English Language and Literature Commons^™

From Present To Past: Contextualizing The Sonnet, Nicole Trackman

Understanding Poetry

Students will learn the components of a Shakespearean sonnet by looking at the intentions and figurative language of modern music and tracing it back to Spenser’s blazon “Sonnet XV” and Shakespeare’s response in “Sonnet 130”. This lesson allows multiple entry points into the language, content and form of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This lesson can be used at the beginning of a unit on Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, or sonnets.

"My Own Little Home": Historical Places Of Peace In British Literature, Erin Kayla Choate

Tenor of Our Times

No abstract provided.

A Single Man Of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities And Consumerism In The New Novel Of Manners, Bonnie Mclean

Dissertations (1934 -)

In my dissertation, I argue that the novel of manners, while sometimes considered a moribund genre, presents itself as a genre relevant to contemporary criticism of social change from consensus politics to privatization both at governmental and domestic levels. I establish both key terms, cultural and theoretical trends, and define the novel of manners in context as a historical genre and a contemporary one. I further explore the novel of manners as a commentary on social and moral problems, particularly in tensions between social morality and individual morality that emerge when manners break down, a concept originally highlighted by Henry …

Saving The Grotesque: The Grotesque System Of Liberation In British Modernism (1922-1932), Matthew Henningsen

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation re-situates the grotesque in a critical tradition that emphasizes its function as a liberating force, rather than its traditional role as an arouser of terror and amusement. I then apply the grotesque liberation to the High Modern literary environment of Britain in order to reveal the grotesque dimensions of this period. To accomplish these goals of re-situating the grotesque, and applying the grotesque to High Modernism, I create a so-called "Grotesque System of Liberation." This system consists of three stages (the Symbolic, Real, and Non-Symbolic Symbolic) that trace a specific text's progress from a state of illusory stability …

Review Of Barbara K. Seeber, Jane Austen And Animals, Lucinda Cole

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

In this review of Barbara K. Seeber's Jane Austen and Animals (Ashgate, 2013) Lucinda Cole summarizes this foundational book and emphasizes the role of animal studies scholars in linking feminism and environmental issues.

Review Of Helen E.M. Brooks, Actresses, Gender, And The Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women, Leslie Ritchie

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley And Hannah More, Patronage And Poetry, Catherine Keohane

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

Review of Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry by Kerri Andrews.

Review Of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, And Friendship In Early Modern Britain, Angela Rehbein

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

Review of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. xi, 256 pages: illustrations; 24 cm. ISBN 978-0-300-17740-4.

Mansfield Park Comes To Life: Teaching And Staging Elizabeth Inchbald’S Lovers’ Vows In An Austen Course, Misty Krueger

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

This essay discusses how I incorporated readers theatre into a senior seminar on Jane Austen and her contemporaries. The article recounts how my students read Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1798 drama, Lovers’ Vows, and Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park, and then were inspired at the end of the seminar to take part in a readers theatre production of the play. In order to set up this pedagogical example, the essay addresses the theatrical episode of Mansfield Park, the controversies surrounding Lovers’ Vows, and the ways in which I edited the play and prepared students to create a “little …

Shared Ideas Among Friends: The Common Ground Of Owen Barfield, J.R.R. Tolkien, And C.S. Lewis, Phillip Joe Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

No abstract provided.

Jane Austen's Heroines--And Some Others, Neda H. Jeny

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Jane Austen’s Heroines--and Some Others

Jane Austen is the earliest English novelist whose novels are still widely read today; in fact, they are becoming more popular all the time.

Of course, there are good reasons for this popularity. Apart from Austen’s creation of unforgettable characters, and her exquisite irony and sense of humor, there is one other thing I’d like to discuss today: her heroines could be called, in a sense, brilliant (and often unorthodox) adaptations of universally recognized types. For example, Elizabeth Bennet is so remarkable a character because she is, at the same time, a sort of Cinderella …

Contextualizing The Writings Of J.R.R. Tolkien On Literary Criticism, Sherrylyn Branchaw

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Tolkien's writings about literary criticism, which are focused on Beowulf, fairy stories, and his own works. Whereas his writings have often been taken to mean that analytic scholarship is not valid and should not be pursued, my essay takes the intellectual climate of the time into consideration and offers an alternative interpretation, according to which he did not mean to forbid these studies outright and indeed intended that scholars should continue writing them. The essay ends with a call to academics not to be discouraged by his strong language from producing analytic studies.

Discordant Desire: Morley’S Polyphony In Shakespeare’S Twelfth Night, Helen Plevka

2015 Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creative Activity - Documents

From Orsino’s opening line, “If music be the food of love, play on,” to Feste’s concluding song of solitude, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will is relentlessly full of music, whether explicitly calling for sound or indirectly invoking references to musical ideas (1.1.1). Shakespeare utilizes music not only to entertain the listeners of his plays but also to employ its inane ability to enhance and empower human speech. The musicality of this play, first performed at a feast on February 2, 1602, would have been understood and appreciated by its original audience as Elizabethan England experienced a golden …

Shakespeare And School Counseling, Nick Abel

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

In the ongoing search for therapeutic tools and techniques to use with students from kindergarten through the 12^th grade (K-12), it is unlikely that many school counselors have considered the work of William Shakespeare. Generally confined to upper-level high school English classrooms, the work of “The Bard” is more likely to be considered an obstacle for students to overcome than a resource to enhance their academic, career, or personal/social development (Anderson & Anderson, 2003). While Shakespeare may not have a place in every school counseling program, below are some possibilities for using his work in contemporary K-12 settings.

Shakespeare And Teaching Rhetorical Technique In The Speech Classroom, Amanda Arp

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Shakespeare’s artistic communication within the speeches of his plays has the potential to augment student learning in college speech communication courses. Studying Shakespeare is appropriate in college speech communication courses because students could achieve improved rhetorical skills. Studying Shakespeare could even fulfill learning objectives of speech communication classes. For example, at Iowa State University, one of the learning objectives of the speech communication foundation course, SP CM 212, is to “select appropriate language to communicate ideas vividly, accurately, and respectfully” (LeFebvre 3). William Shakespeare’s plays have thrived because of his vivid, rhetorical language. Therefore, by studying the language of several …

A Contemporary Ophelia Reads The Sonnets, Vicki J. Simpson

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a complex character—she’s multilayered, conflicted, and evocative. Exactly how a woman from such a golden age of exploration and expansion in England’s history could have lived such a circumscribed existence is certainly understandable, given the time period, but it’s also an incalculable tragedy. In this piece, I invite you to suspend your disbelief and join me in an imaginative quest to see how this star-crossed noblewoman from Denmark might approach Shakespeare’s Sonnets 29, 30, and 122, from a decadent, epicurean, self-indulgent, and entirely postmodern perspective.

Reality In Shakespeare And The Digital World [A Review By John Sievers Of Shakespeare And The Digital World: Redefining Scholarship And Practice, Edited By Christie Carson And Peter Kirwan], John Sievers

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The collection of essays edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, came to me at a pertinent moment. I started reading it after I had pushed a squeaky-wheeled cart full of twenty-eight iPads to class, then used a document camera displaying my iPad and fingers to show the class how to search a database. Later that day, I also observed a student use a smartphone-based online dictionary app to hear how to pronounce Ceres. The student then used his new knowledge to further a group discussion about scansion in lines …

A Review By Regina Marler For Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries And The Diaries She Read, By Barbara Lounsberry, Regina Marler

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Very rarely, when bending the head over some worthy academic volume, perhaps with a title something like, Post-postmodernisms of Cross-colonial Language Theories or (Mal)contents: Forematter Errata in Eighteenth Century Rural Sermons, a revelation strikes the reader around page fifteen: “My God, I am actually going to enjoy this.” Some of us have experienced this jolt of pleasure and intellectual communion but few realize that it can occur even when the author has, unaccountably, snatched one of the best titles from a handwritten shortlist the reader has kept taped near her desk for her own current work-in-progress. Such, I can …

Faculty Author Series-Dr. Brenda Ayres

Honorable Mention

Announcement about Dr. Brenda Ayres' presentation on Feminism and Christian Scholarship. This is a lecture event for the JFL Faculty Authors Series.

Altered Perspective, Jaymee L. Wagner

The Kabod

This paper analyzes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations by discussing how and why Pip’s perspective on social classes and individual morality changes as a result of the various characters and events he encounters throughout the novel.

The Rhetoric Of Exile In The Preaching And Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Church: Glimpses Of The Cultural Ideology In Old English Homilies, Yi-Chin Huang

The Hilltop Review

Abstract.

This article explores how the early medieval vernacular homiletic discourse produced in Anglo-Saxon England strategically employs the rhetoric exile, a theme whose significance is also articulated widely in Old English poetry. As words denoting such similar ideas as exile, banishment, exclusion, casting/driving out, etc., recur significantly in the homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, including the homilies of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the Blickling and Vercelli Codices, I propose an analysis of the instances in which the rhetoric about exile is used in preaching and theology in order to reveal not only the Church authors/teachers’ ability and effort to translate Latin …

Finding Aid For The Eileen M. Curran Papers, Eileen M. Curran, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection comprises working files, dissertation materials, photographs, personal documents and artifacts, published reference materials, and accruals by and about Eileen Curran, a librarian, professor of English, and authority on Victorian-Era British literature and periodicals.

Eileen M. Curran was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1927, the only child of Edward O. and Laura (Meyer) Curran. She received a B.A. degree with highest distinction from Cornell University in 1948; an Honours B.A. from Cambridge University (England) in 1950; an M.A. from Cambridge University in 1953; and a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1958. She was instructor of English at the University …

Orts 75, 2015, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Over the past year, I and a couple of other postgraduate/early career researchers who share my interest in fantasy studies have launched an initiative called Reading the Fantastic (www.readingthe- fantastic.tumblr.com) at the University of Leeds (UK); our focus is the exploration of fantasy, fairy tale and folk tale texts as spaces of multi-cultural and intercultural connection. Initially involving a guest speaker talk and regular reading group sessions collecting fantasy and fairy tale texts from a wide range of cultures, our activities have expanded (thanks to various funding grants). In addition to adding a regular seminar series to our reading group …

Sarah Wilkinson: Female Gothic Entrepreneur, Diane L. Hoeveler

Gothic Archive: Related Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Slipping From Secret History To Novel, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The secret history, a genre of writing made popular as opposition political propaganda during the reign of Charles ii, has been the subject of renewed critical interest in recent years. By the mid-1740s, novelists were using markers of secret histories on the title pages of their works, thus blurring the genres. This forgotten history of the secret history can help us understand why Ian Watt and other twentieth-century critics tended to end their narratives of the rise of the “realist” Whig novel with the works of the Tory novelist Jane Austen. In particular, the blended narrative perspective that Watt praises …

Living By The Code: Authority In Gerard Stembridge's The Gay Detective, Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Irish drama has few representations of police officers as anything but a trope for authority, tending to avoid any substantive character development. Likewise, it has few representations of homosexual characters, and when such representations do exist they are often caricatures. Reductive portrayals of police often arise from the complex relationship the Irish have with authority and with the legal system. But one of the few exceptions to this trend, and the only play to tackle the representation of a police officer and a homosexual at once, is Gerard Stembridge’s play The Gay Detective (1996). The play offers up the character …

Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger

English Faculty Publications

Many a medievalist has been seduced by Chaucer. Perhaps it’s the totality of Chaucer’s enduring characters, memorable tales, elusive narrator, and fragmented whole that keeps us coming back. We are fascinated and delighted, too, by his linguistic play and the lyrical cadence of Middle English. Chaucer may have led us to graduate study in the first place and remains a treat that organizes our pedagogical lives. For some who teach in smaller programs or two-year colleges, Chaucer’s canonical status may provide the only guaranteed place for medieval texts in the curriculum and thus represents one small chance to share our …

Pastoral Unity: Constructions Of Nostalgic Retreat Space In Charlotte Brontë'S Shirley, Joel Tyre Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to address questions of unity within Charlotte Brontë's Shirley. From the time of its publication, Shirley has been criticized for major characters and themes that do little to contribute to the work as a unified whole. Critics focused on the caricatured portrayal of religious figures, the ongoing industrial conflict, and the reconciliation of one of the novel's heroines to her mother as justification for the novel's lack of unity. In this thesis I hope to reconcile these criticisms and propose a unifying framework in which the characters and themes in question act as necessary components. Through …

Middlemarch: Eliot's Spencerian Sociological Study Of Provincial Life, Kellie Marie Mckinney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the novel Middlemarch, George Eliot fulfills the intention of her subtitle and uses sociological theories to conduct A Study of Provincial Life. Eliot's letters, journals, and various essays provide evidence of sociologist Herbert Spencer's influence on her own writings. Spencer's specific opinions and contributions not only strengthen the sociological message of Eliot's novel, but a handful of his ideals shape the narrative voice of her novel. Variations of Spencer's theories are seen in Eliot's "authorial narrator's" comments and observations of the Middlemarch couples. With her narrator, Eliot applies Spencer's theories on "belief" and on the correlation of …

Bones Of The Soup An Exploration Of J.R.R. Tolkien's Methodology, Devan Bierbrauer

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.