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Articles 1 - 30 of 596
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
America The Monstrous: The Birth Of American Horror Fiction In The Long Nineteenth Century, Rachel Kietzman
America The Monstrous: The Birth Of American Horror Fiction In The Long Nineteenth Century, Rachel Kietzman
Dissertations
American gothic works that center the affect of horror explore themes of abjection, inhumanity, and monstrosity that impede a coherent expression of American identity. By approaching these works through the lens of horror rather than only as Gothic works, a picture ofa visceral, embodied becoming takes shape: America is a monstrous birth in the most literal sense of the word, a sign and demonstration that unity and uniformity are not the same, that wholeness does not require conformity, and that political choices are paid for in flesh. In short, American horror fiction is the head of Medusa, an apotropaic sign …
Endings Of Half-Lines In The Middle English Alliterative Joseph Of Arimathea, Ian Cornelius
Endings Of Half-Lines In The Middle English Alliterative Joseph Of Arimathea, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Middle English alliterative poem Joseph of Arimathea survives in a single copy, lacking verse lineation and the regular alliteration expected of this form. Several explanations have been advanced, but the poem has been treated with reserve: scholars and critics have been reluctant, perhaps, to attend closely to a text that has seemed unfinished, careless, or corrupt. The present study counters these impressions with a narrow metrical test. Joseph agrees very well with one of the ‘finer rules’ described in recent scholarship on alliterative metrics, namely the requirement that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Regular line endings support the …
The Hitching Post: American Poetry And Chinese Mythology, Xiamara Elena Hohman
The Hitching Post: American Poetry And Chinese Mythology, Xiamara Elena Hohman
Dissertations
In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which Chinese mythology has figured in American poetry, focusing particularly on the ways Chinese mythologies have served—and continue to serve—as “hitching posts,” quasi-material sites from which meaning can be created and explored. As I am defining it, a myth is a narrative that gives meaning to a lived experience. It explains what we commemorate and worship and renders meaningful both celebration and life. In the first three chapters of this study, I discuss the ways in which Chinese myths and cultural practices have been both used as hitching posts and appropriated by …
Modernism’S Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical Matrilineage, Samantha Marie Lepak
Modernism’S Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical Matrilineage, Samantha Marie Lepak
Dissertations
I position this dissertation at the intersection of modern/contemporary literature, queer/feminist theory, and ancient Greek classics in the hopes of better understanding the spaces in which they meet, engaging with writers from the late modernist era to the present in order to highlight the connections between theories, themes, and practices of queerness from the modernists forward. Using the work of H.D. and writers following in her footsteps, I argue that exploring adaptations of Greek classics written primarily by female and gender-variant authors from the modernist era forward illuminates the extent to which the classics enables writers to “think queerly,” considering …
The Devil In The Machine: The Doctor Travels Through Time In Chris Bush’S Faustus: That Damned Woman, Verna Foster
The Devil In The Machine: The Doctor Travels Through Time In Chris Bush’S Faustus: That Damned Woman, Verna Foster
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman (first performed in 2020) is a feminist and contemporary adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The magus is a woman who travels through time from the seventeenth century to the far distant future. In the process, Johanna Faustus becomes a brilliant scientist who attempts to create digital immortality by uploading the minds of billions of human beings to the Cloud. When a power failure destroys almost all of humanity, it is uncertain whether the universal outage is caused by Mephistopheles (in accordance with the expectations of Faustian fantasy) or is simply an unforeseen but …
Ecologies Of Medieval Latin Poetics, Ian Cornelius
Ecologies Of Medieval Latin Poetics, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The concept of literary ecology is developed as an instrument for large-scale literary study by Alexander Beecroft (2015), for whom the metaphor emphasizes the great diversity of world literatures and the possibility of organizing this diversity into cultural types, analogous to the biologist’s ecotypes. For a study of Latin poetics, the most important typological distinction is between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. Latin acquired an articulated body of stylistic norms (“poetics”) in antiquity as a vernacular language; subsequent developments in Latin poetics were conditioned by the language’s acquisition of cosmopolitan characteristics. I explore the consequences of that shift; texts discussed include …
Ford Madox Ford’S Unusual War: Ongoing Worry And Modernity, Nur Karatas
Ford Madox Ford’S Unusual War: Ongoing Worry And Modernity, Nur Karatas
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the …
Prosodic Protocols And Interruptions Of Them In Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius
Prosodic Protocols And Interruptions Of Them In Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In premodern societies artificial prosody supplied an encoding protocol for the transmission of sound in writing. Focusing on the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman, this essay examines mid-stream interruption, modification, or blending of prosodic protocols. In most cases the interruption takes the form of a mid-line switch from English verse to Latin prose. In a few cases, the switch is from English verse to Latin verse. These interruptions of protocol are part of the formal artistry and multilingual facility of Piers Plowman, encoding a great range of sound and some silence. They prompt readers to re-evaluate well-justified expectations …
The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Pamela Caughie
The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Pamela Caughie
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay asks, when does our effort to avoid offending students interfere with our ability to teach them? Rehearsing conflicts over language and terminology, over who can speak and what can be said, from my four-decade career as a literature professor, critical theorist, and gender scholar, I confront contemporary efforts to censor certain words, to prohibit certain kinds of inquiry, and to limit who can speak about certain subjects by placing recent incidents in relation to previous debates in academia and the public sphere. The university classroom and scholarly peer-reviewed journals have long served as spaces where established viewpoints can …
It’S Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences In Piers Plowman B, Ian Cornelius
It’S Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences In Piers Plowman B, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Recent scholarship on the meter of fourteenth-century English alliterative verse demonstrates that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Piers Plowman is a recognized anomaly, yet there is disagreement about the extent of the differences. In this article, I examine long final dips, the vocalic quality of syllables in the final dip, and the placement of word divisions. Throughout, my focus is on the B version of the poem. I make a survey of lines with a word division after the final lift and of lines ending in -ly adverbs, compounds in -man, compounds in -nesse, nouns in -(i)oun …
George Colvile's Translation Of The Consolation Of Philosophy, Ian Cornelius
George Colvile's Translation Of The Consolation Of Philosophy, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Consolatio philosophiae of the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius (fifth/sixth century) was read and studied intensely in medieval western Europe and repeatedly translated into vernacular languages. Medieval commentaries on this text and translations of it claim attention today as case studies in a history of reading, for they exemplify the practices of medieval literary scholasticism. In an English context, the final flowering of this reading tradition may be placed in the year 1556, when John Cawoode printed a new translation of the Consolatio by a ‘George Coluile, alias Coldewel’. The translator remains unidentified. The translation is a medieval throwback …
Some Corrections To The Notation Of Verse Structure In Two Recent Editions Of Middle English Alliterative Poems, Ian Cornelius
Some Corrections To The Notation Of Verse Structure In Two Recent Editions Of Middle English Alliterative Poems, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Germanic alliterative verse the fundamental unit of meter and rhythm is the half-line. Editions of older Germanic alliterative poems now usually record this feature in their typographic design: the poetry is lineated and coordinate half-lines are separated with whitespace. For Middle English alliterative poems, the usual presentation has been in undivided long lines, but several recent editions separate half-lines with whitespace or punctuation-marks. The present essay examines the half-line divisions in John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre’s Piers Plowman B (2014/2018) and Ad Putter and Myra Stokes’s Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2014). Burrow …
Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou
Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou
Dissertations
This dissertation is a critical critique of Queer Theory as an academic field. It argues that queer theory’s establishment as an academic discipline and as a periodizing and historicizing force through the bibliographies that make up its canon has upheld and supported the very normative models of temporality and progression that the field claims to resist. As a result, I argue, queer theory has focused most heavily on modernism and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has positioned the nineteenth century as the precursor to the queer strategies and representations that we see more fully fleshed out in the twentieth …
Takamiya Ms 23, Its Exemplar, And The Editio Princeps Of Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius, J. Eric Ensley
Takamiya Ms 23, Its Exemplar, And The Editio Princeps Of Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius, J. Eric Ensley
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 23 is a mid sixteenth-century copy of the B Version of Piers Plowman, distinguished by pervasive linguistic modernization. The manuscript derives from a source very similar to that used by Robert Crowley for the editio princeps, a textual affiliation that remains unexplained. In their critical edition, George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson collated Takamiya 23 in full but did not print its unique variant readings and the manuscript has not figured in recent textual scholarship on Piers Plowman. This neglect has led to some conclusions that should be revisited, particularly regarding …
Feminist Modernist Dance, Part Ii, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Feminist Modernist Dance, Part Ii, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In late July of 1959 Chicago dance writer Ann Barzel went to Cuba. The successful revolution led by Fidel Castro to overthrow the military dictatorship of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista had happened a little over six months earlier, and relations with the United States, while not comfortable, were still imaginable. Barzel came at the invitation of her friends, the ballet dancers Alicia and Fernando Alonso, to act as a member of the selection board for auditions for the Ballet Alicia Alonso. Founded in 1948, Ballet Alicia Alonso was Cuba’s first professional ballet company (it would later become the Ballet Nacional …
Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius
Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
From a visual standpoint as well as a semantic and functional one, Middle English lyrics were often absorbed into their co(n)texts. In what sense, then, is a “Middle English lyric” a thing? I seek in this essay to show what metrical analysis may contribute to that question. Context is not all. If contextual analysis has tended to dissolve the presumed thing-hood of Middle English lyrics, metrical analysis shows that verses are robust enough to sustain that. Metrical structuration sets verse apart from its surround; it defines the verse object as a distinct entity, distinguished by a specifiable compositional craft.
Langland Parrhesiastes, Ian Cornelius
Langland Parrhesiastes, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The ancient Greek word parrhēsia designates speech that is bold, frank, and free, holding nothing back; a parrhēsiastēs is a person who gives voice to such speech. Although the word was little used in Latin literature and had no precise Latin equivalent, the concept was transmitted to medieval western Europe in rhetorical theory and the New Testament. In this essay I propose that the concept of parrhēsia may help to register the irruptive force, pointedness, risks, and complexity of certain acts of saying in Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century English vision poem. For most of this essay, I focus on a …
Viruses, Vaccines, And The Erotics Of Risk In Latinx Hiv Stories And Covid-19, Dr. Suzanne Bost
Viruses, Vaccines, And The Erotics Of Risk In Latinx Hiv Stories And Covid-19, Dr. Suzanne Bost
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In 2019, I published Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (University of Illinois Press), in which I discuss contagion as a metaphor for embracing our shared materiality with others. Six months later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors were crossing streets to avoid each other. Social distancing is, counterintuitively, asking us to view separation and seclusion as forms of solidarity. But how can we be solid if we are oriented against each other? Isolation itself has become contagious: sharing repulsion and rejection, measuring six feet of “social” distance from others. These spaces are made up of a variety …
Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …
Take This Work Global, Ian Cornelius
Take This Work Global, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History elaborates a general program for the study of literature centered on the question, “What is the thing read?” Concepts of document, text, and work are parsed with care, generating many valuable insights and clarifications, but there is need for more thinking about the linguistic medium of literature. To textual studies, bibliography, and book history — the trio of foundational disciplines advocated by Eggert — one should add philology, or the study of literary language.
The Text Of The "Abc Of Aristotle" In The ‘Winchester Anthology’, Ian Cornelius
The Text Of The "Abc Of Aristotle" In The ‘Winchester Anthology’, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Middle English ABC of Aristotle is an alliterative abecedary poem that survives in fifteen manuscript copies dating between the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most eccentric copy, bearing the greatest number of unique textual variants, is in London, British Library, Additional 60577, a commonplace book and miscellany of verse and prose known today as the ‘Winchester Anthology’. The Winchester copy of the ABC of Aristotle is distinguished from all others by changes to vocabulary, idiom, and prosody. The result is a unique redaction, illustrating the kind of literary composition that could be expected to grow out of late …
The Intricacies Of Counting To Four In Old English Poetry, Ian Cornelius, Eric Weiskott
The Intricacies Of Counting To Four In Old English Poetry, Ian Cornelius, Eric Weiskott
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupies a middle ground between two levels of analytic description, distinguished by Roman Jakobson in an influential article as ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’. Metrists in the Sievers–Bliss tradition employ a concept of metrical position (a key component of verse design), yet the focus of attention usually remains on the contours of stress of individual verses. Important exceptions are the studies of Thomas Cable and Nicolay Yakovlev. …
Hanna (Ed.), Richard Rolle: Unprinted Latin Writings, Ian Cornelius
Hanna (Ed.), Richard Rolle: Unprinted Latin Writings, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
No abstract provided.
The Upstart Peril In The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Lydia Craig
The Upstart Peril In The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Lydia Craig
Dissertations
Responding to the French Revolution (1789-1799) with his widely read text Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke influentially accused an ambitious bourgeoisie of inciting the lower classes to revolt against the aristocracy and Bourbon dynasty. He also insinuated that only the class hierarchy and feudal respect prevented a similar upstart peril in England from occasioning revolution. For the English middle classes, this demonization of upstarts, or parvenus posed an ideological challenge to their public consolidation as a political and cultural force. Bourgeois authors from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens utilized an upstart rivalry device …
Mcmullen/Weaver (Eds.), The Legacy Of Boethius In Medieval England, Ian Cornelius
Mcmullen/Weaver (Eds.), The Legacy Of Boethius In Medieval England, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
No abstract provided.
The International Life Of A Russian Colonial Document: The Russian-American Company, The Kashaya Pomos, The Bodega Miwoks, And The 1817 Métini Protocol, Jeffrey Glover
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In September 1817 officials of the Russian colony of Ross drafted a protocol of a meeting held with the Kashaya Pomos, the Bodega Miwoks, and other Native Americans. The protocol described how the Russians had promised gifts and military protection to their Native American allies in exchange for the right to continue occupying Métini, a Kashaya Pomo–controlled territory about eighty-five miles north of San Francisco. Soon, reports of the meeting had made their way up and down the coast and across the Pacific, as Native Americans, Russian imperial ministers, and diplomats from Russia's imperial rivals debated its significance. This essay …
Christopher Bigsby, Twenty-First Century American Playwrights, Verna Foster
Christopher Bigsby, Twenty-First Century American Playwrights, Verna Foster
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
No abstract provided.
Reforming Sensory Disability In Early Modern England, Mary Lutze
Reforming Sensory Disability In Early Modern England, Mary Lutze
Dissertations
Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England traces early modern literary depictions of blindness and deafness during the Reformation. the project proposes an inherently dynamic early modern religious model of disabilities: first characterized by its initial rejection of England's prior faith tradition, then by doctrinal negotiation among reformed dissenters. It analyzes the shift in disability representation in popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century before culminating in an examination of seventeenth-century deaf education. Finally, the project proposes that the seventeenth-century advent of deaf education should be read as a concrete ideological shift in English society's perception of the disabled.
Interpreting Minorness And Minor Characters In The Victorian Novel, Grace Pregent
Interpreting Minorness And Minor Characters In The Victorian Novel, Grace Pregent
Dissertations
An unprecedented and staggering wealth of characters floods the Victorian novel with its rich social representation of the nineteenth century. in reading these capacious narratives that seemingly accumulate objects, plots, and people, critics continuously privilege plot and minimize or dismiss the intricate participation of minor characters in the construction of meaning. Studies of literary characterization have classically struggled to articulate a theory of character that moves beyond reductive dichotomies€”flat or round, major or minor€”but that does not become inflated and cumbersome. Despite a lack of comprehensive critical attention, minor characters are no minor matter, and the brevity of their textual …
Utopian Discourse In Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Casey Alan Jergenson
Utopian Discourse In Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Casey Alan Jergenson
Dissertations
I argue in this dissertation that utopianism is a vibrant form of cultural production in the post-Cold War period, despite the paucity of recent texts depicting €œgood€ societies. Most literary historical accounts of the genre place the decline of the utopian narrative in the early twentieth century, with a brief resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary culture has since become inundated with dystopian and post-apocalyptic visions of the future. If we take this generic distribution at face-value, it seems symptomatic of the utopian idea's retreat from cultural production since the 1980s. Influential critics have resisted this narrative by demonstrating …