English Language and Literature Commons^™

End Of Life Ethical Dilemma, Gregory Heiser

Best Integrated Writing

Gregory Heiser explores the options and dilemmas involved in deciding on care for a 93-year-old female patient with Alzheimer’s disease in this essay written for NUR 4800: Transition to the Role of the Professional Nurse, taught by Dr. Ann M. Stalter at Wright State University.

Classicism And Humanist Ideology In Donatello’S Gattamelata And David, Shayla Wheat

Best Integrated Writing

Shayla Wheat traces Classical and Humanist influences on Donatello and his works Gattamelata and David in this essay written for ART 3130: Early Italian Renaissance, taught by Dr. Caroline Hillard at Wright State University.

Chandara’S Power, Amy Kasten

Best Integrated Writing

Amy Kasten analyzes the struggles of women against oppression in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Punishment” in this essay written for ENG 2040: Great Books: Literature, taught by Ms. Carolyn Stoermer at Wright State University.

Reflection On Pema Chödrön’S When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times, Carol Jones

Best Integrated Writing

Carol Jones reflects on suffering, self-knowledge, and enlightenment as presented in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times in this essay written for CST 2320: Non-Western Religions, taught by Dr. Sharon A. Showman at Wright State University’s Lake campus.

Reflection On Michael Coogan’S God And Sex, Sierra Garwood

Best Integrated Writing

Sierra Garwood reflects on themes of love, sex, and the bible in Michael Coogan’s God and Sex in this essay written for REL 2040: Great Books: Bible and Western Culture, taught by Dr. Sharon A. Showman at Wright State University’s Lake campus.

The Conflict Of Time: Tradition Vs. Modernity In Love In The Time Of Cholera, Rachel Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Rachel Smith analyzes themes of time, tradition, and modernity in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, in this essay written for the Integrated Writing course CST 2310: Non-Western Cultures, taught by Dr. Alpana Sharma at Wright State University.

Trends Of The Portrayal Of Yahweh In The Hebrew Bible, Kenneth Price

Best Integrated Writing

Kenneth Price explores trends of the portrayal of Yahweh in the Hebrew bible in this essay written for the Integrated Writing course ENG 2040: Great Books, Bible and Western Culture, taught by Dr. Heidi Wendt at Wright State University.

Contents And Acknowledgements

Best Integrated Writing

Table of Contents and acknowledgements for Best Integrated Writing: Journal of Excellence in Integrated Writing Courses at Wright State. Fall 2014. 1st Edition. Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

State Of The Discipline: Comparative Literature And Transdisciplinarity, Paul Jay

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

An inquiry into the practices and applications of comparative literature and transdisciplinarity.

Scandalous Deception In The Castle: An Examination Of The Gender Performance Through The Bedtrick Trope In Arthurian Literature, Abby Louise Daniel

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The bedtrick – mistaken identity in a sexual encounter – is a comic motif employed by medieval, renaissance and modern storytellers. While modern readers tend to recognize this motif as (at best) a disturbing sexual escapade and (at worst) rape, the scholarship on mistaken identity in medieval literature still generally glosses over the bedtrick as a moment of comedy. My thesis examines the literary trope of the bedtrick through the critical lens of Judith Butler’s performativity theory, and the motives behind this form of deception and the modern implications. Furthermore, the bedtrick trope is explored in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur …

Victorian Sexual Politics And The Unsettling Case Of George Eliot’S Response To Walt Whitman, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influenced each other’s careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing …

Romola And Politics, Andrew Sanders

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It could properly be argued that Romola is George Eliot's most overtly political novel. Unlike Felix Holt or Middlemarch it doesn't directly refer to near contemporary political events, or to those of George Eliot's childhood and youth. Unlike Adam Bede it does not deal with the ramifications of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which cast their long shadow over the Victorian years. Nevertheless, Romola demands that readers respond to a whole range of complex political issues: historical, sexual, feminist, religious and, of course, to a whole range of historical concerns which can be seen as fore-shadowings of the vital …

Supplementary Annotations To Daniel Deronda, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The annotations to the first and second Penguin Classics editions of Daniel Deronda, by Barbara Hardy and Terence Cave respectively, and those of the Oxford World's Classics edition, by Graham Handley, weave a web like that attributed by Marvell to Cromwell - 'a net of such a Scope'' that very little has escaped its threefold curtain. Even so, one or two leavings that they missed or deliberately passed over might be worth recording here.

Chapter 1, p. 42:2 Do you mean that old Adonis in the George the Fourth wig?

Terence Cave passes over this entirely, but Barbara Hardy …

A Response- 2014, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Against Marianne Burton's carefully argued case for the consummation of the Casaubon marriage are images and hints which I mentioned in The Appropriate Form: an Essay on the Novel' and Particularities: Readings in George Eliot,' especially: the Cadwallader and Chettam opinions: 'A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in, and 'no good red blood'; the onanistic echo of 'the seeds of joy are forever wasted', (Middlemarch, Ch. 42); Casaubon's lack of bliss; post-marital absence of expectations of issue; 'the way' in which 'years to come' ... might be filled with joyful devotedness' became less clear …

Laughter Vesus Sympathy In Romola And Felix Holt, Louise Lee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: 'What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?'! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot's Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature - the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte - and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot 'themes' might include science, religion, …

Review Of The Victorian Diary: Authorship And Emotional Labour, Anne-Marie Millim

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The diary genre has been repeatedly explored both as a confessional, retrospective form of writing and 'as an inherently female genre' (p. 17). Refreshingly, Millim challenges these approaches by stressing not only the genre's multiplicity, but also its ability to shape future, rather than past, experiences. This study is positioned alongside the more recent 'pragmatic, rather than ideological' (p. 23) approaches of Delafield's Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009) and Steinitz's Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century British Diary (2011). Millim's The Victorian Diary is less wide-ranging (unlike Delafield and Steinitz, she does not also …

In Memoriam Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Andrew Missak: Cleverley Brown died peacefully at home on 21 January 2014, days short of his sixty-fourth birthday, and only months after his retirement from the position of Development Director for Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press. He joined the Press as a Graduate Trainee in 1976, and over subsequent decades was influential in developing first the literary studies list, then Humanities and Social Science more broadly, and finality the whole of Academic and Professional Publishing. While he had an extraordinary range of interests, his scholarly heartland was Victorian fiction: his Cambridge doctorate was on 'The Metaphysical Novels of Edward …

Japanese Branch Report- 2013, Ayako Tani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 7 December 2013, the Seventeenth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Keio University.

The morning session started with an opening address by Maiko Otake (Obirin University). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented on by Toyotsugu Matsui (Daido University) and the third by Hideo Takano (Komazawa University).

The first speaker was Nanae Hama (Seinan Gakuin University), whose subject was 'The Hero Worship and the Imperial Consciousness: How George Eliot Described Heroes among Children'. In her presentation on The Mill on the Floss (1860), Hama argued that …

Romola's Religious Experience, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Romola can be seen as a landmark in George Eliot's career, when we bear in mind her striking confession to her second husband, John Cross: 'I began it a young woman -, I finished it an old woman' (Haight [1968] 362). Many of her readers, indeed, felt it represented a new departure, far from the world of Adam Bede, Mrs Poyser and Silas Mamer. It was a more ambitious novel, with more refined and educated characters, set in a foreign country, in a distant past. Her first works of fiction were also set in the past, but only one or …

Review Of After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, And The Mind, Angelique Richardson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This extremely interesting and well organized collection of 11 original essays and an 'Afterword' is not greatly concerned with George Eliot, although it would seem every major Victorian concern somehow ends by involving her. As a study that aims at what its title indicates, it includes George Eliot and G. H. Lewes as direct subjects, hut only in one essay, Angelique Richardson's 'George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and Morals'. Although, she concedes, both 'maintained human distinction in their writing' (p. 137), George Eliot felt and expressed through anthropomorphism, a real kinship with animals. With Lewes (whose …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24 November 2013- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Sheila Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

First of all, may I say what an enormous honour it is to be asked to speak on this very special occasion. When John asked me in January what I was doing on 24 November, I was obviously not quick enough to think of a reason to duck out of the responsibility! In fact, I wondered he had asked several others more agile with their excuses before he got round to me.

John asked me to speak about 'What George Eliot means to me'. In consequence, my speech will not be an academic one - those who went to the …

Politics And Pastoral In Silas Marner, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When eighteen-year-old sumameless Eppie stands by Silas Mamer and against Godfrey Cass she joins a line of subversive children in Victorian fiction. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre speaks out against her aunt; Dickens's Oliver Twist asks for more gruel; his Paul Dombey asks the capitalist father, 'What is money after all?' One child rebels against adult power; one against institutional power; one against the cash nexus. The children are all economic dependants but there is no emphasis on class. Oliver behaves like a little gentleman; Paul is a little gentleman; Jane tells Brocklehurst she would not like to be poor, and …

Review Of Oscar Browing's Life Of George Eliot, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to draw the attention of interested readers and George Eliot scholars to one of the earliest biographies of George Eliot, that written by Oscar Browning. It is a book which, apart from many interesting anecdotes of her life, might still be valuable to them for the exhaustive annotated bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum, appended to the end of the volume. The extent and range of the bibliographical details collected there are the result of very thorough, painstaking research which may provide further new insights and give clues to unexplored areas in the …

George Eliot And Psychosomatic Illness: A Footnote To The Biographies, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A reader of George Eliot's novels, with their luminous intelligence and authoritative command of a fictional world, might be surprised to learn that this author was actually frequently tormented by crises of confidence, exhaustion and bodily pain. Her illnesses were often exacerbated by her novel-writing; but certainly not always. '[M]y life’, as she wrote, 'has always been much broken by physical malaise'.' She later commented that, despite extensive medical tests, the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. The word 'malaise' suggests extreme somatic discomfort, not necessarily associated with disease, but also depression. Eliot herself was aware, as she acknowledged …

Obituary Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I first met Andrew Brown on the conference circuit in the early 1980s. As the recently appointed senior editor for literature at Cambridge University Press he was a regular presence at Victorian Studies conferences, wearing his Press hat, but unlike many other publishers, attending as a productive scholar in his own right. He got in touch with me in 1989 asking if he could come to Leicester to talk about a project he was contemplating, a new edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the nineteenth-century volume of which had been last updated under George Watson's editorship in 1969. …

Review Of George Eliot In Context, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This collection offers a wide range of individual and rigorous criticism, with essays by the most informed specialists: amongst others, Margaret Harris on 'Biographies’, John Rignall on 'Landscape' and 'Metropolitanism’, Melissa Raines on 'Language', Leonee Ormond on 'The Visual Arts', Ruth Livesey on 'Class' and 'Transport', Joanne Shattock on 'Editions ' and 'Publishing and Publishers’, Richard Menke on 'Industry and technology'. Texts in context include journalism as well as fiction and poetry.

I have a few reservations. Most of the essays are remarkably condensed but one or two have more breadth than depth. In 'Travel and Tourism' Judith 10hnston touches …

'In Isolation Human Power Is Limited, In Combination It Is Infinite': Tracing Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence Of Christianity Through Daniel Deronda, Milena Schwab-Graham

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Written between January 1873 and June 1876, Daniel Deronda was George Eliot's final and most ambitious novel. The Jewish-born, later excommunicated Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics Eliot translated in 1856, would perhaps seem the more obvious choice of philosophical context for our analysis of Deronda, owing to his religious affinity with the eponymous protagonist. However, Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, translated by Eliot in 1854, provides a more thorough basis for drawing out the ethical complexities of her final novel. Feuerbach's philosophy, the influence of which is integral to all her novels, hinges upon 'the moral [ ...] qualitative, …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2013, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We can be pleased with the Fellowship's year in 2013. For some time now we have tried to add extra events to the well-established series of meetings built up over the years. In 2013 we looked towards Coventry to provide a theme for the year, and were delighted with the results, much helped, it has to be said, by the enthusiasm and new ideas brought to the Fellowship by Vanessa Oakes, whose writing skills have much enhanced our programme. The other major event for the year was our emergence, blinking and floundering, into the world of websites and Facebook (Twitter …

Casaubon's Impotence: A Literary Libel?, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There are some literary hypotheses which so suit readers' impressions of a text that they become accepted almost as literary fact, as if they were stated in the text itself or had been confirmed by the author in an interview, letter or notebook. This seems to have become the case with Edward Casaubon's sexual impotence in Middlemarch. Gordon Haight complained that undergraduates 'despite a generation of sex-education' never failed to describe Casaubon as impotent simply by virtue of his age. Casaubon was around forty-eight. Haight was seventy-three when he wrote this essay, and indignantly listed the famous men who had …

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …