English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Master Of Time, Rachel Aedo

Modernist Short Story Project

“The Master of Time”

Norman Lindsay’s work in The London Aphrodite spanned more than a single short story in a single issue. His contribution to this periodical was due to more than his relationship with the editor—Jack Lindsay, creator of The London Aphrodite, was his son—rather, Norman Lindsay’s writing adhered strongly to the premise of the journal. The self-proclaimed cultural journal was set in defiance to the critical literary trends of the day, specifically in opposition to The London Mercury. “The Master of Time” appeared in the third volume of the Aphrodite. Thematically, Lindsay is addressing a distrust …

Through The Eyes Of A Deaf-Mute, Nicole Finlayson

Modernist Short Story Project

Author of England and one of Ezra Pound’s lovers, B.M. Goold-Adams (Gould-Adams), or most commonly referred to as Bride Scratton, was a writer who drew from personal experiences to create short stories that “explores the lives of people from different classes, and backgrounds living in England” (England). The events in Scratton’s life – especially the loss of her father, birth of disabled daughter, and divorce from Ned Scratton in 1923 – greatly influenced her writings and were key components in her short story “The Obsequies.” This story was written in 1923 and published in England, a collection of Bride’s short …

Male Presence And Indecision In “Tète À Tète, À La Femme”, Olivia J. Esplin 9714899

Modernist Short Story Project

The short “Tète à Tète, à la Femme” is unremarkable at first glance much like its author Beatrice Hastings (writing under the name Beatrice Tina). Just a conversation between friends Marjorie and Beatrice about the merits of free marriage (“not [marrying] at all”) versus a legal marriage. Beatrice, a forward-thinking woman in the eyes of Marjorie surprises her friend by adamantly opposing Marjorie entering a free marriage with her beau, George. She gives extensive examples of free marriages that have failed and generally talks over Marjorie’s attempt to rebut the grim perspective Beatrice presents. It all seemed very straightforward until …

“The Longest Day Of Her Life”: Affirming Pre-Wwi Gender Roles, Nicole Umphress

Modernist Short Story Project

The January 1913 edition of The Strand Magazine featured a short story titled “The Longest Day of Her Life” by W. B. Maxwell, prolific during his time but virtually unknown in modern studies of the Modernist Era. The son of popular novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Maxwell spent much of his life writing and pursuing the creative arts; though in contact from a young age with some of the premier figures of the British literati, including Robert Browning, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde, Maxwell was most inspired by his literary mother. Loving, kind, and immensely talented, Braddon set an example …

Anti-Feminism In Modernist Literature, Maddie Holbrook

Modernist Short Story Project

After the stifling conventions of the Victorian era, the modernist movement cast a new and surprising light on issues that had previously been ignored or approached only a single way. The rigidity of moral standards was fading, and many authors sought to start conversations about topics that had previously been taboo. Modernism is often credited with progressive attitudes toward issues such as feminism, independence, and homosexuality, but there may not have been as radical a change as there appears. Some modernist works carried the appearance of progressive thinking, but a closer inspection reveals attitudes more similar to their Victorian ancestors. …

Broadcasting The Search For Understanding: The Essay's Relationship With The Podcast, Miriam Bay Sweeney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this creative thesis project, I explore the relationship between the modern essay and the podcast. I do so by producing the first three episodes of my own essayistic podcast, called Peer-Refined Health. In this foundational exploration, I consider the value of the podcast as a new medium of communication for the essay. I begin this project report with a background on both the podcast and the essay as well as a discussion of my project development. The transcripts of three episodes of Peer-Refined Health follow. Finally, I analyze the relationship between the essay and the podcast and suggest additional …

Flannery O’Connor And Transcendence In The Christian Mystery Of Grace, Taran Trinnaman

Student Works

Within Flannery O’Connor’s works are the repeating themes of grace and salvation. Kathleen G. Ochshorn points one major criticism towards O’Connor’s works however in that her morally flawed characters’ reception of grace and salvation comes through violent or traumatic means, which appears counter to the Roman Catholic faith of Flannery O’Connor. This paper argues against this reading of Flannery O’Connor’s works by examining the Catholic theology surrounding grace alongside the theology of grace as understood through Protestantism. The paper then places three of Flannery O’Connor’s works, “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” and “The Enduring Chill,” within a Catholic and Protestant reading to explore …

Three Books, Three Stereotypes: Mothers And The Ghosts Of Mammy, Jezebel, And Sapphire In Contemporary African American Literature, Christine E. Eck

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The stereotypes of Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire are still being dealt with in contemporary African American literature. In the representation of black mothers, nonfiction is ideal to portray mothers who do not represent these stereotypes; fiction is ideal to favorably represent mothers who embody some aspects of these stereotypes. Jezmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Margo Jefferson's Negroland, and Tracy K. Smith's Ordinary Light are used as case studies.

The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …

How Drag Culture Resolves Tensions In Victorian Shakespearean Cross-Dressing; Or, Slay, Feste, Slay, Isaac Robertson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 2017, Madame Le Gateau Chocolat, a black drag queen, sashayed onto the stage of the Globe theater to portray Feste in Emma Rice’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This bold move not only gave anxiety to its investors (eventually leading to the stepping down of Emma Rice), but also raised questions about the validity of drag performance within Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare has historically been inseparable with traditional cross-dressing (both in performance and in the narrative itself), although the relationship has not always been cordial. In Victorian England, cross-dressing was often set equal to homosexuality or moral deviance, and …

Winter 2018 Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

A Slowly Starving Race: Land And The Language Of Hunger In Zitkala-Ša’S "Blue-Star Woman", Adam R, Brantley

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper proposes that the motif of starvation in Zitkala-Ša’s 1921 short story, “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” is in fact a metaphor for the dispossession of Native American lands and its disastrous effects on Native American livelihood and culture. Though much scholarship has been done on sentimental rhetoric in Zitkala-Ša’s fiction, critics have not yet explored its connection to this the most immediate Zitkala-Ša’s concerns. This essay first unpacks letters from Zitkala-Ša’s personal archives to demonstrate her individual interest in dispossession, and then examines “Blue-Star Woman’s” ever-present language of hunger through this lens of land loss. In doing …

Table Of Contents

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Bloodland: A Holistic Approach To Contemporary Reclamation Of Native Female Power, Anna Kendall

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Blackwood's To Hawthorne In Light Of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation, Holly Young Boud

Theses and Dissertations

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was arguably the most important and widely published literary magazine of the nineteenth century. Its readership extended from Britain to America, shaping literary tastes across the Anglophone literary marketplace. BEM wrote two reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction during the author's most prolific years. The first was published in 1847 and contained a lengthy reflection of the state of American literature that prefaced its review of Mosses from an Old ManseM. In 1855, BEM reviewed Hawthorne's novels. The language of these reviews encouraged BEM's transatlantic readership to interpret Hawthorne in a very particular light: a dark, intense, …

Rain Of Gold'S Prison Play: Identity Making And Maneuvering, William Henry Guajardo

Theses and Dissertations

Critics mostly dismiss Victor Villasenor's 1991 Rain of Gold—the supposed biography of the author's father who enters the United States during the Prohibition era. Nevertheless, upon closer examination this narrative explores and erodes corroded human categories and racial reductions present in the Southwestern penal system. According to scholars in critical prison studies and critical race theory, the prison functions as a state-sanctioned method for prosecuting criminals and persecuting minority Americans. Juxtaposing Rain of Gold with these two areas of academic research, however, reveals that penitentiaries produce faulty and fallible notions of personhood that are, in part, responsible for the …

Contributors Page

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Silence And Self-Harm: Understanding Unconventional Voices, Sarah Cannon

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay explores the connection between silence, self-harm, and communication in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It shows how viewing silence and self-imposed violence as modes of communication contributes to a more productive understanding of trauma and increases the opportunity for healing.

The Uncomfortable Self: Emily Dickinson’S Reflections On Consciousness, Charlotte Kupsh

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems reflect a profound curiosity about the concept of the self, its limits, and its relationship to the body. While much has been written about the influence of religion on Dickinson’s poetry, few scholars have focused on the influence that prominent philosophers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, may have had on Dickinson’s work. Emerson’s arguments about the role of consciousness and subjectivity in human experience were widely circulated in Dickinson’s time, and evidence of the poet’s engagement with these issues can be seen in many of her poems. Dickinson repeatedly returns to questions about the physical …

Stepping Out Of Photographs: Stopping The Myth Of The Vanishing Native Through Reclaiming Personhood In The Edward Curtis Project, Mari Murdock

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Forum Prompt: Approaching Indigeneity, Learning Modernity, Christine Bold

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Sun Dance Opera: A Call For Native Survivance, Lorin Groesbeck

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Nourished By My Mother”: Zitkala-Ša And The Indian Sterilization Project, Lainey Wardlow

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

Editor's Note, Makayla Okamura And Mckay Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

'Fashionable Piety': Theological Modernism In Evelyn Waugh's Decline And Fall And Vile Bodies, Deirdre Murphy

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Sprinkled, Cleansed, And Comforted”: The Early American Jail, Jacob Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

;Blackwood's ;Responses To Hawthorne In Light Of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation, Holly Young Boud

Theses and Dissertations

Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine was arguably the most important and widely published literary magazine of the nineteenth century. Its readership extended from Britain to America, shaping literary tastes across the Anglophone literary marketplace. BEM wrote two reviews of Nathaniel Hawthornes fiction during the authors most prolific years. The first was published in 1847 and contained a lengthy reflection of the state of American literature that prefaced its review of Mosses from an Old Manse. In 1855, BEM reviewed Hawthornes novels. The language of these reviews encouraged BEMs transatlantic readership to interpret Hawthorne in a very particular light: a dark, intense, and …

New Perspectives On Paul And Marx: William Blake's <">The Chimney Sweeper<"> In <<>I>Songs Of Innocence And Experience<<>/I>, Lianna Jean Manibog

Theses and Dissertations

New Perspectives on Paul and Marx: William Blakes œThe Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLianna Jean Rose ManibogDepartment of English, BYUMaster of Arts This article explores the function of religion in socio-political spheres. Karl Marx is famously against religion in all its various capacities, arguing that it is a tool used by power structures to control the masses. William Blake, the British poet, is also seen as critical of religion, and because of this his works are often read through a Marxist lens. And yet depictions of Blake as a staunchly anti-religious man dont seem to fit with …