English Language and Literature Commons^™

A World Half Created: The Imaginative Power Of Sound In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Trinity Myers

Undergraduate Honors Theses

William Wordsworth has long been considered one of the greatest British Romantic poets, and critical interest in his use of sound has grown since the mid-twentieth century. This paper investigates Wordsworth's fascination with "poetic musicality"—a phrase developed by the researcher to describe a poem's sensitivity to sound—and its effect upon the active imagination of a poem’s listeners. Such aural receptivity is explored in several of Wordsworth's early works, namely: the 1805 Prelude and selections from Lyrical Ballads. Rather than limiting conceptions of musicality to song and instrumentation, this project investigates how the power of sound can be extended to …

Pastries And Plots: Food Rhetoric And Gender Struggles In Shakespeare’S Plays, Juliet Nierle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Food is a common motif across the Shakespearean cannon. From early plays to late plays, comedies to dramas, food appears in a variety of instances, functioning in numerous ways. Frequently representative of social class or serving as a cultural marker, food in Shakespeare can be innocent and passive, but it has the potential to contribute to scenes of violence. Foodstuffs in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus contribute to the brutal harms committed in the plays, specifically in scenes of violence against women. Characters use foodstuffs as pejorative metaphors, like the subjugation of Volumnia in the context …

Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the extent to which Vergil’s Aeneid influences the characters, themes, and epic style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Focusing primarily on the Carthage episode of the Aeneid in which Aeneas meets and falls in love with queen Dido, this thesis explores how the figures of Aeneas, Creusa, Dido, and Sychaeus parallel those of Milton’s Satan, Sin, Eve, and Adam, respectively. This thesis also shows how the appearance of epic themes such as fate in both texts affects characters’ personal motivations in similar ways, such as Dido’s suicide and Eve’s consumption of the infamous apple. Through an exploration of …

Framing The Female Narrative: Male Audiences And Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels, Sammy Murphy

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since being published, both Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have attracted scholarly and critical attention on account of their framed narratives. At the time of publication, some portion of this attention was negative; however, since the early 20th century, scholars have moved towards recognizing and analyzing potential purposes for the narrative structures of both texts. Within my thesis, I enter into this field of scholarship so as to analyze how the frame narrative functions as a tool for both simulation and subversion within the two texts. More specifically, I argue that Emily and …

'Carcern' And 'Wordcræft': Enclosure, Connection And Gender In Cynewulf's "Juliana" And "Elene", Katherine Grotewiel

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The scholarly narrative around monastic enclosure has centered on rigid gender divisions. But Cynewulf's Juliana and Elene reveal a more complex picture. Through images of enclosure, binding and the creation of words, Cynewulf unwinds these restrictive ties of gender in the epilogues of his poems and instead identifies with the figures in these poems not along lines of gender, but in their experiences of enclosure.

Feelings Of Fallenness: Affect And Gender In Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A famous poem by Coventry Patmore articulated Victorian expectations for women: to be “the angel in the house.” The woman was the arbiter of morality, spiritual guide and helpmeet, and was worshiped almost as a goddess of purity— and goddesses need no legal protections. Chastity and submission were not only expected, but demanded of Victorian women. After all, these qualities were scientifically inherent in women (to the Victorian mind); the biological imperative of reproduction and maternity rendered women’s bodies a sacred space and prevented their minds from developing as a man’s could.The twin forces of Victorian patriarchal science and religion …

'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In my honors thesis, I uncover what I consider to be a poetic trope governing emotional expression in three of the Old English 'elegies.' Narrators in these poems engage the emotional values of the Old English "Heroic Tradition"-namely the value of keeping silent in the face of adversity-through abstracted and idealized figures like the 'eorl' (warrior/man). The invocation in these poems of the eorl and eorl-like figures such as a hlaford (lord) or geong mon (young man) functions as a poetic trope that signals the speakers engagement with the heroic emotional community represented by that figure. I name this …

Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis employs the later philosophy of Michel Foucault to think through the unique set of socio-cultural problems that emerged alongside the early novel. I endeavor to explain the development of “biopower” and the concomitant (yet historically grounded) concept of a mass population in order to round off a nettlesome tendency among historicist rise-of-the-novel critics to focus on the creation of a bourgeois individual at this time. To that end, the texts of Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne bear out a unique narratorial response to biopower that begins with the ‘body’ of his work: i.e., Shandeism. Signaling the importance of the …

Flipping The Castle: Evolution Of Gothic Spaces In The Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

"Flipping the Castle" explores topics of domesticity in Gothic literature over the course of three centuries. The Gothic is a genre with roots in 18th century British literature, but more broadly, it can be described as horror that has a social function, and it is the birthplace of some of the most successful narratives in horror fiction. The aspects of the Gothic this research is concerned with is its themes of unchecked masculine aggression versus repressed femininity, its ability to adapt over time, and its preoccupation with setting, specifically the home, whether that be a medieval castle, a haunted house, …

With Inviolable Voice, We Melt Into Each Other With Phrases: The Construction And Deconstruction Of Heteroglossia In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land And Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Alexa Kelly

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay analyzes the ways in which T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf simultaneously construct and deconstruct linguistic environments that embody Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In The Waste Land and The Waves, Eliot and Woolf construct elements of Bakhtin's novel before dismantling those same elements through the formation of linguistic imbalance. Both authors generate heteroglossia by incorporating numerous speech types and speech genres into their texts through variations of idiolect, sociolect, and literary allusion. These speech types then dialogize each other within the texts. However, the works then diverge from heteroglossia through an imbalance of the centrifugal and centripetal …

"'Dying To Live': Remembering And Forgetting May Sinclair”, Suzanne Raitt

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this …

Marital Law In He Knew He Was Right, Suzanne Raitt

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Bringing together leading and newly emerging scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope offers a comprehensive overview of Trollope scholarship and suggests new directions in Trollope studies. The first volume designed especially for advanced graduate students and scholars, the collection features essays on virtually every topic relevant to Trollope research, including the law, gender, politics, evolution, race, anti-Semitism, biography, philosophy, illustration, aging, sport, emigration, and the global and regional worlds.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

No abstract provided.

The Remains Of Several Hearts, Suzanne Raitt

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

On 27 December 1910, Virginia Stephen ate some hearts at Saxon Sydney-Turner's house in Brighton. Her account of the visit is both intense and dismissive. For a few hours, she glimpsed the contours and colours of lives that were profoundly different from her own. And then she went home. But fourteen years later, she remembered Mrs Turner and her own younger self when she sat down to describe what it means to be a writer. In this essay I ask: when in 1924 Virginia Woolf wrote the famous words that are the seed of this volume, what memories was she …

The Poetry Of Sidney Alexander, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"I find myself the keeper of a modest flame that burns (in Shelley’s image) barely brighter than a taper through the night of time. That flame marks the remnants of a nearly forgotten Victorian poet, Sidney A. Alexander (1866-1948), who won the 1887 Newdigate prize as a student at Oxford. Some of his other youthful poems after Oxford he did publish, and his name is recorded in the literary history of England.1 But Alexander moved from the muses to Christ, and became a canon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, remembered for his impressive work on behalf of the great Wren edifice, …

Swinburne, Tennyson, And Matters Funereal, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from the article: "This year, 2009, is of course the centenary of the death of Algernon Charles Swinburne, that bad boy of Victorian poetry, that extraordinary writer who outraged so many of his contemporary readers—and later readers too, I might add—with his strongly anti-theistic poetry, with his radical republicanism in a monarchical culture, and with his melodic and entrancing siren song of sexually outrageous poetry. This evening I’d like to talk about Swinburne’s funeral in April 1909 on the Isle of Wight, an event that closed his life with the kind of public controversy that I think he might …

Talk At The Swinburne Centenary Conference, London, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from the article: "My own contribution today to the development of Swinburne’s reputation will be slight, in large part because I’ll be talking about Swinburne’s life and letters—his recognition will have to be based on the just appreciation of his work, which is a job for the critics among you. But when Catherine Maxwell invited me to speak, she more or less gave me my marching orders in saying that the audience today would like to hear from me about “some aspect of your Correspondence project – maybe significant new perspectives/material on ACS that emerged during your researches.” That …

Introduction To "Victorian Poetry" Vol. 14, Iss. 4, Terry L. Meyers, Ricky Rooksby

Arts & Sciences Articles

Part I, by Rikky Rooksby

Part II, by Terry L. Meyers

Will Drew And Phil Crewe & Frank Fane: A Swinburne Enigma, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"Few people perhaps noticed a tentative entry by Cecil Y. Lang in his Swinburne entry in volume 3 of the 1969 New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, an item that had escaped earlier bibliographers: 'Will Drew and Phil Crewe & Frank Fane [1962?] priv prtd.'..."

Introduction To "The Uncollected Letters Of Algernon Charles Swinburne Vol 1", Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

These three volumes of letters by Algernon Charles Swinburne add approximately 600 letters by this poet that were not available when Cecil Y. Lang published his six volume edition of Swinburne's letters. The volumes also contain a selection of several hundred other letters addressed to Swinburne.

Several Letters By Tennyson And His Family, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"In the years since Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon edited Tennyson's letters (1981-1990), I have been able to acquire for my collection several letters by Tennyson and by other members of his family. I print those here, along with some other material relating to Tennyson..."

William Morris On Prostitution: A Letter Of August 17, 1885, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"The following letter by William Morris refer to the St. James's Hall Conference and Hyde Park demonstration of August 21 and 22, 1885. The letter is not in []orman Kelvin' The Collected Letters of William Morris, 3 vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984t but appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, August 19, 1885, p. 12..."

John Nichol’S Visit To Virginia, 1865: ‘The James River, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"In the autumn of 1865, a young Scot, John Nichol, a graduate of the University of Glasgow and Oxford University, sailed down the Chesapeake Bay and up the James River from Baltimore to Petersburg and Richmond. Only about six months had passed since the Confederacy had capitulated and the scars of war were raw. Out of Nichol's trip came his poem "The James River" (reprinted below) an evocation of the James as military highway and, more particularly, an interesting sketch of the infamous Petersburg Crater..."

"Contagious Ectasy": May Sinclair's War Journals, Suzanne Raitt

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry, and the trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. The essays in this volume, by a number of leading critics in the field, considers some of the best-known, and some of the least-known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. Ranging from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and H.D. to Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts, the contributors challenge current thinking about women's responses to the First World War and explore the …

Swinburne And Whitman: Further Evidence, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

No abstract provided.

Found: Swinburne’S Copyright, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"Scholars working with unpublished material by Swinburne or with works by him still covered by copyright will be interested to know that the copyright remains in the hands of its presumptive owner, the successor firm to William Heinemann Ltd..."

Comments On Amy Clampitt’S 'Matoaka', Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"If you're a poet compelled to write a poem for a particular occasion, your muse might well freeze up. Almost a century ago, for example, at Charter Day, 1897, Thomas W. Higginson hailed the College in a poem that included a pleasing tribute (couched in a clever metaphor) from Harvard to William & Mary as "Thou earliest College of our native land/ The first conceived, yet not the earliest born!" But Higginson's poem is flaccid, done in by the bombast characteristic of the genre..."

Second Thoughts On Rossetti: Tennyson’S Revised Letter Of October 12, 1882, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"Although Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. include in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson the incomplete draft of a letter Tennyson prepared to send William Sharp (1855-1905), the writer, poet, and friend and biographer of D. G. Rossetti, they overlook a printing of the letter as actually sent, after Tennyson revised it significantly..."

Swinburne’S Copyright: Gone Missing, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"For seventy-six years William Heinemann Ltd. has controlled Swinburne's copyright. Now the firm has abandoned it. Given the uncertainty that results, any other claimant should step forward..."

Swinburne Shapes His Grand Passion: A Version By ‘Ashford Owen.’, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"That a blighted love lies at the heart of many of Swinburne's works has long impelled scholars and biographers to search for details as to the who, the where, and the when of the affair. The first candidate was nomi- nated by Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise and was supposed to be a young miss, a Jane "Boo" Faulkner. Her candidacy, however, withered under the scrutiny of John Mayfield and Cecil Y. Lang, and a substitute was found: the poet's first cousin Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon Leith (1840-1926), a writer who married a military man, Col. Robert William Disney …