English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review Of Victorian Narratives Of The Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction, Helen Kingstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century saw a number of ways in which amateurs and professional historians and novelists approached the presentation of history, especially histories of the recent past. Eminent, professional historians at universities, and those aspiring to join them, increasingly avoided commenting on periods within living memory on the grounds that one could quickly lose credibility debating subjects not yet fully digested. Kingstone clearly illustrates the point in chapter 9, Conclusions: writing 'both before and after the United Kingdom's 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, I am aware that any arc I try to draw, any judgment I try …

Japanese Branch Report, Masako Kimura

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 10 December 2016, the Twentieth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held in Otani University. The morning session, moderated by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), began with an opening address by Yoriko Murase (Otani University). Thereafter, two papers were presented. The first paper 'The Influence of Adam Smith's Discussion of Sympathy on George Eliot: Reading Si/as Marner with The Theory of Moral Sentiments' was read by Chiyo Fujiwara (Kobe College). The second paper 'Women's Education inAdam Bede' was read by Chiyuki Kanamaru (Aichi Bunkyo University).

Review Of The World Of Mr Casaubon: Britain's War Of Mythography, Colin Kidd

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title of this book is interesting, as the subtitle describes what it is about but the main title refers to a fictional character from Middlemarch, part of a novel recently voted the greatest in English. Such a title makes the book much more marketable to a general audience and more likely to be reviewed in some of the broadsheets than a title which indicates that this is a book that 'venture[s] into the thickets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarianism' (vi). But the downside of the more appealing title is that readers who expect Middlemarch to play a central role …

Review Of The Transferred Life Of George Eliot: The Biography Of A Novelist, Philip Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have been several good new biographies of George Eliot in recent years but none quite like this. Davis's subtle and searching analysis focuses almost exclusively on the writing as he traces the complex ways in which the experience of Mary Ann, or later Marian, Evans is 'transferred', to use the term of his title, into the creation of George Eliot and her work. The first life of relative failure, unhappiness and unsuccessful relationships is transformed into a second life as George Eliot, successful novelist and woman of letters, and this closely written and argued study explores the relationship between …

In Memoriam, Kathleen Adams (1929-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The sheer number of years, forty, that Kathleen Adams was Secretary of the George Eliot Fellowship, is extraordinary, but that number does not do justice to the prodigious amount of time, energy and dedication that she devoted to the job.

Like many others, Kathleen came to George Eliot via her life rather than her works. As a grammar school girl from Barrs Hill in Coventry she had heard about Eliot; as an adult she learned details of her extraordinary life. That took her to the novels and then a commitment to tell people about them which was to dominate her …

Kathleen Adams: A Tribute, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

All but 50 years we knew each other. And I think George Eliot owes Kathleen Adams a lot. This is common knowledge - for where would the Fellowship be without her tireless efforts. Westminster Abbey, the Nuneaton statue, membership numbers: these are all well known. But that small terrace house in Stepping Stones Road, Coventry, visited by so many important figures, represents for me the championing of the ordinary folk and their appreciation of George Eliot's work. I remember an American academic being disappointed at the Newsletter Kathleen prepared so diligently, and how it was not on the intellectual level …

Review Of Writing The Stage Coach Nation: Locality On The Move In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Ruth Livesey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Starting from the observation that so many of the major Victorian novels are set, not in the railway age in which they were written, but in the horse-drawn world of the previous generation, a world that is 'just past', this fine study explores the ways in which novelists from Waiter Scott to Thomas Hardy use the stage coach to connect particular localities, often closely observed and substantially realized, to the larger framework of the nation. This turning back to the past is not, Ruth Livesey insists, a retreat from the complications and dislocations of a modern present into a simpler …

Living With George Eliot: A Tribute To My Parents, Will Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was a strange but much-appreciated honour to be asked to address the annual George Eliot Fellowship lunch in 2016. It was strange because I'd attended many such events long ago - fewer more recently - and had always sat with the 'rank and file' on the lower tables while Mum and Dad, officers and distinguished guests occupied the top table. So, when on Sunday 20 November, I rose to speak, I was quite miffed to find that there was no top table! All very egalitarian, but it left me wandering up and down the floor as I imparted my …

Radical Politics In The 1860s: The Writing Of Felix Holt, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While Felix Halt the Radical was being written there was a transformation in the atmosphere surrounding further parliamentary reform in Britain. In March 1865, when George Eliot began the novel, the Liberal Prime Minister Palmerston remained cautious about an extension of the franchise. Yet Felix Holt was finished on 31 May 1866 amidst great political excitement: a Reform Bill was being debated and the outcome uncertain. This change in emphasis in the political mood had its effect on Eliot 's writing, since the 'reform campaign had not gained enough momentum' I to explain Eliot's initial choice of subject. To say …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2016, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The most noteworthy events of 2016 were the deaths of Bill and Kathleen Adams, a couple whose extraordinary dedication and hard work from 1968 until 2008 enabled the Fellowship to prosper and become a genuinely influential literary society. Bill was the first to die, just a couple of days after laying the wreath for us in June in Nuneaton, an event he loved, and where he met and chatted to so many old friends.

The AGM in March saw the existing team of Council members renewing their positions, with a request from Hon. Treasurer Jill Bridgewater that we should find …

When Howard Met George: A Play In Two Acts, Susan Ryley Hoyle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dramatis Personae (in order of appearance)

Marian Evans (Mrs. Lewes) (George Eliot) (left) was born near Nuneaton in 1819 to a prosperous land agent and his (second) wife. She has lost whatever regional accent she may have had, and has often been complimented on her melodious voice. She speaks quite slowly, rarely with emphasis, nearly always with a shy earnestness and a dry sense of humour. At the time of this play, only her husband and (very recently) her publisher know that she is 'George Eliot', the author of the huge best-seller Adam Bede (1859), and of the only …

Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Some years ago many of us were excited by the discovery of a cache of Willa Cather’s correspondence with publisher Alfred A. Knopf that had been in the hands of Peter Prescott, one of the succession of would-be biographers of Knopf. He died before he completed it. These letters are now held in the Barbara Dobkin Collection in New York City. Before these materials came to light, researchers, including the editors of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, had relied on a strange and fragmentary “memoir” Knopf wrote of his relationship with Cather based on his correspondence files with her, and …

George Eliot In Romantic Biofiction, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon is the first complete biofiction of the woman enduringly known by her masculine pen name, George Eliot. It tells the story of a precocious provincial English girl who challenges the conventions of her middleclass upbringing as she pursues a writing career in Victorian London, moves in with an alreadymarried man, becomes one of the greatest living British novelists, and then marries John Cross, a man twenty years her junior whom she’d long called “nephew.” Whether or not Eliot’s brief marriage to Cross constituted a “happy ending” depends on how you interpret the harrowing incident that took …

Engl 352: Intermediate Fiction Writing—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Chigozie Obioma

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Absent the elements of effective writing, there has been a strong debate on whether or not other aspects of creative writing can be taught. Many practicing writers like myself who teach have concluded that a student writer can be guided towards fully actualizing their talent, and this “guidance” is what mostly constitutes teaching. How then do we evaluate the effectiveness of this teaching, and to what extent do students’ individual talent help or stand in the way of effective instruction? How do we plan various learning outcomes and test the success of such strategies over the duration of the ENGL …

Fight For Equality, Edgar A. Ruiz-Guaderrama

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The great author Jane Austen lived during a time period in which there was a patriarchal society installed which made it quite difficult for women rights similar to the Victorian Era. Both in Jane Austen’s society and the Victorian Era, there were huge gaps in gender equality. The society at the time made it easy for men to run everything that happened in society which in turn lead to women being at a huge disadvantage.Jane Austen showed people many examples of this inequality in her book Pride and Prejudice It is crucial as a society to improve from and correct …

Behind The Shadows, Selena Ramirez Ahilon

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The nineteenth century is classified as the Victorian era, a period in which the middle class rose in power as a result of industrialization. As the middle classes living standards rose the middle class became reliant on utilitarianism values. This ideal appeared to offer a more comfortable life for both men and women, however, by classifying the position of women as the “heart” and men as the “head” of the house, women were hindered to a society in shadows. Women were restricted in every aspect of life because men were in power, and the ideal Victorian woman became the one …

Jonathan Swift: Ideology And Influences, Ricky Romero

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

This project will analyze the ideology and influences Irish author and satirist, Jonathan Swift had in cultivating theories on society/economy and thoughts especially relevant in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. The information is worth noting because of the bigger than life themes he suggests in liberal thoughts and social interactions between people. Ultimately, remorseful thoughts on monotheistic governments, European influences, and pro-world-peace examples were found as prominent ideas conveyed by Jonathan Swift.

Overall, it is morally correct to agree with Jonathan Swift’s ideology of a world based upon freedom and liberty. It is fairly simple to sympathize with Swift’s thoughts on …

A Matter Of The Soul: Our Human Relationship To Trees In Nebraska, Ariana Brocious

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

We love trees. We connect with them more closely, relate to them more intimately, than almost any other plant. Nebraska, in the country’s heartland, may be known today for its fields of corn, soybeans, and cattle. But for the last 200 years, Nebraskans have also labored to fill their prairie state with trees. This obsession has touched all kinds of things: tax incentives, state slogans, farming practices, rural homeownership, urban water bills, state celebrations, land use and conservation.

A Matter of the Soul: Our Human Relationship to Trees in Nebraska is a work of narrative nonfiction that looks at how …

Engl 487: English Capstone Experience—A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Stage

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio documents the teaching objectives, strategies, and assessments for a capstone course in the English major at UNL. As the English Studies Capstone and as an ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) 10 course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, English 487 must help students meet key outcomes for the department and the University, but it also allows flexibility and creativity in the methods chosen to meet these requirements and structure the course. This portfolio thereby reflects on the intellectual labor of designing a particular version of these requirements and on guiding students through the design. The assessments included here are measuring traditional …

Teaching Place: Heritage, Home And Community, The Heart Of Education, Judy Kay Lorenzen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the implementation of a Place-conscious pedagogy as a means to teach heritage and sense of place. This pedagogy is framed upon the premise that trying to understand our heritage and place—ourselves—are crucial elements in our ability to live well as individuals who are connected school/community members, who help our schools/communities thrive, becoming Place-conscious citizens. I argue that in teaching in such a culturally diverse community, tensions rise as immigration has become a main focus. Our school/community has experienced many ethnic groups with vast social differences for which Place-conscious education offers practical solutions. These students have a great …

Review: Shakespeare’S Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing And Competition In Renaissance Theatre. Janet Clare., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic is a fit title for Janet Clare’s investigation of Shakespeare and his theatrical environment. While her subtitle outlines the key practices that underpin her readings of Shakespeare’s plays, their co-texts, and their competition, the idea of traffic best encapsulates the complexity of the relationships that Clare charts. As she writes, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic may enable “a more conjoined critical study of the plays of the early modern stage — one that will take into account the networks of influence, exchange, and competition of stage traffic that make up the matrix essential for talent to flourish” (267). Her …

White Paper, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials.1 Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

Final Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials. Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

“In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett,” Willa Cather wrote in her preface to the Mayflower Edition of The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), “I find this observation: ‘The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.” Cather’s private letters and her public statements in the form of essays, interviews, and speeches testify abundantly that Jewett had teased Cather’s mind over and over in the years following her friend and mentor’s death in 1909. Furthermore, as …

Nebraska's Wedding Crasher, Jennine Capó Crucet

Department of English: Faculty Publications

My building thinks of itself as Lincoln's premier wedding venue. I was not told this when I signed the lease. A glitch of duct work sends the sounds of every single party straight through the exhaust fan of my apartment's bathroom, so loud and clear that I can hear the names of everyone in the wedding party as they are announced -- not just in the bathroom, but from the living room. I can hear when people are clapping, can hear the claps as individual sonic events: I can almost always make out the crisp echo of the last person …

Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Recent pedagogical scholarship has engaged strenuously with the use of YouTube and other online platforms in the literature classroom. Stephen O’Neill, for one, champions video-sharing and similar media “in the interests of fostering various experiential, collaborative and peer-learning scenarios,” especially in tandem with the “array of Shakespeare content, which can potentially illuminate and deepen [learners’] understanding of the text and its diverse contexts” (190). In this essay, I discuss the advantages of sharing for this purpose online materials that have been developed by artists, instructors, students, and others—specifically, materials with a musical orientation. Along the way, I shall explain my …

I Dreamed In Terms Of Novels: Dorothy Day And The Ethics Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Katherine Thomsen Pierson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To the extent that she is known, Dorothy Day, a twentieth-century American Catholic journalist and social reformer currently under consideration for sainthood by the Vatican, is recognized for her religious influences. Pope Francis, in his 2015 speech before the American Congress, said she was inspired by “the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.” Yet throughout her life Day was a consistent reader of secular texts and even said she “lived by” the vision of some of her favorite writers. This thesis examines Day’s secular influences—in particular Dickens’s David Copperfield and Little Dorrit—and begins to trace their …

Urgent News From The Front, Jennifer J. Gray

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is an original work in the genres of fiction and poetry. It consists of three short stories and a chapbook of poems. My work focuses on the ways we find to survive, to create meaning, and to connect to ourselves, to those around us, and to the world in which we live.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

A New Kind Of Social Dreaming: Diversifying Contemporary Dystopian Fiction, Brita M. Thielen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis argues that the dystopian genre lacks diversity not because dystopian novels with a focus on issues of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality have not been written, but because these novels are assigned to other genres. Reevaluating the importance of a future setting to dystopian fiction opens the genre to stories whose characters need not exist in a future temporal landscape because their oppression exists in the present. The entrenched norm of a future temporal setting in dystopian fiction privileges the perspectives of a group of people who largely do not experience systemic oppression in the present: white heterosexual men. …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …