English Language and Literature Commons^™

E.M. Forster's Lecture "Kipling's Poems": Negotiating The Modernist Shift From "The Authoritarian Stock-In Trade" To An Aristocratic Democracy, Michael Lackey

English Publications

In 1909, Forster delivered a scathing lecture about Rudyard Kipling, which outlines the political dangers implicit in Kipling's aesthetic. This introduction to the lecture briefly examines Forster's critique of Kipling's politics and aesthetic found in both the lecture and subsequent reviews of Kipling's work. Central to Forster's critique is his conviction that contemporary culture is and should be moving from authoritarian to democratic political systems. While Forster acknowledges Kipling's power and skill as a writer, he suggests that Kipling's aesthetic genius belongs to an earlier stage in the world's development, when authoritarian political models dominated. Within Forster's aristocratic democracy, Kipling's …

Understanding Macbeth: A Returning Soldier, Christy Clothier

Inquiry Journal 2007

No abstract provided.

Lies Breathed Through Silver: Mythological Constructs In Tolkien’S Works, Joshua Mccrowell

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

It’s not hard to imagine the English air being warm the night John Ronald Reuel Tolkien brought Clive Staples Lewis hard won into Christianity. The image of their lengthy midnight talk has since become almost mythic to those who study those two authors because of the impact that Christianity (and the other) had on each other’s lives. Lewis’ most famous works - everything from Narnia to his Space Trilogy to his apologetics - all are based on and inspired by his faith. Similarly, Tolkien once said that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic …

Orts 70, 2007, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

In the summer of 2005, just as we were commemorating the centenary of George MacDonald's death, I received a surprise telephone call from Kate Davies. She was helping two aunts to move out of their large house in Sanderstead, Surrey and into sheltered accommodation and had discovered a large collection of George MacDonald books, many of them first editions and many signed by the author, that had belonged to her aunts' grandfather, William Carey Davies, a Croydon man (south of London) who had been George's private secretary in his later years. Her aunts' father, George MacDonald Davies, had had a …

Review Of Milton In Popular Culture By Laura Lunger Knoppers And Gregory M Colón, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Devotions: Popular And Critical Reception, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Wisdom Of Forgiveness: Singing Like Birds In The Cage With Old King Lear, Janet L. Ramsey, Alan G. Padgett

Faculty Publications

Learning to forgive and to be forgiven is a lifelong curriculum from which we never really graduate. Shakespeare’s King Lear can be one guide in this educational process.

A Vision Of Human Solitude: Rhetoric Of Isolation And Ephemerality In Two Novels By Virginia Woolf, Marsha Lee Schuh

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis investigates the interrelationship between the two dominant themes, isolation and human ephemerality found in two of Virginia Woolf's books, To the lighthouse and The Waves.

Scatology And The Sacred In Milton's Paradise Lost, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

In his classic study, "The Dialectics of Creation," Michael Lieb foregrounds the myriad ways in which Milton uses scatology throughout "Paradise Lost" to describe the depravity of the devil. But Satan is not the only character in the epic to be associated with excretion. Milton's angels and Milton's God are also implicated in the operations of the lower bodily stratum. In these instances, however, allusions to the evacuative functions attest to an exalted divinity rather than a disgusting diabolism. Evacuation in "Paradise Lost" is thus a highly complex signifier. Not simply a pejorative pointing inevitably at a damnable degradation, scatology …

Landscapes Of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound And Grendel's Mere As Expressions Of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building, Paul Siewers

Faculty Contributions to Books

An examination of the Old English poem Beowulf as a landscape-text, expressing the Anglo-Saxon project of political hegemony over native peoples and environments.

Racial Impersonation On The Elizabethan Stage: The Case Of Shakespeare Playing Aaron, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article focuses on the implications of playwright William Shakespeare performing racial roles himself, such as Aaron in "Titus Andronicus." Several plays are discussed, including "Titus Andronicus," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Othello." The SHAXICON database, which compiles the text of Shakespeare's plays, is the primary source of evidence to suggest Shakespeare acted in his plays. Information about race relations in Great Britain's society during Shakespeare's time is also given.

Awakening The 'Mere Pulsation Of Desire' In Silas Marner, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, the narrator reflects on those crucial events which shape pathways in our lives. For Tertius Lydgate, this occurs with the chance opening of a book to a particular page:

[T]he first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame.'

For Lydgate, this seminal instant is the one which inspires him to …

Review Of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Oxford's publication of 'Bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures' brings to mind Pascal's famous apology for the length of his letter: 'I have not had time to make it shorter'. Would Rosemary Ashton, who has written both long and short biographies, agree that it is more taxing to produce a 'bite-sized' account that a long one? Brevity demands clear aims, selection of salient points, stringent compression. These tests Rosemary Ashton passes with enviable ease, combining compression with elegance. She begins by summarizing her aims: 'In this study, originally written for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I …

Review Of George Eliot And Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring The Unmapped Country, Michael Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Michael Davis packs a dense yet deft discussion of George Eliot's relationship with the scientific theories of mind of her contemporaries into this short book. Revisiting the novels and essays, and to a lesser extent the letters, he adds to our understanding of her place as a thinking novelist by his careful negotiation of intellectual positions, his weaving of the discussion among such Eliot contemporaries as Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Huxley, Alexander Bain, W. B. Carpenter, and E. S. Dallas, and his engagement with recent studies in the field by Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, K. K. Collins, Tess Cosslett, David Carroll, …

Review Of 142 Strand: A Radical Address In Victorian London & George Eliot In Germany,1854-55: 'Cherished Memories', Rosemary Ashton, Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The outlines of Marian Evans's life in the years immediately preceding her emergence as George Eliot are well-known-her work for the Westminster Review, her relationships with Chapman, Spencer and Lewes, and then her departure with the latter to Germany in July 1854. What these two studies do in their different ways is fill in the picture with fascinating detail. In focusing on the house that John Chapman rented from 1847 to 1854 and from which he ran the Westminster Review and his publishing business, Rosemary Ashton recreates the circle of radical intellectuals that the future novelist came into contact with …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 11 June 2006, Tim Over

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

May I begin by thanking the Fellowship for the invitation to be the principal guest at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. My association with today's event goes back over a number of years bringing students to lay a floral tribute at the obelisk. Indeed, when I first came more schools were involved. It is fitting that the secondary school named after many would say the greatest Victorian woman novelist, still comes along faithfully to the Memorial Garden. Kathleen and Bill Adams have visited the school, talked to groups of students and presented the school with a portrait of George Eliot and …

Review Of George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy has been thinking and writing about George Eliot for about fifty years, always in ways that push against reigning orthodoxies, and that immerse us in particular patterns of imagery, affect, or narrative organization that make the substance and texture of George Eliot's work come alive. Her new book is no exception. This 'anti-biography', as she calls it, is an attempt 'to redress the balance' of conventional biography by focusing on the effect of George Eliot's life on her writing, rather than on retelling the story of her life (xi). In fact, it redresses more balances than that. Hardy …

Review Of Identifying The Remains: George Eliot's Death In The London Religious Press, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a detailed examination of the various religious-based obituaries which followed George Eliot's death in December 1880. It exposes misinformation, largely biographical, examines bias, confusion, open and concealed concerns, direct, responsible and weighted theological arguments, dubious and inconclusive conclusions, the forms and themes of the debate about the beliefs of a major writer. Collins's dissertation-like topic is informed with foreground and background research: his footnotes read as tellingly as his text and provide wide-ranging and perceptive quotation.

He considers the idea, derived from Richard Simpson, that the appearance of George Eliot's name on the title-pages of Scenes of Clerical …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2006- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Adrian Litvinoff

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I was surprised, honoured and delighted by the invitation to join you today and propose the toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot. I am no George Eliot expert, or indeed scholar, although I am an enthusiast. She is, after all, Warwickshire's other world-class writer, and it is tempting to think how much better known she might have been in her home county had Shakespeare been born in Stoke-on-Trent, say, rather than Stratford-upon-Avon.

My first encounter with George Eliot was while taking' A' level English at school. I still recall my dawning surprise and admiration as I, an inexperienced …

The George Eliot Centenary Of 1919, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The centenary of George Eliot's birth in 1919 was recognized as an opportunity to commemorate her connection with the parts of Warwickshire where she was born and spent her early life. While her association with Coventry and Nuneaton had been noted during her lifetime and in obituaries, and emphasized again when George Eliot's Life as related in her letters and journals, arranged and edited by her husband J. W. Cross was published in 1885, there were some inhibitions about too enthusiastically claiming an agnostic libertine as a local celebrity. Both Nuneaton and Coventry chose to celebrate the centenary, and reconstruction …

Review Of Middlemarch In The Twenty-First Century, Karen Chase

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This set of eight original essays engages afresh with a novel that many readers might claim to know well, in such a way as to make 'the lights and shadows ... fall with a certain difference' (chap. xxi). Karen Chase is well-known for her own studies of George Eliot, not least George Eliot: 'Middlemarch' (1991). Here, she confines herself to an introductory essay, which cogently states the brief given to her contributors, to reflect on how Middlemarch can be read in the twenty-first century. 'Who besides Eliot has been better aware of the alteration of objects given a change in …

Review Of George Eliot And The Discourses Of Medievalism, Judith Johnston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism argues that Eliot abandons realism in her last two novels in favour of medievalism, and that recognizing the presence and function of medieval discourses in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda enables subversive political readings. Johnston positions these readings against criticism of the novels that identifies a collapse of narrative coherence and characterization in Eliot's 'failure' to sustain their apparent realism. In contrast, Johnston proposes that Eliot's manipulation of medievalism signals neither the failure of realism nor realism's antithesis. Johnston argues that the discourses of medievalism that Eliot manipulates share a facility for transformation: hagiography …

Notes On Contributors- 2007

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Rosemary Ashton is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of acclaimed critical biographies of George Eliot (1996) and G. H. Lewes (1991). Her many publications on George Eliot include The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History (1990), and editions of Middlemarch (Penguin, …

The Thirty-Fifth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2006- Glimpses Of Life At 142 Strand, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1. John Chapman and the Strand in 1847

24 July 1847 the following advertisement appeared in the weekly periodical, the Athenaeum:

MR CHAPMAN, Bookseller and Publisher, begs to announce that he has REMOVED his Business from 121 Newgate Street, to more spacious premises on the South side of the STRAND, No 142, a few doors West of Somerset House; and requests, therefore, that all communications may be forwarded to the latter address.

For the next seven years John Chapman's 'spacious premises' - consisting of the bookselling business and publishing house, his family home, and rooms for literary lodgers - was …

Jane Fairfax’S Choice: The Sale Of Human Flesh Or Human Intellect, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Articles and Research

"It is Jane Fairfax’s story rather than Emma’s, however, that exposes the grim reality of life for many women of the nineteenth century: the attractive and accomplished but penniless young woman is not rescued by a good man. She marries a man who in Austen’s other novels would have been rewarded by a mindless flirt (Lydia Bennet) or an adulteress (Maria Rushworth). Through Jane Fairfax’s story—her life-defining choice between selling herself in the marriage market or the governess trade—Austen subtly exposes the grim reality of life for many women who were handsome, clever, but not rich. Jane Fairfax, perhaps even …

The Missing Child In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

The Indian boy over whom the king and queen of fairies quarrel is the most important of several characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who do not appear on stage: his parents, who form with him a missing nuclear family; a child god, Cupid; and a female authority figure, the dowager to whose property the lovers Lysander and Hermia flee. In its narrative structure the play presents a healing regression to the early mother and the primary process. However, the regressive movement has disturbing, as well as adaptive, elements; in addition, while the characters are still in the forest, the …

Elizabeth Goudge Revisited: The Lost Art Of Happily Ever After, Anne A. Salter

Georgia Library Quarterly

The article focuses on the works of novelist Elizabeth Goudge. Her style of writing has been described as adult fairy tales. Her works were greatly influenced by the Victorian Period. Goudge's book "The White Witch" presents the historical backdrop of the English Civil War. Writer Josephine Lawrence stated in her review of the novelist's book "Gentian Hill" that the Victorian side of Goudge makes it appealing.

Under English Eyes: The Disappearance Of Irishness In Conrad's The Secret Agent, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Representations Of The Catholic Inquisition In Two Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novels: Punishment And Rehabilitation In Matthew Lewis' The Monk And Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, Jarad Fennell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The …

Religion And The Academy: Report On The Western Conference On British Studies Roundtable, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This article is a report of a roundtable I moderated at the 2006 meeting of the Western Conference on British Studies. It proposes some directions religious studies might take in the 21st century; it is also the first publication to mention of the British Pulpit Online, an emerging digital resource for the study of the sermon from 1688-1901.