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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano
On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Handwas not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.
Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno
Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno
Department of English: Faculty Publications
External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …
The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead
The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …
Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey
Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey
Department of English: Faculty Publications
The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.
"The Borders Between Us": Loren Eiseley's Ecopoetics, Thomas Lynch
"The Borders Between Us": Loren Eiseley's Ecopoetics, Thomas Lynch
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Loren Eiseley's literary reputation today rests almost exclusively on the significance of his nonfiction nature essays, which deservedly stand as influential exemplars of creative nonfiction science and nature writing. However, in his early years as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, Eiseley had the reputation as an important and promising poet, and he published poetry in a range of literary journals. Most notably, his work appeared in the earliest editions of Prairie Schooner, whose editorial staff he joined in 1927, the year after it began publication. And, not limited to his own school's journal, he published in a variety …
Introduction To Artifacts & Illuminations: Critical Essays On Loren Eisley, Thomas Lynch, Susan M. Maher
Introduction To Artifacts & Illuminations: Critical Essays On Loren Eisley, Thomas Lynch, Susan M. Maher
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Acknowledged as one of the most important twentieth-century American nature writers, Loren Eiseley was a widely admired practitioner of creative nonfiction, a genre that, in part due to his example, has flourished in recent decades. Contemporary nature writers regularly cite Eiseley as an inspiration and model. General readers, as well, appreciate Eiseley's eloquent, complex, and informative essays; devoted readers have helped keep Eiseley continuously in print since his books first began appearing more than a half century ago. Clearly, Eiseley is a writer who matters. As many observers lament, current environmental and other problems require a public and media that …