English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …

Tolkien And The Deadly Sin Of Greed, Amanda A. Kieffer

The Kabod

Tolkien’s genius as a writer and insight as a philosopher and theologian (of sorts) are reflected in his subtle yet impactful interweaving of the consequences of greed within the lives of the peoples of Middle-Earth. He shows readers that greed is not simply the love of money. Greed is the root of all evil, and it takes a variety of forms, as represented by Sauron’s desire to possess power over and control others, Saruman’s imitative desire, and Feanor’s over-possessiveness of his sub-creative acts. Tolkien also reveals that a proper relationship with nature can provide recovery from the drab familiarity which …

"Enchantment Dissolved": A Reexamination Of The Hymn's Authorship And Significance In The Commonplace Ms. Hannah Swynock, Hannah Bradley

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

“Enchantment Dissolved” is a hymn written by John Newton and a part of the first publication of the Olney Hymns in 1779. However, starting around the year 1803, the hymn was misattributed in multiple publications to William Cowper, the second author of the collection. This article will analyze Cowper’s literary style and consider why the hymn may have been mistaken for his creation. This particular hymn also appears in a 17-18th century commonplace, Hannah Swynock 1687, in the Parker MSS. at the Lilly Rare Book Library at Indiana University. In this hand-written manuscript, the hymn has four additional verses that …

Neues Testament Und Märchen: Tolkien, Fairy Stories, And The Gospel, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1943 claim in “On Fairy-stories” that the Christian Gospel is a fairy story which “has entered History and the primary world” stands over against significant (and widely publicized) elements of Liberal Protestant biblical interpretation of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, exemplified in Rudolph Bultmann’s 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology.” Tolkien’s position, which seems to have influenced C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer, owes something to G. K. Chesterton but has yet more direct parallels in Thomas Aquinas and Gregory the Great.

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

The Formation Of The Autonomous Woman Through A Hegelian Lens: A Comparative Study Of The British Fin De Siecle "New Woman" And The Post-Mao "Amazing" Woman, Robyn L. Buro

English Department Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hegelian concept of self-consciousness development to explore the formation of the autonomous woman within the New Woman movement of the British fin de siècle and the literature of women writers in 1980s Post-Mao China. The sexual figuration of the New Woman via an unremitting male gaze as well as the absence of individual awareness due to limited reflective self-assessment lead to a misrepresentation of the female figurehead in fin de siècle Britain. Through an in-depth study of literature by Charlotte Mew, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, the reader can identify key points of failure …

Harold Pinter’S Other Places (Staged Reading), Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

ETSU Patchwork Players will perform a staged reading of Other Places – 3 Plays by Harold Pinter in Studio 205 of Campus Center Building at 7:30 p.m. free of charge. The reading is under the direction of Theatre & Dance faculty member Melissa Shafer and advising of Department of Literature & Language Chair Dr. Katherine Weiss, acting as dramaturg.

Silver And Gold: The Markers Of Goodness, Greed And Vanity In Chaucer's Travelers, Samantha G. Strickland

Georgia College Student Research Events

In this presentation, I will argue that in the “General Prologue” to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer refers to silver and gold in three different ways in and analyze how these methods reflect on the travelers as well as reflect Chaucer’s own musings on morality and wealth: through description of their attire or looks, through reference to the literal exchange, and through metaphor. All three types of references allow for both negative, like the Pardoner and Miller, and positive, like the Parson, evaluations of the specific traveler’s character, and through this Chaucer reminds the reader that wealth is not inherently good …

The Horse And The Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators Of Morality In Lancelot, Don Quixote, And Tolkien, Kirsten G. Rodning

English MA Theses

There is a strong connection in Don Quixote and the works of Chretièn de Troyes and J.R.R. Tolkien between a character’s moral decisions and the way that said character treats his horse or horses. The Horse and the Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators of Morality in Lancelot, Don Quixote, and Tolkien studies the moral factors that affect the way heroic characters are revealed to readers and how these morals relate to the ways in which characters interact with horses. This ecocritical study focuses on the protagonists in Chretièn’s Lancelot, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and …

Eng 200: The Consciousness Of Reality Through Poetry, Jill Matthews

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Games & Disguise: The Businessman In 19th & 20th Century Literature, Megan Koperna

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Transatlantic Grammars: Lindley Murray And William Cobbett, Peter J. Manning

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sight And Song Augmented, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

This file is an Android application built in the Unity 3D game engine with the Vuforia Augmented Reality extension. It remediates Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a collection of ekphrastic poetry about paintings by the Old Masters.

Ambiguous Pleasure(Ers): Negotiating The Bodies Of Falstaff And Moll, Lauren Van Atta

Honors Theses

The British Early Modern Period was a time of shifting social ideologies where class as well as gender were mapped onto bodies and embedded in the very material conditions of life. But class and gender were not discreet categories with dichotomous definitions like ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘nobility’ and ‘peasant’. They had many inbetweens, and the theater was perhaps the most glaring inbetween of all. The theater necessarily complicates definitions and ways of viewing bodies as no body is what they seem. And at the heart of these ambiguous identities lay the fat body. It is consumptive, it is transgressive, …

Root And Neal's "The Surprising Imagination Of C. S. Lewis" (Book Review), James L. Sauer

The Christian Librarian

A review of Root, J. & Neal, M. (2015). The surprising imagination of C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. 270 pp. $34.99. ISBN 9781426795107

Recording Angels: Examining Female Narrators In Vampire Fiction And Film, Jacqueline T. Bashaw

College Honors Program

Authors of vampire fiction often grapple with the shifting gender norms of the late nineteenth century. They explore these shifting tensions through the creation of complex narrative structures, some of which incorporate female narrators. By making these women narrators, these authors carefully consider female perspectives and the authority women can wield, both as narrators in their respective texts, and as women in late nineteenth-century British society who were confined to rigid gender roles. The narrative tension that arises between the narrator and the text then allows these authors to use literature to explore and theorize about broader societal tensions.

This …

Four Case Studies In Teaching Sermons At A Public University, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

In this paper, delivered at the March 2017 meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association, I discuss my experience with teaching sermons at Marshall University, a public institution in Huntington, WV. I have done this in four classes over the past several years: “Good Essays” (a 200-level general-education course in the English Department); “God Talk” (another gen-ed course, team-taught with a faculty member in religious studies); “Sermon: Text and Performance” (a 400-level class in the Honors College); and “The Victorian Spoken Word” (a graduate seminar in English).

The audiences were very different, as were the texts we used (Newman, Spurgeon, …

Simulations Of The Androgynous Society: Shattering Gender Stereotypes In George Eliot’S Silas Marner, Jessica L. Wall

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

This paper examines George Eliot's novel Silas Marner and the compelling argument it asserts against Victorian gender stereotypes. Through the contradictory successes of characters that fail to conform to their expected niches, Eliot presents her revolutionary vision for an androgynous society. Most notably, Silas’s accidental motherhood redeems his purpose while saving Eppie's life, Priscilla's ability to protect the well-being of her family stems from her avoidance of a husband and assumption of a “masculine” managerial position, and Eppie’s idyllic life with Silas is preserved by her refusal to be treated as a possession by male authority figures. Through the experiences …

Anthony Trollope Competition

Honorable Mention

Essays are invited on the topic of "Trollope and His World." Submissions may include essays focusing exclusively on the works of Anthony Trollope; comparative essays on Trollope and other writers; essays examining Trollope's work and career in the larger context of Victorian history, culture and society; historical or literary essays on topics central to Trollope's work and illuminated by his work; or essays on the reception of Trollope's work or on his larger cultural influence. Prize is $1,000 to undergraduates and $2,000 to graduates. Deadline is June 1, 2017.

A Review By Wagoner Of Virginia Woolf’S Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries & The Diaries She Read, By Barbara Lounsberry, Elizabeth A. Wagoner

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The scope and influence of literary Modernism continues to expand, and current scholarship includes not only studies of Modernism within its time period in literary history, but increasingly the force Modernism exerts on innovations in contemporary literature. Barbara Lounsberry’s new book, Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries & the Diaries She Read, the second volume in her ongoing study of the diaries of Virginia Woolf, breaks open at the molecular level the complex and thrilling confluence of currents that fed Woolf’s writing, as well as an examination of how she used formal experimentation in her diaries to create …

The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor

Mime Journal

Taylor considers the role that book arts may play in Craig’s theories of the new theatre, or the Art of the Future. He expands our understanding of Craig’s design work to include print culture, examining his engravings for the monumental editions of Hamlet published by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in 1929–30. Taylor explores the relationship of Craig’s designs for the 1912 Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet to his engravings for the German and English-language Cranach Press editions of the play. He suggests that it was only with this print publication that Craig finally achieved the absolute artistic control …

Remembering The Great War: Writing And Publishing The Experiences Of Wwi, Ian A. Isherwood

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues …

The Merchant Of Venice: Tsubouchi’S Shylock And Early Modern Japanese Dichotomy, Matthew Thome

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Band Of Bastards: Rhetorical Parallels And National Memory In Shakespeare’S St. Crispin’S Day Speech, Patton’S Speech To The Third Army, And Olivier’S Henry V, Mitchell Ploskonka

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Skin As An Index To Moral Character In English Renaissance Tragedy, Uwe Klawitter

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

A Case For Using The First Folio As Directing And Acting Text, Megan Burnett

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Gabriel A. Rieger

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Hobbits?...And What May They Be?, Michael Flowers

Journal of Tolkien Research

Hobbits…And what may they be? This study considers the possible origin of the word ‘hobbit’ on the eightieth anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Tolkien’s book - The Hobbit. It examines the most widely discussed supposed origin by contemporary commentators, and undermines its credibility. Instead, it foregrounds what was originally a medieval Welsh word widely used in agricultural circles, which Tolkien may have encountered in his youth. Proof that the word had a widespread use in a specific sector of the provincial Welsh press is amply demonstrated, and consideration is given to Tolkien’s childhood visit to …

Building Middle-Earth: An Exploration Into The Uses Of Architecture In The Works Of J. R. R. Tolkien, Johanna H. Brooke

Journal of Tolkien Research

Many aspects of Tolkien's Middle-earth have been the attention of scholarly interest since the boom of 'Tolkien studies' but an area that seems to be lacking in criticism, but is certainly full of detail and character in Tolkien's books, is architecture. This essay explores how important the creation of buildings and living spaces in Middle-earth is to the underlying messages of the tale and how the architecture of Middle-earth impacts the reader's journey.

This essay starts as we the reader does - in a hole - and explores the way that architecture is used to help explain hobbits, show their …

“The Lass Of Aughrim” – Love, Tragedy, And The Power Of The Past, Allie J. Kapus

The Kabod

The traditional Irish ballad “The Lass of Aughrim” appears in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and provides both significance to the unfolding of the story itself, as well as insight into the frailty of human relationships and the human condition. The song, while appearing only briefly in the story, is the point at which the story drastically shifts. “The Lass of Aughrim” is central to the development of Gretta Conroy as a character, to an understanding of the complexity of Gabriel and Gretta’s marriage, and to the tension present in the “The Dead” which allows the story to communicate …