Comparative Literature Commons^™

Review Of Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics Of Austen, Eliot And Hardy, Kay Young

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Imagining Minds sets out to read nineteenth-century fiction in the context of modern theories of human cognition and of the mind/body relationship, making the central contention that 'the novel is an aesthetic map to and experience of the nature of the mind-brain' (9; Young's italics). Young takes up concepts from a range of modern psychological theories, especially those of Antonio Damasio, and also makes frequent reference to the revolutionary, and still seminal, work of William James, as a framework within which to investigate how the three major novelists of the title represent the mind's problematic relations with the world as …

Enter The Aunts...., Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and Uncles' and the three redoubtable Dodson sisters are indeed accompanied by their husbands, the Uncles, as they descend upon Dorlcote Mill for a family summit about their nephew Tom Tulliver's education. Yet while Messrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane subsequently play their individual parts in the unfolding of the novel's plot, it is the Aunts …

A Portrait Of Lucy Deane, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The young woman lifted her hands from the keys, and swivelled on her piano-stool to smile at the large bald-headed man comfortable in a crimson armchair.

'Well, sir, was that to your liking?'

'I seem to remember the piece, my dear, but not the composer. Is it something you haven't played for a long time? By one o’ your Germans? You know I never was musical, though I played the flute when I was a young man. Trade opened my eyes and sharpened my wits but I didn't have your expensive schooling.'

'No, papa, not one of my Germans but …

Annual Report 2010, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is pleasing to report another successful year for the Fellowship, albeit with the occasional blip where we were perhaps over-ambitious in our plans: we had to cancel two of our George Eliot Country Tours. We lost a few members, either as a result of age and infirmity or the increase in our subscription rates, but we also gained new ones, and made many new contacts as a result of our activities through the year

I start with thanks to the Fellowship Council, strengthened at the AGM with new members; I am glad to report that our Council meetings are …

Mr. And Mrs. Cross With The Artist John Wharlton Bunney In Venice, June 1880, Sarah Bunney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The dramatic incident in Venice on the morning of 16 June 1880, when the newly married John Walter Cross jumped into the Grand Canal from his hotel room's balcony, has attracted much curiosity and speculation. Understandably Mrs. Cross (George Eliot) was reticent about the happening in her journal and letters, and also wrote little about her stay in Venice before and after the event. But there is another source of information about the couple's Venetian experiences - the personal recollections and correspondence of the English artist John Wharlton Bunney (1828-82).

Bunney, described by Marian as 'an excellent painter and an …

'Pier Glass Imagery' In George Eliot's Middlemarch And Its Fictional Treatment Of Spinoza's Ethics, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 'George Eliot's Middlemarch as a translation of Spinoza's Ethics' (GER 40), Miriam Henson refers to the author's use of 'pier glass' imagery to illustrate her theory of morality and to show how an individual looks at the world from his self as the centre of moral vision and limitation. It is well known that Spinoza expounds his ethical theory in terms of geometrical concepts and physical theories of concentric and eccentric circles and lines etc. He was a lens grinder by profession and it is natural that he used to explore the mechanism of his trade in terms of …

Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 22 June 2010, Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It seems extraordinary to think that ISO years ago Mary Ann Evans, a young woman with very few resources apart from a strong conscience and an enquiring mind, almost ruined her life by revealing to her father that she was no longer certain that the Bible was the literal word of God. Might it not instead be the work of men, she wondered, reaching out to report their sense of God at work in their own lives? Was it not, in fact, a record of human rather than divine history?

For this piece of heresy, as we know, Mary Ann …

Between Deafness And Sound: Aurality And The Limits Of Sympathy In The Mill On The Floss, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his review of The Mill on the Floss on 19 May 1860 for The Times, E. S. Dallas began by arguing that Eliot's first novel Adam Bede was successful because 'the temporary delight of listening to a pleasant tale' it gave its readers helped to achieve 'the permanent good of an increased sympathy with our kind'.1 Although the publication of The Mill on the Floss proved, according to Dallas, that 'George Eliot' was 'as great as ever', it could not match the triumph of Adam Bede because she was determined not to repeat the idealism of a world that …

The Thirty-Nine George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2010- The Mill On The Floss And The Difficulties Of Relationships, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By late 1859, when she had almost finished writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was still unsure of its final title. The working title was 'Sister Maggie', which was particularly appropriate to the first two thirds of the novel, where interest is concentrated on the pleasures and pains of the childhood relationship between Tom and Maggie Tulliver. But in the last third of the book, attention had turned to the romantic relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest, itself intruding into Maggie's near-engagement to Philip Wakem, with Tom kept in the background until the death of brother and sister …

'Even Our Failures Are A Prophecy': The Mill On The Floss And The 1860s*, Marilyn Orr

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet' " written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a prophecy that shaped an aesthetic for the rest of her career.

Also known as 'My Vegetarian Friend’, this poem traces many of the important ideas that Eliot has been working with from the start of her career. It begins as a humorous characterization of 'a vegetarian seer', who anticipates a glorious 'Millennium' …

Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …

Universal Identities And Local Realities: Young Poland's (Mis)Readings Of Synge, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problems Young Poland experienced in understanding the work of John Millington Synge were informed by precisely the same kind of behaviors that Daniel Corkery described in his argument for a truly native Irish national literature in the 1930s. Overcome by a strong sense of self, Poles were not fully able to appreciate the complexities and nuances of Synge's work and by extension, the Irish-Ireland movement. In the end, then, Young Poland was incapable of really understanding the Irish, and so the best they could do was to associate with them. As a result, Poles may have been able to …

The National Imagination (Spring 2011), Robert D. Tobin, Beth Gale, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

Delno C. West Award Winner 2011

Quidditas

James H. Forse

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper presented by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Work As A Manifestation Of Faith In The English Nunnery: Barking Abbey, Essex, Terri Barnes

Quidditas

This paper discusses various occupations held by nuns in the late-medieval and early-modern English convent, and argues that while the nuns did have extraordinary opportunities for self-management when compared to secular women, nuns carried out those responsibilities in part as extensions and expressions of their faith. This paper looks at offices held by the nuns at Barking Abbey in Essex, from the late Medieval period up to the Abbey’s dissolution in the sixteenth century as a result of the shifting political and religious sands under King Henry VIII. Barking Abbey was a large, wealthy institution that needed capable administration, and …

Robert Yaxley, Tudor Physician, Phyllis Johnson Walton

Quidditas

On the 22nd day of the month of October, 1540, Robert Yaxley, doctor of Physic of the city of London, dwelling in the parish of St. Michael in Cornhill, made his last will and testament. (Although a recent statute allowed for transfer of real property by will, any land owned by Dr. Yaxley would almost certainly have been held in trust and not subject to the terms of his will.) After bequeathing his soul to Almighty God, his blessed mother, Saint Mary, and all the company of heaven, and his body to be buried in the churchyard of St. Michael’s, …

‘Up These Hills To The Mountain Top’: Memories Of 'The Golden Sun' In Michael Echeruo's War Poems (Distanced), Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

One of the leading voices among the first generation of post-independence African modernist poets of the twentieth-century, Michael J. C. Echeruo's second collection of poetry, Distanced (1975), is, unlike his better-known first collection, Mortality (1968), characterized by direct phrasing and open accessibility—in terms of imagery and other signifiers—to the general reader. Composed within the first four years (1970-74) after the end of the Biafran war of independence of 1967-1970, the nineteen lyrics that make up this collection look back with extraordinary candor and passion into the future of the Biafran experience, especially with regard to the problems of reintegration into …

'Clearing The Forest': Critical Commentary On Gabriel Okara’S Postwar Ode, ‘The Dreamer’, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

The present essay is essentially a preliminary exploration of a previously unexplored territory of postcolonial, modernist African poetics—Gabriel Okara’s venture into the appropriation of the signs of the classical and latter-day European ode as a vehicle for both a satirical interrogation of the performance of the postcolonial civilian and military elite the dysfunctional Nigerian federation after its war against Biafra and for an understanding of the possibility of heroic regeneration in the face of the depth of , bordering on existentialist , into which the nation has been reduced by the post-civil war triumph of disorder in the hands of …

Christopher Okigbo’S Intentions: A Critical Edition Of A Previously Unpublished Interview By Ivan Van Sertima, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

This is a critical edition with emendations of lacunae from indelible inkblots and termite activity of an interview with Christopher Okigbo conducted in the mid-1960s by Ivan van Sertima, the distinguished Caribbean-American anthropologist, linguist, literary critic, Afrocentric historiographer, and founding-editor of The Journal of African Civilizations (New Brunswick, NJ), who passed away on May 29, 2009, at the age of 74. It was discovered in January 2006 among Okigbo’s unpublished papers, which I catalogued at the invitation of the Christopher Okigbo Foundation, in Brussels, Belgium, now part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

RéCits De Filiation : ÉTude De Trois Perspectives Dans La LittéRature QuéBéCoise Contemporaine, Danielle Jouet-Pastre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

La littérature québécoise se transforme de manière significative entre les années 1960-80 avec la présence d'écrivains de souche étrangère, ce qui élargit considérablement la thématique, le style et les horizons culturels d'une littérature autrefois monoculturelle.

‘The Mystic Drum’: Critical Commentary On Gabriel Okara’S Love Lyrics, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Structurally, Okara’s love lyric, “The Mystic Drum,” evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of initiation from innocence through intimacy to experience. By comparison to the way of Zen as manifested in the experience of Zen Master, Ch’ing Yuän Wei-hsin, this pattern resolves itself into an emotional and epistemological journey from conventional knowledge (born of innocence) through more intimate knowledge (born of closer apperception of reality) to substantial knowledge (born of experience). The substantial knowledge born of experience empowers the lover to understand that beneath the surface attractiveness of what we know very well (such as the women we love) may lie …

'The White Man Laughs': Commentary On The Satiric Dramatic Monologues Of Gabriel Okara, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Examined in the present article are two early satiric lyrics of Gabriel Okara—“Once Upon a Time” and “He Laughed and Laughed and Laughed”—which are the products of the postcolonial cultural war environment in which the issues of modernity, alterity (otherness or difference) and afro-authenticity implicated in Achebe’s ripostes on the bigotry of the colonialist critic were central. The tone of this discourse amongst leading African intelligentsia was set in the 1930’s and 1940’s by four fellow south-eastern Nigerian writers in their semi-autobiographical blueprints for African cultural emancipation—Renascent Africa ((1937)) by Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996); British and Axis Aims in Africa (1942) …

‘The Monstrous Anger Of The Guns’: Critical Commentary On The War Poems Of Gabriel Okara, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Throughout the Biafran War of Independence from Nigeria (1967-1970), Gabriel Okara remained a committed Biafran. But he was neither an iconoclastic secessionist (determined to wantonly wreck any well-founded order, including the subaltern state of Nigeria) nor a romantic revolutionary (dreaming of a postcolonial African utopia rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the failed postcolonial state of Nigeria), he was a Biafran at a higher level of philosophical and humanist reasoning as eloquently argued throughout his war lyrics discussed in the present paper, whose themes include: commitment, nationalism and pacifism as they pertain to his Biafran experience; modern warfare …

Escape From Responsibility: Ideology And Storytelling In Arendt’S The Origins Of Totalitarianism And Ishiguro’S The Remains Of The Day, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Immortality Through Tale In "The Crossing", Evanne Lindley

Global Tides

This article explores the dichotomy of life and death in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing through Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive lens. The article traces the novel’s ostensible indications that death is absolute, but highlights passages from the work which suggest shared narratives can challenge and even conquer death’s sting. Ultimately, the article interprets how McCarthy’s text breaks down the dichotomy between life and death and instead suggests that death can be transcended through storytelling.

Inverting The Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification, And Mobility In Richard Wright’S ‘Haiku: This Other World’, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

Richard Wright’s haiku — both the 4,000 he wrote at the end of his life and the 817 he selected for inclusion in Haiku: This Other World (1998) — remain something of an enigma in his larger oeuvre; critics variously position them as a continuation of his earlier thematic concerns in a different literary form, an aesthetic departure from the racialized limitations imposed upon his earlier work, or one of several positions in between. Such arguments debate the formal construction as well as the strategic reinvention of Wright’s haiku. The present essay engages both sides of this conversation, arguing that …

Hear (No) Evil, See (No) Evil, Speak (No) Evil: Artistic Representations Of Argentina's "Dirty War", Juliana Theresa Reineman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Argentina’s “Dirty War; in it, I argue that our view of the Other is the key to not repeating the past. Literature has long been accepted as a resource for understanding culture; this dissertation moves beyond literature, and includes photography, art, and film to demonstrate how artists have represented and responded to this period of political oppression. Adopting a psychoanalytic approach for my research, I begin with a literary analysis of multiple texts which exhibit features of what Anne Whitehead calls “trauma fiction,” texts in which the narrative voice displays the repetition …

A Comparative Study Of The Concept Of Atonement In The Writings Of John R. W. Stott And Ellen G. White, Lawrence O. Oladini

Dissertations

The study examines two evangelical penal substitutionary theologies of atonement presented by John Stott and Ellen White. It adopts a descriptive and analytic approach to examine the respective atonement theologies of both authors. Chapter 1 introduces the purpose of the dissertation and the methodology adopted. Chapter 2 examines the different theories of atonement in Christian theology. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the respective atonement theologies of Stott and White. Chapter 5 is a comparative analysis of the concept of atonement in both authors, while chapter 6 summarizes the conclusions of the study. -- Purpose. The purpose of the research is …

文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing The Study Of Literature: A New Pragmatism And The Systemic Approach To Literature And Culture), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven (斯蒂文·托托西). 文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing the Study of Literature: A New Pragmatism and the Systemic Approach to Literature and Culture). Trans. Ma Jui-ch'i (马瑞琪翻). Peking University Academic Lectures Series 7. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1997. ISBN 7-301-03482-2 217 pages. The book contains texts of invited public lectures at Peking University in 1994, 1995, and 1996 on radical constructivism, culture and literary theory and methodology, women's writing, film and literature, and Canadian and Hungarian modern and contemporary prose. The Peking University Press 1997 print version of the book does not include a Works Cited: in the 2011 pdf version …

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.