Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Egyptian Sorcerer's Drop Of Ink In Adam Bede, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

Many scholars and critics have discussed the symbolic significance of the famous opening sentence of Adam Bede and related it to …

On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: James Miranda Barry (1999) And Sophie And The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), Patricia Duncker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My first historical novel - James Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had a very successful and colourful career in remote parts of the Empire. He spent an important period of his life in Jamaica, then a British colony, during the 1830s, taking care of the army garrison stationed on the island to protect the interests of the Crown and put down the numerous slave revolts. The British maintained a regiment there until …

The Radical Candidature: Harold Transome's Political Motivation In Felix Holt, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In late 1832 Great Britain was preparing for a special General Election. A Reform Bill passed in June had extended voting rights to the middle class, and parliamentary constituencies were re-distributed to enfranchise some of the larger industrial towns. Many Tory landed gentry had - unsuccessfully - opposed the change. So, early on in Felix Halt, the Radical, it comes as a surprise to the reader as well as his family when Harold Transome, heir to the Transome estates, declares his political allegiance. Just returned from abroad where he had made his fortune in business, he does not intend to …

George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems …

Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the …

The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …

Networking With Middleton And Jonson: Theater, Law, And Social Documents, Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the lines above, the lawyer Tangle seems to be listing the tools of his trade, various legal documents he uses regularly. However, the list names more than just documents; it also labels the stream of blood trickling out of Tangle’s arm as he is forced into a purgative healing. Quieto, a lawyer-cum-healer, prescribes a bloodletting because Tangle’s long association with ink has infected him and the only way to cure him of poisonous legal practice is to drain him. Quieto confirms his diagnosis with the protagonist, Phoenix, who looks into the basin catching the blood and exclaims “This, why …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …

Henry J. Leir Annual Report, 2015-2016, Robert D. Tobin

Henry J. Leir Chair Annual Reports

Henry J. Leir Annual Report for the 2015-2016 academic year, covering Henry J. Leir Chair holder Robert Tobin's scholarship work, publications, programming, teaching, and more.

What Happened To The Grandsons And Great-Grandsons Of The House Of York?, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Josephine Tey, in her famous murder mystery centering on Richard III, The Daughter of Time, asserts that Richard was not a murderous tyrant determined to eliminate any challengers to his throne; rather it was the aim of Henry VII and Henry VIII to eliminate most of the male descendants of Richard Duke of York. Do the fates of those male descendants actually demonstrate that such was the policy of the first two Tudor monarchs?

Le Morte Darthur And The Extratextual Significance Of Prophecy Across The Centuries, Stephanie Victoria Violette

Quidditas

Prophecy is the driving force of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The Morte emerged from a tradition of prophecy that existed long before its creation, and which continued into the early modern period. Prophecy influenced both political and religious spheres, as well as medieval cultural perceptions of time. English culture absorbed the Morte’s prophetic elements and used them to either bolster later uses of prophecy or to defame them. Using the Morte as a starting point, this examination draws on elements from various sources: Greek, Christian, and Welsh folklore, Geoffrey of Monmouth and contemporaries of Thomas Malory. Also part …

The Reception Of Tacitus’ Germania By The German Humanists: From Provence To Empire, Thomas Renna

Quidditas

It is well known he German Humanists (1490-1540) used Tacitus’ Germania to advance their notion of the German nation in response to Italian criticism. But less attention has been given to the German nature of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (1509). I argue that Humanists after Conrad Celtis (Bebel, Wimpheling, Cochlaeus, Brant, Irenicus, Franck, Hutten) emphasized the Germanness of the empire by reinterpreting the traditional Translation of Empire, the Germanic migrations out of Germania after Constantine, and the designation of a new national purpose (the protection and expansion of the Church and the faith). They grafted the …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Intersections Of Space, Movement, And Diasporic Subjectivity In Brick Lane, White Teeth, And Maps For Lost Lovers, Md. Alamgir Hossain

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the correlations between characters' encounters with specific locations and their interior development as they adjust to their new environments in the novels Brick Lane (2003), White Teeth (2000), and Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). Monica Ali's Brick Lane focuses on Nazneen's (the protagonist) encounters with different places such as particular streets, pubs, restaurants, cafés, and train stations, which impact her personality to such an extent that, in the process of traversing London's physical terrain, she is transformed from a passive Bangladeshi rural woman into an active, independent agent in London. In With Teeth, Zadie Smith depicts …

"There Is So Much You Can't Translate" : English Translation Of Chinese Classic Poetry In Twentieth Century America, Ahui Yu

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Although the translation of Chinese texts by modernist poets has been acknowledged by critics, the implications of this cultural exchange between China and America has not generated substantial critical study. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language, this thesis examines this cultural dialogue through the work of Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth. Restoring Fenollosa’s pioneering role, a chapter of this thesis uncovers his unfinished project of a fusion of East and West, and exposes his imperialist and nationalist attitudes that later result in appropriation. Reexamining Pound’s engagement with Chinese texts throughout his career, another chapter of this thesis argues …

The Dialectics Of Reading : Fredric Jameson And Politics Of Interpretation, Robert Henri Faivre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Fredric Jameson’s theory and practice of reading, in the name of critical interventions into the dominant hermeneutics in literary and cultural texts, have limited transformative readings and provided interpretive alibis, though an ever-receding utopian writerly space, for cultural reform within capitalism. Deploying a materialist analytics, The Dialectics of Reading draws out Jameson’s interpretive ambivalence, unlayers its class interests and demonstrates how in Jameson’s interpretations—from his Sartre: Origins of Style to An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army—the dominant material relationships are grasped as dialectical reading. In a detailed interpretation of his interpretation of “Walmart,” The Dialectics of Reading …

When Time Stops: A Loss Of Identity Or A Lack Of Responsibility?, Emma M. Kuper

The Criterion

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”, and Louis MacNeice’s “Sunday Morning” follow a similar temporal structure as they begin with a normal passing of time, feature a hiatus or stretch of time in the central part of the poem, and then end with a return to normalcy. In addition, both poems include a connection among strangers during this stretched time period. However, Bishop’s speaker finds this connection frightening, due to her resulting loss of identity. In contrast, MacNeice portrays this connection as positive, as all of humanity shares in a peaceful, joyous morning. This difference originates in the cause of …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Fragmented Knowledge: The Riddle Of Unknowability In Kafka's "In Unserer Synagoge" And "Die Sorge Des Hausvaters", Matthew Greene

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

Re-Examining And Redefining The Concepts Of Community, Justice, And Masculinity In The Works Of René Depestre, Carlos Fuentes, And Ernest Gaines, Jacqueline Nicole Zimmer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In La Communauté desoeuvrée (1983) French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes how a community is creating by bringing its members together under a collective identity. The invention of myths, such as the myth of racial superiority and the mythic revolutionary community, functions to sustain the hegemonic dominance wielded in Haiti by the United States and later by François Duvalier, the Porfiriato and its aftermath in Mexico, and white society in the United States Deep South. These myths often engender policies founded in the inhospitable treatment of those who are deemed lesser or ‘other’. Nancy’s conception of being singular plural posits that …

The House In South Asian Muslim Women’S Early Anglophone Life-Writing And Novels, Diviani Chaudhuri

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation undertakes the first sustained examination of representations of Islamicate material culture, domestic interiors, residential forms, and historic sites in the early Anglophone writing of South Asian Muslim women. Reading the memoirs of Pakistani diplomat Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (1963), in conjunction with three early Anglophone novels, namely, Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra (1951), Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957), and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), I develop the analytic category of autoethnographic spatial discourse in contradistinction to the harem fantasy inflected colonial spatial discourse prevalent at the time in order to describe the …

The Evolution Of Feminism In India Through Women Writers Of The Colonial Period: Krupabai Satthianadhan, Cornelia Sorabji, And Sarojini Naidu, Betsy George

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Nursery Rhymes: Pieces Of The Children’S Literature Puzzle In Translation, Catalina Millán Scheiding

Faculty Works

Nursery rhymes are being found increasingly in translational situations, normally in intertextual translations, yet there is no framework or specific study of how they should be translated. This paper aims, on the one hand, to explore the theories related to children’s literature translation that could be applied to nursery rhyme translation, and on the other hand, to identify the particular idiosyncrasies of nursery rhymes that may have an effect on their translation. Several examples are analyzed from different media (comic, children’s book and film) in their translation from English into Spanish and new study possibilities are proposed.

Translating History And Expunging Treason: Textual And Political Intervention In The Conspiracy Of The Duke Of Biron, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

This article explores the connections between official history writing, the genre of political biography and translation practices in France and Spain in the seventeenth century. It argues that Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo’s Historia trágica de la vida del duque de Biron, a biography he wrote using Pierre Matthieu’s monumentally large Histoire de France as a source, served to refashion contemporary history by actively intervening in the text in order to change its political and ideological implications. Early modern theories on imitation and the hackneyed traduttore, traditore motif are thus the backbone of the analysis of a translation that shows how …

The Evolution Of The Vampire Other: Symbols Of Difference From Folklore To Millennial Literature, Kate Buckley

Honors Theses

With its roots in Eastern Europe and rapidly spreading to Western society in the past few hundred years, the vampire has served as a double for humanity, with the division of self between monstrosity and the human ideal. Vampires in folklore and literature have been a means by which human cultures have identified concepts of human subjectivity (identity), particularly with regard to what various societies have defined as monstrous (being Othered) within human nature. This study examines how the vampire character evolves throughout the centuries, with a specific focus on the less monstrous contemporary vampires who form hybrid communities with …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.