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Literature in English, British Isles

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Articles 2011 - 2040 of 5484

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay May 2018

Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the …

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Forgotten Fairies: Traditional English Folklore In "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Alexandra Larkin May 2018

Forgotten Fairies: Traditional English Folklore In "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Alexandra Larkin

The Criterion

While the fairies shown in the play would have been known by Shakespeare’s audience, there was a clear difference between the fairies of traditional folklore and the fairies that Shakespeare describes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In traditional English folklore, fairies were “made” for, and by, the middle and lower classes; their stories were most believed and the most encounters were experienced by these people. Fairies in folklore were alternatingly deadly and wildly helpful, giving humans who stumbled upon them presents or death. In the play, Shakespeare departs from more traditional depictions of fairies and instead characterizes these magical creatures …

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Something In Nothing: A Discussion Of Madness And Wisdom In King Lear, Leela Mennillo May 2018

Something In Nothing: A Discussion Of Madness And Wisdom In King Lear, Leela Mennillo

The Criterion

This essay argues against Shakespeare critic David Kastan’s nihilistic reading of King Lear. While I agree that nothingness lies at the heart of the tragedy, I maintain that the recurring theme of nothing does not depict a world devoid of meaning. Rather, Shakespeare suggests that the recognition of the abyss is necessary in the quest for higher meaning. I approach this debate through various philosophical lenses, presenting a reading that equates wisdom and nothingness. Cordelia’s recognition of the limitations of human knowledge first introduces this idea. I detect elements of the divine nature of nothingness in the seemingly nonsensical speeches …

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"'Violent Love': Jane Austen And Eighteenth-Century Marriage Laws", Brianna Bicho May 2018

"'Violent Love': Jane Austen And Eighteenth-Century Marriage Laws", Brianna Bicho

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In several of Jane Austen’s novels, her heroines are confronted more than once with the proposition of marriage. Many of the primary proposal scenes in these tales contain violent language seemingly at odds with the romantic context, and the romance convention, of a proposal scene. Austen’s rhetoric of violence functions as a critique of contemporary laws defining and regulating marriage, particularly Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. These laws negated a woman’s ownership – both personal and financial – upon her marriage: they outlined both the illegality of a wedded female to own property and the …

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Time, Memory, And Consciousness In Virginia Woolf’S Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, And Between The Acts, Nicole Olivotti May 2018

Time, Memory, And Consciousness In Virginia Woolf’S Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, And Between The Acts, Nicole Olivotti

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway emerges as a character gripped by the notion and passage of time. Woolf represents the chronological aspect of time through images such as Big Ben and its relentless chimes as well as the various references to clocks or bells throughout the novel. To the Lighthouse also thematically and narratively explores constructions of time, particularly by focusing on elements such as inaction and delay. The journey to the Lighthouse, for example, does not occur until the end of the novel. Both texts underscore the tension between the linear timeframe of the novel and …

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Review Of The Making Of Jane Austen, Mary Beth Tegan May 2018

Review Of The Making Of Jane Austen, Mary Beth Tegan

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

No abstract provided.

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Review Of Minds In Motion, Anna K. Sagal May 2018

Review Of Minds In Motion, Anna K. Sagal

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

A review of Anne Thell's Minds in Motion.

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Review Of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Stacey L. Kikendall May 2018

Review Of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Stacey L. Kikendall

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

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

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Review Of The Ladies Of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, And The Legacies Of Criticism, Dawn M. Goode May 2018

Review Of The Ladies Of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, And The Legacies Of Criticism, Dawn M. Goode

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

Review of The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism. Bucknell UP, 2017. xxxvi + 331pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-6114-8761-9.

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Review Of Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre Production Of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, Tanya M. Caldwell May 2018

Review Of Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre Production Of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, Tanya M. Caldwell

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

This article reviews the production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem directed by Tony Cownie and produced for the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in February and March 2018. In setting the play in Edinburgh and placing emphasis on its women characters, Cownie underscores the universal and timeless relevance of Cowley's play as well as its performance versatility.

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Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie May 2018

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

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

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …

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Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens May 2018

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

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

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

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Of The Silmarils And The Ring: J. R. R. Tolkien's Fiction And The Importance Of Creation And Art, Michael Hartinger May 2018

Of The Silmarils And The Ring: J. R. R. Tolkien's Fiction And The Importance Of Creation And Art, Michael Hartinger

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

J. R. R. Tolkien embodies the opposing ideals of Enchantment and the Machine in the Silmarils and the One Ring respectively. These created objects oppose each other just as Tolkien’s ideals of art do. Enchantment is art’s ideal, it's purpose is to glorify and enrich the beauty of reality through subcreation. The Silmarils exhibit the delight of making and perceiving beauty. Whereas the Machine is art’s shadowy reflection that utilizes apparatuses or devices rather than personal talent in order to coerce others and reality itself. Overall Tolkien's aesthetic theories reflect many fears surrounding modern attitudes toward weaponizing art. Tolkien supplies …

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Of Ivory And Eros: How Kurtz Was Corrupted By The Congo, Alexander T. Grey May 2018

Of Ivory And Eros: How Kurtz Was Corrupted By The Congo, Alexander T. Grey

The Criterion

While much ink has been spilled about the savagery and rawness of Conrad's magnum opus, Heart of Darkness, few scholars have sought to look at the softer side of Kurtz, Marlow, and the cast of characters. This essay attempts to view the work through the lens of love and the Grecian concepts of eros, philia and agape as they apply to Kurtz's tryst and what can be learned about this tormented man in the jungle when love enters the equation.

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Humanity's Unlikely Heroine: Examining Eve In John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' And "Paradise Regained", Alyssa V. White May 2018

Humanity's Unlikely Heroine: Examining Eve In John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' And "Paradise Regained", Alyssa V. White

The Criterion

This essay explores the biblical world of John Milton’s poetry through the eyes of the only woman given dialogue in his most famous works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Eve has often been read with scrutiny and judgment, with many readers and scholars dismissing her character as weak and uninteresting. The paper draws on sources from several scholars, but it works primarily with the actual text of Milton’s epics themselves. The argument of this paper seeks to counter those beliefs and provide a thorough analysis of Eve’s character and development throughout Paradise Lost, as well as her impact on the …

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Review Of Stephen Mitchell, Beowulf, Carol A. Leibiger May 2018

Review Of Stephen Mitchell, Beowulf, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Universal Truths, Verisimilitude, And Hyperreality: Baudrillard’S Simulacra And Simulation In Pride And Prejudice And The Lizzie Bennet Diaries., Kathryn M. Kohls May 2018

Universal Truths, Verisimilitude, And Hyperreality: Baudrillard’S Simulacra And Simulation In Pride And Prejudice And The Lizzie Bennet Diaries., Kathryn M. Kohls

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project applies Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Hank Green and Bernie Su’s The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012). By applying Baudrillard’s theory, one can see that Austen’s marriage plot is a shrewd critique of how social simulacra, simulations of reality, dictate how society is structured and interacts. These manipulative simulations are able to be transgressed by the novel’s protagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. Their ability to find an unsimulated real is appealing to contemporary audiences caught in the hyperreality of the internet age. This leads to a panicked production to …

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Iarwain Ben-Adar On The Road To Faerie: Tom Bombadil's Recovery Of Premodern Fantasy Values, Greta Rogers May 2018

Iarwain Ben-Adar On The Road To Faerie: Tom Bombadil's Recovery Of Premodern Fantasy Values, Greta Rogers

Masters Theses

This thesis project discusses J. R. R. Tolkien's character Tom Bombadil as an agent of recovery of premodern fantasy values. Several premodern fantasy works espouse a sense of harmony with the world as God’s created order, a value that is missing from some postmodern fantasy works. Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil is examined as a means to recover that acceptance of the created order.

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Who Died: Redefining The Elegy Through Affect And Trauma, Brittney La Noire May 2018

Who Died: Redefining The Elegy Through Affect And Trauma, Brittney La Noire

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project introduces the claim that death literature, specifically elegies and epitaphs, do not rely on set structure or content, but rather are poetic effects of trauma and affect. Both have been defined and redefined by critical scholars, but there is still a division about their use. The beginning of the project will pull together Paul De Man, Cathy Caruth, Theresa Brennan, and Diana Fuss to apply the theoretical principle of trauma and affect transhistorically through Theocritus, John Milton, and Percy Shelley. The final portion will be an original creative collection of elegies combined with epitaphs as ending couplets about …

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Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley May 2018

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …

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Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian May 2018

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

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Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder May 2018

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

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The Separate Spheres Of Women And Science, Annie Hays, Barbara Huizar, Crista Johnson, Steven Le, Samantha Tate May 2018

The Separate Spheres Of Women And Science, Annie Hays, Barbara Huizar, Crista Johnson, Steven Le, Samantha Tate

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Through the 19th century ideology of separate spheres, Frankenstein shows how the exclusion of women from science is detrimental to science and destructive to society.

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Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley: Student Poster Session Program, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature May 2018

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley: Student Poster Session Program, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Program of student posters presented as part of “Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium: FrankenSTEM? Technology Ethics in Silicon Valley, organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University on May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University.

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Dehumanizing The Human Body, Shelby Escott May 2018

Dehumanizing The Human Body, Shelby Escott

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

How does death affect the way in which the human body ceases to represent humanity?

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A Flourynge Aege: Tracing The Sacred And Secular In The Book Of St. Albans, Allison Treese May 2018

A Flourynge Aege: Tracing The Sacred And Secular In The Book Of St. Albans, Allison Treese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the introduction of the printing press to England around the mid-fifteenth century, English authors were not only writing under the lingering influence of Chaucer and the conventions of established medieval genres, but now had to confront the implications for reading and readership that printing brought with it along with the already turbulent political climate of the fifteenth century. Though this cultural shift was arguably a gradual one, with the earliest printers taking special care to remain faithful to the manuscripts they were copying, and conventional scribes likewise being commissioned to make copies of printed works, there were nevertheless radical …

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Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling May 2018

Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent …

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Reading Charlotte Brontë Reading, Madhumita Gupta May 2018

Reading Charlotte Brontë Reading, Madhumita Gupta

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to …

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T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud May 2018

T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud

Master's Theses

While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …

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Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester May 2018

Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester

English Theses and Dissertations

Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and …

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