a way that fosters critical analytical skills, which reveal the power relations behind racism and how race has been institutionalized in U.S. society to create and justify inequalities" (541). This is the work. And I have chosen to do it.

Steeped in anti-racist pedagogy “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Composition Course” aims to explore the ways that writing classrooms can affirm students’ autonomy while simultaneously equipping them with skills that equate to “cultural capital.” Anti-racist …

Cripping The Welfare Queen: The Radical Potential Of Disability Politics, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

Drawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines the connection between the motif of the Old English warrior woman and Tolkien’s female characters. It provides a critique of Leslie Donovan’s paper “The valkyrie reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen” and contrasts previous research on Tolkien’s female characters focussed either on gender-studies or on a “Germanic” influence with a more direct and specific connection between Medieval English and his works. The motif of the Old English warrior woman is established by investigating the female characters Judith, Elene, and Juliana from the Old English poems Judith, …

Eng 3008-600: Digital Writing And Multimodal Texts, Melissa Ames

Fall 2021

No abstract provided.

Faerie Reality In The Spiral Dance By Rodrigo Garcia Y Robertson, Robert Tredray

Mythcon

Garcia y Robertson's The Spiral Dance begins as a historical novel set in the time of the rebellion led by the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Westmoreland against Elizabeth I in 1569, told from the point of view of Anne, Countess of Northumberland. It is also an epic or heroic fantasy; besides Lady Anne, two of its main characters are a werewolf named Jock and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Their adventures carry them not only to the highlands of Scotland but to the realm of Faerie. The author's theme is that one must lose all one has before …

This Was The World And I Was King: Land And Identity In Scottish Children's Literature Of The Golden Age, Rodney Fierce

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Scottish cultural identity and its erasure in nineteenth-century British children’s literature as successful Scottish authors became known as British authors, and British children’s literature was canonized as the genre’s first Golden Age. Specifically, it explores the ways that Catherine Sinclair, George MacDonald, R. M. Ballantyne, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Helen Bannerman—six popular nineteenth-century Scottish authors—maintain a sense of Scottishness in their adventure fiction. By reading the texts in the historical context of the authors’ biographies, I demonstrate that the land in their works and the benevolent colonizers allowed to control it in some …

Mythcon 51 - A Virtual “Halfling” Mythcon, The Mythopoeic Society

Mythcon Programs

Nothing “halfling” about it in the end, this year we are presenting fifty papers, panels, roundtables, and alternative programming for your Mythopoeic enjoyment. 2020 was a rough year for literally the whole world, and not just because we had to reschedule Mythcon 51. Many of us found ourselves turning to our favorite books for solace, not just academic interest, in the past year. We never could have expected to be hosting Mythcon 51 virtually, but already I’m thrilled about the silver linings that a virtual conference brings:

• Greater international attendance, with presenters and attendees from all over the world!
• Reduced …

Final Master's Portfolio, Sean Heron

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Final portfolio for a master's degree in English with a specialization in English teaching

The Green World Is Calling And She Must Go: Rhetoric Of Adventure And Betrayal In Shakespeare's Othello, Madeleine Dax Wilson

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

None.

An Unexpected Study: A Response To Ordway's "Tolkien’S Modern Reading", Maureen F. Mann

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract for An Unexpected Study

This essay review interrogates the polemical style of rhetoric in Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Modern Reading. It critiques her use of a fictional narrative to represent an adolescent Tolkien, her intertextual criteria, and her dating of Victorian fantasists and their historical moment. It questions her claims about entrenched notions concerning Tolkien, her use of evidence, and her assumptions about her audience. It concludes that Ordway is less interested in Tolkien’s contemporary reading and more interested in creating a new narrative about Tolkien the author.

Shakespeare’S Revisionist Historiography Of The Crusades And Crusading, Mufeed F. Alabdullah

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

This paper studies the topic of crusades and crusading in Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, 1&2 Henry IV, and Henry V within the medieval religious, political, and historical contexts seen retrospectively from the perspective of the Elizabethan England of Reformation. It surveys and analyzes Shakespeare's revisionist views of that medieval historical phenomenon, and demonstrates that he addresses the main aspects of that issue with some liberty he gathered from the cultural outlook developed after his country had sailed away from medieval ideologies and politics. Shakespeare looks back and evaluates not only the holy wars directed against the Muslims in …

James Jones And His Short Stories On Life Challenges Faced By Americans In The Xx Century, Elmira Muratova

Philology Matters

The article, dealing with the centenary anniversary of James Jones, presents her own subdivision of his creative work into periods, given that the author of the article was the first researcher in the former USSR and the USA defending her monographic work in 1981 on “Problems of War and Peace in James Jones’s creative work”. The aim of her article is to highlight the role of a short story genre in evolution of American writers, including James Jones, choosing their themes and further confirming the manner and peculiarities of their writing style in their novels. The main part of the …

Articulate Vol. Iv

Articulāte

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Joy—Joy—Strange Joy: Spiritual Experience In World War One Poetry, Ryder Seamons

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.