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Articles 1 - 30 of 31
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw
The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw
English
This essay details the history of the land and structures that occupy the property currently located at the corner of Hawthorne and Woodland Streets in Worcester, Mass. Covering over 300 years, it begins with the legacies of the Nipmuc and the early English colonialist settlers before moving into a discussion of Worcester's 19th Century industrialists and 20th Century acquisition by the University. The essay builds on extensive archival research using materials from both physical and digital collections such as atlases, censuses, biographies, directories, criticism, and more. To further develop the story of the English Department and its home, the essay …
Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott
Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott
English
This project aims to examine gender as perpetuated in the “Wonderland” trope, paying specific attention to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. At the surface level, these works seem like they don’t have much in common—they come from different cultures, different time periods, and different social contexts. However, to say that these stories are too dissimilar to compare is simply incorrect as both deal with the transitional periods of young girls who are approaching adolescence. Because both stories contain an alternate world in which the main little girl character wanders into and journeys through, …
“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley
“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley
English
James Baldwin’s remarkable second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956) influenced all subsequent gay writing—not only in its themes, but also in its tone. Paying frequent homage to that book, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and other fiction of the Eighties taught gay men how to be gay, and the melancholic tone these novels created persisted for decades to come, exemplified most recently in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). An unexpressed loss imbues the work of David Leavitt, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham, and Alan Hollinghurst, but the argument here is that more recent protagonists are, if anything, …
The Black Frontier, Aparajita Nanda
The Black Frontier, Aparajita Nanda
English
As a nationalistic concept, frontier refers to America's westward expansion, which was propelled in the nineteenth century by Manifest Destiny. Culturally, frontier promises even more: the creation of communities, the development of markets and states, the merging of peoples and cultures, and the promise of survival and persistence based on values of equality and democracy. Thousands of people left their homes in the East to pursue these ideals, including large communities of African Americans. However, African Americans, like many other cultural groups who moved westward, encountered struggles when they reached the new frontier. In some cases, they faced the same …
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley
English
As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, “This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture,” –an “invisible people” (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the …
Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham
Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham
English
What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, …
Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley
Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley
English
In his Introduction to this collection, Gustavo Subero makes reference to the AIDS Quilt, a reference made especially significant since the year 2012 marked its 25th anniversary. The whole quilt had been last displayed in 1996; in the summer of 2012, 8.000 panels were rotated each day in the National Mall in Washington, DC. The quilt, composed of thousands of 3’ x 6’ panels (intentionally the size of a human grave), currently consists of over 48.000 panels honoring more than 94.000 individuals who have died of AIDS. In the early days of the quilt, in the 1980s and 1990s, the …
Power, Politics, And Domestic Desire In Octavia Butler’S Lilith’S Brood, Aparajita Nanda
Power, Politics, And Domestic Desire In Octavia Butler’S Lilith’S Brood, Aparajita Nanda
English
Octavia Butler’s works, from her short stories and novellas to her science fiction novels, focus on themes of power, control, bondage, and a desired freedom from servitude. Power structures inevitably center on the master/slave or the captor/captive trope. Her handling of this issue takes on complex manifestations in her works, where enslavement and genetic evolution often form the core of the narrative. Within this framework, hostile and repressive regimes enforce a controlled society. Butler brings race, gender, and sexuality to the foreground of speculative fiction as she deals with complex social and political issues in all their ambiguity. Her handling …
"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley
"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley
English
Commentators inevitably remark upon Yvonne Vera's prose and upon its startling application to the violent episodes she recounts. Some find it inappropriate, self-conscious, more suited to poetry than to prose. Others (and sometimes the same folks) describe it as by far her strongest suit, wherein descriptive powers overtake narration and plot becomes inevitably amorphous - but lovely. In this essay I wish to analyze why this conflicted response would not have concerned the author and why, in fact, she would have sought to discomfort the reader while bringing pleasure. Many writers before Vera have struggled over the applicability of art …
Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod
Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod
English
Readers familiar with Susanna Rowson as the author of Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) do not think of her as an abolitionist. But in 1805 Rowson articulated an anti-slavery position in Universal Geography, a textbook addressed to schoolgirls such as those she herself taught at the Young Ladies Academy in Boston. Condemning those who viewed sugar and slavery as a winning equation that would make them rich, Rowson denounced the “purchase and sale of human beings,” and insisted that anyone “enlightened by reason and religion” would oppose the “horrid trade,” and see it as she did, as “a disgrace to humanity.”1 …
Trade, Time, And The Calculus Of Risk In Early Pacific Travel Writing, Michelle Burnham
Trade, Time, And The Calculus Of Risk In Early Pacific Travel Writing, Michelle Burnham
English
In the 2005 Common-place issue on early America and the Pacific, historians Edward Gray and Alan Taylor observe that the Atlantic studies paradigm, which moves "beyond nations and states as the defining subjects of historical understanding, turning instead to large scale processes" is also particularly "useful for understanding Pacific history" since "dis- ease, migration, trade, and war effected [sic] the Pacific in much the way they effected [sic] the Atlantic." A similar transfer of the Atlantic world model to the Pacific informs David Igler s insistence that, like the Atlantic, the Pacific world was "international before it became national."1 Igler …
Re-Writing The Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, The Posthuman Other In Octavia Butler’S Adulthood Rites, Aparajita Nanda
Re-Writing The Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, The Posthuman Other In Octavia Butler’S Adulthood Rites, Aparajita Nanda
English
Cultural critics have sought to define the term posthuman1 as primarily a condition that does away with hierarchical forms of power and control. It recognizes a transformation of the human species into a subject position that moves from an oppositional politics of segregating the human “self” from the “other” to one of acknowledging the “other” as part of the human “self.” 2 With the advent of the posthuman condition comes the need to re-define human rights in a posthuman context. Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Adulthood Rites3 introduces us to Oankali, gene-trading aliens who travel through space. They …
Dickinson And Smith: Years Apart But Not So Different, Nicole Day
Dickinson And Smith: Years Apart But Not So Different, Nicole Day
English
Even though there were sixteen years separating them, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson had much in common. They both use death as a theme to explore and mock life. Their small poems have a lot to say about life and death.
Phillis Wheatley’S Abolitionist Text: The 1834 Edition, Eileen Razzari Elrod
Phillis Wheatley’S Abolitionist Text: The 1834 Edition, Eileen Razzari Elrod
English
The problem presented to readers by the late eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley is nearly as well known as her poetry. Alongside many readers’ expressions of admiration, others have registered suspicion and disapproval, first in the eighteenth and then again in the mid- and late twentieth centuries. And nearly all of Wheatley’s critics acknowledge the centrality of the poet’s life in responses to her poetry. Whether the questions were framed in terms of literary authorship in the context of racist assumptions (as they were in the eighteenth century) or racial (as well as gendered) authenticity in the context of assumptions about …
Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley
Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley
English
l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …
Teaching Lolita In A Course On Ethics And Literature, Marilyn Edelstein
Teaching Lolita In A Course On Ethics And Literature, Marilyn Edelstein
English
The late 1980s saw a resurgence of interest in ethics and literature, with the publication of new books on the subject by major scholars like J. Hillis Miller and Wayne Booth. In recent years, many critics and theorists (including some Nabokov scholars) have (re)turned to ethical questions about literature: Does literature imitate life, and will readers, in turn, imitate the actions (whether virtuous or ignoble) of characters in literary texts? How and why can literary works be ethically beneficial or harmful for their readers? Are authors responsible for any ethical effects-positive or negative-their works may produce in readers? What are …
Land, Labor, And Colonial Economics In Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham
Land, Labor, And Colonial Economics In Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham
English
As long as critics have written about it, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan has been positioned as a counterhistory to William Brad ford's canonical Of Plymouth Plantation. One vein of critical reception has dismissed Morton's text as a flawed literary anomaly, effectively re peating Bradford's own befuddled and anxious response to Morton's aes thetics.1 A smaller but impassioned vein of literary criticism has, in turn, elevated Morton over Bradford on the basis of his egalitarianism, proto environmentalism, or multiculturalism avant la lettre?essentially cele brating Morton as a more laudable expression of individualism and free dom than that represented by the …
Multiculturalisms Past, Present, And Future, Marilyn Edelstein
Multiculturalisms Past, Present, And Future, Marilyn Edelstein
English
Once upon a time, most classes, in both schools and universities, focused on historical events shaped by white men, scientific discoveries made by white men, philosophies constructed by white men, and literary and artistic works created by white men. This time was not so long ago-and during some of our lifetimes. Since at least the late 1960s, this normative maleness and whiteness-which always claimed to be universal-has been challenged by the development of ethnic studies, women's and gender studies, and multiculturalism. Especially in literary studies-and nowhere more than in the field of American literature-the canon has exploded, as more works …
Epistolarity, Anticipation, And Revolution In Clara Howard, Michelle Burnham
Epistolarity, Anticipation, And Revolution In Clara Howard, Michelle Burnham
English
In the critical hierarchy of Charles Brockden Brown's six published novels, Clara Howard has traditionally ranked dead last. While Brown's four socalled major novels have long been redeemed from aesthetic disdain and continue to receive increasing attention and acclaim, his last two novels are routinely bracketed off from this earlier work and described in derisive and dismissive terms, when they have not been ignored completely. Critics, moreover, seem to agree that of these two late epistolary romances, both published in 1801, Clara Howard is worse even than Jane Talbot.1 From Mary Shelley's 1814 remark that Clara Howard is "very …
The Bombay Boys Of Mira Nair, Firdaus Kanga And Ardashir Vakil, John C. Hawley
The Bombay Boys Of Mira Nair, Firdaus Kanga And Ardashir Vakil, John C. Hawley
English
The valorization of traditional sources that has come to be termed nativism has a broad politics that can distort the historical record by romanticizing the past. When Leopold Senghor or Amilcar Cabral speak of a "national culture"1 as the source for post-independence development and Frantz Fanon warns against the exoticization of "native"2 culture, the contours of the argument seem to be obvious: critics in one camp seek first to counter colonial cultural dominance; critics in the other camp wish to temper such rejection with a "domestication" of European culture. Westerners, even well-meaning ones, can get caught in related entanglements when …
Moses And The Egyptian: Religious Authority In Olaudah Equiano's Iteresting Narrative, Eileen Razzari Elrod
Moses And The Egyptian: Religious Authority In Olaudah Equiano's Iteresting Narrative, Eileen Razzari Elrod
English
From the first image that greeted readers of his book, Olaudah Equiano presented the self of his 1789 autobiographical narrative as a pious Christian, one whose religious conversion meant a kind of freedom as significant as his manumission from slavery. In the striking frontispiece portrait Equiano sits with biblical text in hand, insisting-in his visual as in his textual presentations of himself-that the Christianity he embraces is the defining feature of his life-story. He responds, as Susan Marren has suggested, to two paradoxical imperatives: one, to write himself into creation as a speaking subject and, two, to write an antislavery …
My Mother's Legacy: Trying To Make A Difference Through Teaching And Research, Marilyn Edelstein
My Mother's Legacy: Trying To Make A Difference Through Teaching And Research, Marilyn Edelstein
English
Asked to write about how I became interested in social justice research, I realized that the question had two parts for me: how I got interested in social justice and how I got interested in research. To answer these questions, I found myself thinking back to my early adolescence, and to my mother. I remember a day when I was about 12 and saw a TV news report on poverty and hunger in some 49 underdeveloped" part of the world. When it was over, I flung myself across my mother's bed, crying. My mother came into the room and asked …
Freya Stark, John C. Hawley
Freya Stark, John C. Hawley
English
Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity. "Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself," she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7); "I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates." Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. She had no duplicate. The writings that resulted from her constant travels …
Anne Hutchinson And The Economics Of Antinomian Selfhood In Colonial New England, Michelle Burnham
Anne Hutchinson And The Economics Of Antinomian Selfhood In Colonial New England, Michelle Burnham
English
If American literary histories so often begin with the New England Puritans, it is because histories with such a starting point are able to tell an appealing national story of coherent community and religious freedom. So, at any rate, suggests T. H. Breen when he notes that beginning the national narrative instead with John Smith and the Virginia colony would require telling a far less pleasing tale of American greed, domination, and exploitation. Philip Gura has likewise wondered how Sacvan Bercovitch's model of an "American self," formulated from exclusively Puritan New England materials, might be complicated by John Smith's mercantilism. …
Ethics And Contemporary American Literature: Revisiting The Controversy Over John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, Marilyn Edelstein
Ethics And Contemporary American Literature: Revisiting The Controversy Over John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, Marilyn Edelstein
English
In 1978, the novelist John Gardner published a rather slender treatise called On Moral Fiction in which he claimed that true art must be moral, that little art being produced then was moral and, therefore, that most of his contemporaries were either bad artists or not artists at all.1 It is difficult to recall a book about literature and/or ethics-at least one written by a novelist or poet rather than, say, by William Bennett-that has been received with so much hostility, especially among other writers and artists. Was the hostile response deserved, or is there, beneath the polemics and diatribes, …
The Battle Rages On: The Psychomachia And The Faerie Queene, Book I, Aparajita Nanda
The Battle Rages On: The Psychomachia And The Faerie Queene, Book I, Aparajita Nanda
English
The conception of Christian life as a pilgrimage towards God, a war against the forces of evil, has been reiterated right through the literature of late antiquity and the Middle Ages well into the Renaissance. This 'war' between Virtues and Vices, who fight for dominion over the Christian soul, possibly found its first poetic representation in Prudentius' Psychomachia. The action of this personification-allegory is fairly simple. The Christian Virtues led by Faith, despite certain initial reversals, ultimately triumph over the Vices in a series of combats and move on to build a holy city (in man's soul) in which will …
Loopholes Of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative And The Critique Of Agency In Foucault, Michelle Burnham
Loopholes Of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative And The Critique Of Agency In Foucault, Michelle Burnham
English
Located in the exact center of Harriet Jacobs' i86r slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Shve Girl, is a chapter entitled "The Loophole of Retreat. " The chapter's title refers to the tiny crawlspace above her grandmother's shed, where Jacobs hides for seven years in an effort to escape her master's persecution and the "peculiar institution" of slavery which authorizes that persecution. This chapter's central location, whether the result of accident or design, would seem to suggest its structural significance within Jacobs' narrative. Yet its central location is by no means obvious, for "The Loophole of Retreat" goes …
The Journey Between: Liminality And Dialogism In Mary White Rowlandson’S Captivity Narrative, Michelle Burnham
The Journey Between: Liminality And Dialogism In Mary White Rowlandson’S Captivity Narrative, Michelle Burnham
English
In the introductory segment of her captivity narrative, before the story becomes structured into a series of "removes," Mary Rowlandson succinctly states her purpose: "that I may the better declare what happened to me during that grievous Captivity" (121). Throughout the succeeding twenty removes, this middle-aged Puritan woman-the wife of a minister and the daughter of the wealthiest original landowner in Lancaster, Massachusetts- records her experience during the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive among the New England Indians. Her narrative begins with the extraordinarily violent Indian attack on her home, a scene she describes with …
The Muscular Christian As Schoolmarm, John C. Hawley
The Muscular Christian As Schoolmarm, John C. Hawley
English
In 1859 the Saturday Review was one of the first journals to associate Charles Kingsley with a "younger generation of writers of fiction" who fostered the sentiment that "power of character in all its shapes goes with goodness." "Who does not know," the reviewer asked, "all about the 'short, crisp, black hair,' the 'pale but healthy complexion,' the 'iron muscles,' 'knotted sinews,' 'vast chests,' 'long and sinewy arms,' 'gigantic frames,' and other stock phrases of the same kind which always announce, in contemporary fiction, the advent of a model Christian hero?"1 After Kingsley's death in 187 5, however, Henry James …
"Dark Lady And Fair Man": The Love Triangle In Shakespeare's Sonnets And Ulysses, Michelle Burnham
"Dark Lady And Fair Man": The Love Triangle In Shakespeare's Sonnets And Ulysses, Michelle Burnham
English
The article discusses the novel "Ulysses" by the Irish author James Joyce, and argues that he used sonnets by the dramatist and poet William Shakespeare suggesting love triangles between the poet, a dark lady, and a young man as a model for the love triangle between the characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Blazes Boylan. Joyce's interest in adultery as a literary theme is also touched on.