English Language and Literature | Open Access Articles

Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem, And The Lives Of Irish Emigrant Women By Elaine Farrell And Leanne Mccormick, Penguin, 2023, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

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Coda: Storytelling As A Cultural Context In Vona Groarke’S Hereafter, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

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Storytelling As A Cultural Context For London-Irish Writing In Donall Macamhlaigh’S Schnitzer O’Shea, Jimmy Murphy’S Kings Of The Kilburn High Road And Enda Walsh’S The Walworth Farce, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

The oral tradition of storytelling is culturally significant to Irish literature and important for immigrant communities as a way to connect with their home culture and share stories without the necessity of literacy. This essay considers the motif of storytelling and the importance of voicing the community in much London-Irish literature. In Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, a play within a play, the main character obsesses over retelling the story of their emigration from Ireland but corrupts its purity as he pushes his narrative of innocence too far, and the cycle of storytelling begins again. Similarly, in Murphy’s Kings of the …

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A Gaelic South African Revival?: The Irish Republican Association Of South Africa, The Republic, And Irish South African Identity, Tom Mcgrath

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

In September 1920, at a meeting in Johannesburg, the Irish National Association of South Africa rebranded itself as the Irish Republican Association of South Africa. The IRASA was unique within the history of the Irish in South Africa. While it existed only until 1923, it was the largest Irish group in South African history, made evident by the establishment of its own journal, The Republic. The association was fundamentally devoted to nurturing an “Irish Afrikander” identity and culture within South Africa, primarily through the promotion of Irish works in its journal, from excerpts of Thomas Davis’ writings to a full …

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Hereafter: The Telling Life Of Ellen O’Hara: An Interview With Vona Groarke, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

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'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how digital methods and tools for studying text engage with queer literature. I critique digital methods and tools by posing computation, where textual data is cleaned and structured for electronic processing, against the complexity of queer subjecthood and affects expressed in textual style, form, and voice. While tools like quantitative text analysis, for example, transform, and necessarily reduce, qualitative elements of gender and sexuality into numerical data such as word frequencies or concordances, I argue that this reduction opens up possibilities for interpreting the formal qualities of queer literature. Just as digital formats transform and manipulate text …

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When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis Of Toni Morrison's Sula, Sami Saigh

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

When women dare to self-actualize they frequently face barriers that tear their spirits down, leading to guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy. For the lineage of women in Toni Morrison’s Sula, these consequences are fatal for everyone. As these factors thwart fundamental social development, communal collapse becomes easier, leaving entire cultures vulnerable to erasure. Whether self-determination is expressed through promiscuity or properness, paradoxical moralism leaves no room for either. This essay explores how Morrison offers a retrospective look from the graveyard of a town while illustrating the impact of the loss of friends, lovers, and communities.

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Feminist Phenomenology And First-Person Narrative: Understanding Gender And Social Conflict In Anna Burns’ Milkman, Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur Professor

Comparative Woman

In her magnum opus Milkman (2018), Anna Burns employs a subversive and artfully crafted first-person narrative, deftly exposing the arduous and tumultuous struggles encountered by individuals who dare to defy the confines of traditional gender roles. Through a relentless and unflinching narrative, the novel fearlessly confronts the harrowing manifestations of psychological torment, the insidious spectre of relentless stalking, and the manipulative machinations of gaslighting, all the while fervently interrogating the notion of a fixed and immutable gender identity. In a relentless odyssey toward self-realization, the protagonist's journey unfurls against a backdrop of traumatic events and the unyielding pressures imposed by …

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Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

Madness in literature has a long and colourful history. While its representation varies significantly in different literary periods, madness is nonetheless a consistent theme responding to inherent conflicts of civilisation. Thus, in the eighteenth-century novel, madness is subdued and forced to express itself in the language of rationality, while in the nineteenth century the theme becomes increasingly subversive. In the form of the madwoman trope (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), madness is simultaneously a reaction to restrictive patriarchal norms, and a frame in which the gender conflicts of the time can be safely and effectively played out. In the twentieth century, …

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"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how recent novels are able to expand representations of transgender experiences and promote identification with these characters and their experiences, even if the reader is not trans themself. It begins by delving into a brief history of transgender narrative and the problems associated with these narratives having been primarily in the form of memoir. It then examines how Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, despite being one of the first instances of a fictional narrative focused on a transgender man, reflects similarly problematic narrative characteristics to those found in memoir. Proposing a concept of trans-relational reading, which promotes identifications …

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Gender Wobbles But It Don’T Fall Down: Feste And The Instability Of Gender In Twelfth Night, Evangeline Thurston Wilder

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night appears to some readers as a conservative story of gender-bending, in which all is made “right” in the end. The central character, Viola, disguises herself as Cesario in order to survive. In the final scenes of the play, this character reveals herself to have been a woman all along, and immediately enters a cis-heterosexual marriage with the Duke Orsino. To other readers, the play appears to be an early depiction of what we might now call transmasculinity. In this view, the central character is not just dressing up as a man to survive; he really is Cesario. …

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The Mystification Of Gender Affirmation: Galathea, Gender, And Fantasy, Jubilee W. Finnegan

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

John Lyly's Galatea centers the role that gender expression plays in both communal interactions and interpersonal relationships. I argue that the way in which Galatea and Phillida present themselves within the play parallels the modern interpretation of transgender theory as outlined by Judith Butler. The actions that the two take are in service of manufacturing the kind of gender expression that breaks from conventional norms. While still rooted within fundamentalist dynamics, Lyly breaks free of bioessentialist understandings of gender in favor of a more liberating approach.

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The Monster Mash: A Monster Studies Approach To Literature In The University Classroom, Megan L. Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Monster Mash is a course proposal for an upper-division undergraduate literature course focused on exploring monsters in literature and building connections between classic and more contemporary texts using high-impact practices (HIPs) with student success in mind. I build on previous work in the field of Monster Studies and introduce my own original monster pattern that prompts students to interpret monsters as they trek through Origin, Separation, Power, Threat, and Diminishment. This pattern highlights commonalities when it comes to the representation of monsters and their stories, allowing students to identify them across texts. I also divide monsters into three categories …

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Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

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Course Design As Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, And Demographic Approaches To Teaching Asian American Literatures, Thomas X. Sarmiento

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay offers a theoretical and reflective exploration of critically informed acts of creativity expressed in my course design for and teaching of Asian American literatures at a predominantly white, public land-grant, Midwestern university. I argue that teaching is both a creative and critical activity as it generates new ways of knowing and being through an assessment and curation of extant literary texts and scholarly discourses. Given my geographic, scholarly, and personal orientations, my course features intersectional, regional, and ethnically diverse perspectives that aim to queer what “Asian America/n” signifies. I hope my situated pedagogical insights inspire other scholar-teachers to …

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Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

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Trauma And Stigma In Aids Literature: Tony Kushner’S Angels In America (1995) And Colm Tóibín’S The Blackwater Lightship (1999), J. Javier Torres-Fernández

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

This paper explores the representation of trauma and stigma tied to HIV/AIDS in The Blackwater Lightship (1999) by Colm Tóibín and Angels in America (1995) by Tony Kushner. Both works arguably respond to the socio-political and biomedical crisis that affected queer identities and international politics. These experiences of health and illness highlight the silenced and marginalized voices of those infected with HIV during the 80s and 90s. HIV/AIDS-related stigma and shame marked the LGBTQ+ community under the illness as punishment metaphor for their sexuality. The role of politics and religion remains fundamental in the historical silence around this illness and …

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Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …

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Care And Pregnancy Loss, Chelsea Phillips

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, new legislation across the U.S. has created ambiguity around the access to and legality of interventions for pregnancy loss in certain states. This essay situates our current legal landscape in opposition to that of the eighteenth-century, where care and preservation of the pregnant person were a guiding priority.

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The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In most nations that still execute prisoners—including the U.S.—it is illegal to execute a pregnant person. In English common law, women have been permitted to “plead the belly” in one form or another since the 14^th century, and this fact is sometimes misconstrued by anti-choice and forced-birth advocates as evidence of a long legal tradition of protection for the lives of fetuses. In fact, it is merely evidence of a long history of legal inconsistencies in the ways laws were applied and sentences carried out against women, for whom there were fewer options for clemency than for men. This …

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Introduction: Conversations On Abortion Rights And Bodily Autonomy In The Eighteenth Century And Today, Vicki Barnett Woods, Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This piece serves as an introduction to the discussions of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, revised from roundtable presentations held at ASECS 2023. This collection of essays contributes to the resounding responses of frustration and anger toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The collection was written and presented by eighteenth-century scholars who have a comprehensive knowledge of the eighteenth-century legal, social, and medical histories that center around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

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Review Of Botanical Entanglements, By Anna K. Sagal, Millie Schurch

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Botanical Entanglements, by Anna K. Sagal

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Review Of Reckoning With Slavery, By Jennifer L. Morgan, Brigitte Fielder

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Reckoning with Slavery, by Jennifer L. Morgan,

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Review Of An Archive Of Taste, By Lauren Klein, Parama Roy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of An Archive of Taste, by Lauren Klein

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Review Of Broadview Anthology Of American Literature, Edited By Derrick R. Spires Et Al, Kimberly Takahata

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Broadview Anthology of American Literature, edited by Derrick R. Spires et al

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Review Of Giving Birth In Eighteenth-Century England, By Sarah Fox, Chelsea Phillips

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A Review of Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England, by Sarah Fox

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Review Of Sister Novelists, By Devoney Looser, Katherine Binhammer Prof.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser.

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Teaching Anne Finch In "Partisanship In Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Britain", Jennifer Wilson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The works of Anne Finch, a writer doubly exiled as a female poet and Jacobite, stand out as eminently teachable examples of a compelling political outsider view that provokes us to consider how we can better attend to perspectives of principled opposition. Her poems in response to what has been called the "first modern revolution," together with her odes upon the deaths of King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, showcase the subversive power of indirect articulation, expressing values through emotions and affects in veiled forms such as allegory and alternate history.

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Fierce Allegories: Teaching Anne Finch’S Fables In A Course On Satire, Sharon Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay outlines an approach to integrating Anne Finch’s work into an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate course on eighteenth-century satire, focusing particularly on her satirical verse fables. This approach encourages students to question common critical assumptions about women and satire, most particularly that women avoided satire due to its association with aggression and politics—assumptions Finch’s fables are well-suited to challenge. The essay focuses particularly on Finch’s verse fables "Upon an Impropable Undertaking," “The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat,” and “The Owl Describing Her Young Ones.” In these poems, written in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, Finch employs violent …

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Using The Anne Finch Digital Archive As A Teaching Text, Martha F. Bowden

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In the course of my teaching career, I have used the Anne Finch Digital Archive in two different classes in the English major at my university: the gateway and capstone courses. In the gateway course, it functions as one of several sites in a module on the Digital Humanities, and as a required text in the capstone course. The essay investigates the Digital Archive’s strengths both as an example of a high-quality digital humanities project and as a rich site for the investigation and analysis of Finch’s poetry. Assignment guidelines for the gateway module and the reading list for …

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem, And The Lives Of Irish Emigrant Women By Elaine Farrell And Leanne Mccormick, Penguin, 2023, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

Coda: Storytelling As A Cultural Context In Vona Groarke’S Hereafter, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

Storytelling As A Cultural Context For London-Irish Writing In Donall Macamhlaigh’S Schnitzer O’Shea, Jimmy Murphy’S Kings Of The Kilburn High Road And Enda Walsh’S The Walworth Farce, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

A Gaelic South African Revival?: The Irish Republican Association Of South Africa, The Republic, And Irish South African Identity, Tom Mcgrath

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

Hereafter: The Telling Life Of Ellen O’Hara: An Interview With Vona Groarke, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis Of Toni Morrison's Sula, Sami Saigh

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

Feminist Phenomenology And First-Person Narrative: Understanding Gender And Social Conflict In Anna Burns’ Milkman, Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur Professor

Comparative Woman

Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Gender Wobbles But It Don’T Fall Down: Feste And The Instability Of Gender In Twelfth Night, Evangeline Thurston Wilder

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

The Mystification Of Gender Affirmation: Galathea, Gender, And Fantasy, Jubilee W. Finnegan

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

The Monster Mash: A Monster Studies Approach To Literature In The University Classroom, Megan L. Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Course Design As Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, And Demographic Approaches To Teaching Asian American Literatures, Thomas X. Sarmiento

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

Trauma And Stigma In Aids Literature: Tony Kushner’S Angels In America (1995) And Colm Tóibín’S The Blackwater Lightship (1999), J. Javier Torres-Fernández

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Care And Pregnancy Loss, Chelsea Phillips

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Introduction: Conversations On Abortion Rights And Bodily Autonomy In The Eighteenth Century And Today, Vicki Barnett Woods, Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of Botanical Entanglements, By Anna K. Sagal, Millie Schurch

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of Reckoning With Slavery, By Jennifer L. Morgan, Brigitte Fielder

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of An Archive Of Taste, By Lauren Klein, Parama Roy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of Broadview Anthology Of American Literature, Edited By Derrick R. Spires Et Al, Kimberly Takahata

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of Giving Birth In Eighteenth-Century England, By Sarah Fox, Chelsea Phillips

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review Of Sister Novelists, By Devoney Looser, Katherine Binhammer Prof.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Teaching Anne Finch In "Partisanship In Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Britain", Jennifer Wilson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Fierce Allegories: Teaching Anne Finch’S Fables In A Course On Satire, Sharon Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Using The Anne Finch Digital Archive As A Teaching Text, Martha F. Bowden

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830