English Language and Literature Commons^™

Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Birth Family Search, Trauma, and Mel-han-cholia in Korean Adoptee Memoirs” analyzes the connections between adoption trauma and birth family search by examining three Korean-American adoptee memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, both by Jane Jeong Trenka; and Ghost of Sangju by Soojung Jo. I draw links between their work and studies on trauma by critical scholars Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Margaret Homans, and Jennifer Cho. According to Caruth, the pathology of a traumatic experience lies in the victim’s inability to fully experience the traumatic event as it happens; only …

Jazz Epidemics And Deep Set Diseases: The De-Pathologization Of The Black Body In The Work Of Three Harlem Renaissance Writers, Shane C. Hunter

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes’s, Thurman’s, and Nugent’s work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology …

How Proto-Feminist Was George Eliot?, Ellie L. Feis

UCARE: Research Products

The Mill on the Floss shows the struggle of Maggie, a woman who values education over beauty, in a judgmental society. Maggie is shamed by her society after her cousin’s fiancé, Stephen, tricks her into running away with him. Maggie is forced to live in shame and only escapes public oppression when she dies.

Romola is the story of how a young woman who is forced rely on men for a sense of purpose and safety. Her husband is conniving and has extramarital affairs. Romola finds a happy ending when she is free from patriarchal influence and relies solely on …

Victorian Counter-Worlds And The Uncanny: The Fantasy Illustrations Of Walter Crane And Arthur Rackham, Amzie A. Dunekacke

UCARE: Research Products

I will prepare an in-depth examination of the different, often opposing ways illustrators Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham portray elements of fantasy in their fairy tale illustrations. Fantasy in fairy tales became very popular during the “Golden Age of Illustration” in Britain, which lasted from the mid nineteenth century until the First World War. Fantasy served as a form of escapism from the rigidity of Victorian society and the increasingly industrialized culture. In my examination, I will focus on how Crane and Rackham’s separate styles use or abandon elements of fantasy such as the horrific and grotesque, anthropomorphism of animals …

Penelope’S Daughters, Barbara Dell`Abate-Çelebi

Zea E-Books Collection

A feminist perspective of the myth of Penelope in Annie Leclerc’s Toi, Pénélope, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Silvana La Spina’s Penelope.

At the origin of Western literature stands Queen Penelope—faithfully waiting for her husband to come home: keeping house, holding on to the throne, keeping the suitors at arm’s length, preserving Odysseus’ place and memory, deserted for the pursuit of war and adventures, and bringing up a son alone, but always keeping the marriage intact. Yet recently the character of Penelope, long the archetype of abandoned, faithful, submissive, passive wife, has been reinterpreted by feminist criticism and re-envisioned by …

Defining Taboo: A Study Of The Life And Work Of The Brontë Sisters, Brittany Bell

UCARE: Research Products

Silence=Death: Gay Rights, Wuthering Heights, and the Outspoken Emily Brontë.
Conference paper focused on: • Non-Normative Gender and Relationship Roles • Gender Ambiguity and Role Reversal • Sexual Addiction -Destruction of the Body -Destruction of the Mind -Destruction of the Spirit

God is not a Feminist.
Journal Article focused on: • Battle against patriarchal convention • Feminism, Gender Inequality, and Class Inequality • Involvement of the Christian Church in all of the above

The Girl With The Fur Coat, Cameron S. Steele

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

THE GIRL WITH THE FUR COAT thesis is comprised of 40 poems and a five-page introduction that examine – with equal parts intimacy and distance – how interior and exterior violence threatens female subjecthood, as well as how girlhood is always – and will always be – transforming the female self. The thesis produces this intimate-yet-distancing effect through a close attention to the (primarily free-verse) forms of the individual poems and how those forms interact with the poems’ subjects, bodies, Surrealist moments and fabulist imagery. Also, the arrangement of the poems helps to create a sense of close, disturbing conversation …

Dreaming Free From The Chains: Teaching The Rhetorical Sovereignty Of Gerald Vizenor Through Bearheart, Lydia R. Presley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Gerald Vizenor’s novel Bearheart, through the lens of rhetorical sovereignty. What this means is that the crux of my understanding of Bearheart begins with the knowledge that the language, terminology, and style used by Vizenor are not only his choices, but also his inherent Native right to use. I argue that it is important to teach Vizenor’s theoretical ideas through Bearheart because each of its relatively short episodes, or series of episodes, deals with a key theoretical idea that can be explored not only in a Native American literature setting, but in …

Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland K. Vegso, Marco Abel

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The article examines the relationship of biopower and cinema through the analysis of a specific film, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004). It argues that in the age of biopower, resistance to power cannot be conceived of in terms of a radical outside to power. Rather, biopolitical resistance must take place on the terrain of this power itself, that is, within the field of life. Therefore, what we call the “viral” politics of The Edukators must be interpreted precisely in this context. The film argues that the exhaustion of political paradigms inherited from the past century forces us to take the …

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

CDRH Grant Reports

In the third six months of work on "Image Analysis for Archival Discovery," the project team has made progress toward the goals outlined in our report from June 2015. As we reported in June 2015, we realized that our original plan to analyze 7 million pages from Chronicling America was overly ambitious for the grant period, and we revised our goal to complete a thorough case study of our methodology and code for all newspaper images in Chronicling America from the period 1836-1840. Activities undertaken, toward this and other grant goals, from June 2015–December 2015:

• Publication of the article, "Developing …

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Remembering Barbara Hardy, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I don't compare my intellectual capacity with Lydgate's, but I do remember the precise moment when I knew that the study and potentially the teaching of 'English' were absolutely what I wanted to commit myself to for the rest of my working life, an already distinctly 'mature' student though I was. That moment occurred during my first year at Birkbeck, when Barbara was lecturing on Samuel Richardson's vast epistolary work of fiction, Clarissa, and showing how Clarissa's syntax is one of the ways in which the nature of her intelligence is distinguished from that of every other character in the …

In Memoriam, Bill Adams (1923-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With the passing of Bill Adams at the age of 92 we have truly reached the end of an era. Bill had a close association with the George Eliot Fellowship for fifty years and only two days before his death on 21 June he had laid a wreath ih Nuneaton, as the Fellowship's guest of honour, and after his speech enjoyed chatting at the museum tea room with guests and members, some of whom he had known for decades.

Barbara Hardy (1924-2016), Isobel Armstrong

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This will be a very personal obituary because in losing Barbara I lost one of the profoundest friendships of my life. Her demanding intellectual boldness and buoyant strength of mind were immediately striking. But she also had a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm, a warmth that was evident in the home environment she created: to enter her Earl's Court flat was like entering a Matisse painting - full of colour, oriental carpets, bowls and pots, and paintings by her daughter, Kate. I was lucky enough to experience that warmth and energy less than a week before she died, …

In Janet Dempster's Footsteps: Reminiscence, David Harper

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The road from Trent Valley Station down towards the town centre curves gently past the row of horse-chestnuts in Bond Gate with their white candles. To the young boy arriving to take up residence in Nuneaton it promised something new, always interesting, always just out of reach.

From my earliest years I was a keen reader and felt the privilege of our local author's being one of the unquestioned greats; but it was George Eliot's north Warwickshire that initially attracted me, with The Mill on the Floss and Si/as Marner my favourites. This was reinforced by cycling the lanes for …

'Woman's Freedom Lies In Choosing The Husband Who Is To Be Her Master': Existentialism And The Female Slave In Daniel Deronda, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Various commentators have suggested that Daniel Deronda can be read as a text which espouses early existentialist principles, elevating the individual's search for personal truths above society's expectations and conceptions of duty. I am going to suggest that Deronda 's proto-existentialism is of particular interest when viewed as poised between nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations of existentialism, the godly and the godless, and when Deronda's search is compared with the narratives of the female characters whose freedoms are more curtailed by social mores.

Riding Horses In Middlemarch, Beryl Gary

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'George Eliot's Peculiar Passion' i the title of an article by Sarah Wintle, refers to the belief expressed by Katherine Mansfield in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, that George Eliot had a 'peculiar passion for horses'. At the beginning of the article, Wintle quotes the part of Mansfield's letter which asks Murry to

think of some of [George Eliot's] pictures of country life - the breadth - the sense of sun lying on warm barns - great warm kitchens at twilight when the men came home from the fields - the feeling of beasts horses and cows …

A Tribute To Barbara Hardy, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara and I were close friends for over fifty years. She was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis in 1962, and from then on we met three or four times a year. I had previously reviewed The Novels of George Eliot and been impressed by the subtlety of the sustained investigation and the freshness of approach. It would be accurate to say that it was the major influence on my own studies in Victorian literature.

Notes On Contributors

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Isobel Armstrong--John Burton--Marianne Burton--Delia da Sousa Correa--Patricia Duncker--Beryl Gray--Anna Gutowska--David Halliwell--Graham Handley--David Harper--Margaret Harris--Alain Jumeau--George Levine--Tapan Kumar Mukherjee--David Paterson--John Rignall--Eri Satoh--Michael Slater

Barbara Hardy: Recollections, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The last time I saw Barbara Hardy was in November 2014, at the Middlemarch day held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Senate House, London, when she gave a characteristically rich paper on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.' She had turned ninety that June, and while she was physically diminished and the voice less bell-like, her intonations and gestures were as ever, and her responses to questions as sharp.

George Eliot's Afterlife: Dinitia Smith's The Honeymoon And Diana Souhami's Gwendolen, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, chapter 20, as Dorothea Casubon sits musing in Rome, George Eliot presents one of the most traumatic honeymoons in fiction . With decorum, but unmistakably, Dorothea's sexual confusion is conveyed: however, she will live through widowhood to fulfilment as Dorothea Ladislaw. In contrast, George Eliot denies such fulfilment to Gwendolen Grandcourt in her next novel, Daniel Deronda. Where Dorothea's acceptance of Casaubon's proposal arises from idealistic ignorance, Gwendolen's decision to marry Grandcourt is morally flawed because of her awareness of his liaison with Lydia Glasher. There is no question about the physical consummation of the Grandcourt marriage, unlike …

Opera Review: Middlemarch In Spring, A Two-Act Opera By Composer Alien Shearer, Libretto By Claudia Stevens. First Performance, San Francisco, Z Space, March 19, 2015, Delia Da Sousa Correa, Michael Halliwell

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot consistently paid meticulous attention to matters of 'voice,' typically providing precise descriptions of her characters' voices, whether speaking or singing. Dorothea Brooke's harp-like voice is, of course, one of the qualities that first transfixes Will Ladislaw. Eliot's novels also resound with allusions to the operatic repertoire, from Caterina Sarti's impassioned renditions of Gluck in 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story' through to the elaborate operatic analogies that characterize the social milieu of Daniel Deronda. Despite these deeply-threaded affinities with opera, this is the first operatic adaptation of Middlemarch.

Barbara Hardy In France, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy was a well-known figure among French Victorianists, probably because she had written on three at least of the major novelists of the period, Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, not to forget Thomas Hardy and a few others.

As far as I am concerned, when I started researching on George Eliot in the early seventies, I found her book The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form particularly inspiring. At that time, most critical studies dealing with George Eliot were either concerned with the problem of realism or with a purely moral approach. The notion of form, which …

Conference Report: Annual George Eliot Conference: Daniel Deronda, Institute Of English Studies, 7 November 2015, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The conference opened with a characteristically rich and incisive paper by Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck), 'Re-Reading Daniel Deronda', which, sadly, was the last she was to deliver. In 'Daniel Deronda: The Two Halves That Were Never Whole', Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck) presented a paper that will become part of her forthcoming book on Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. The 'Two Sequels to Daniel Deronda' discussed by John Rignall (Warwick) were a seven-page satirical squib in Mr Punch s Pocket-Book Jor 1877 entitled' Daniel Deronda Book IX', and a short novel, Gwendolen: or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to 'Daniel Deronda', published in …

Japanese Branch Report, Eri Satoh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 28 November 2015 , the Nineteenth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Obirin University.

Barbara Hardy On Dickens, Michael Slater

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1970, the centenary year of Dickens's death, saw a flood of books published on the novelist including several by distinguished writers and critics ranging from F .R. Leavis to J. B. Priestley. One of the best, and most ground-breaking, of these latter was Barbara Hardy's The Moral Art of Dickens, published by the Athlone Press of the University of London. A collection of essays no more than 155 pages long, this book, elegantly and lucidly written like all of Barbara's work, was followed over the years by other critical studies from her pen that were to have a profound and …

Between 'Silly Novels' And Vegetation Myths: George Eliot's Subversive Use Of The Two Suitors Convention In Middlemarch, Anna Gutowska

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Take a woman's head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English, when not required . (Eliot 1992:305)

'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', George Eliot's vitriolic overview of popular novels of the 1850s, which is the source of the mock-recipe above, was published in 1856, shortly before Eliot started writing her first work of fiction, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' . More than ten years then passed before …

Two Sequels To Daniel Deronda, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The two sequels of my title are a seven-page satirical squib in Mr. Punch's Pocket-Book for 1877 entitled 'Daniel Deronda, Book IX',' and a short novel or long story of around 50,000 words - much the same length as 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story' - Gwendolen: or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda published in Boston, Mass., in 1878. The novel was published anonymously but there is one edition published by William F. Gill with a variant title page giving the author as one Anna Clay Beecher/ whose identity remains a mystery.' Both these texts have been contextualized, …

An American Tribute, George Levine

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Isobel Armstrong begins her wonderful obituary for Barbara in the Guardian by noting how Barbara loved a good argument. No consideration of what Barbara Hardy has left us can get anywhere without recognition that she was a feisty woman. She was also an extraordinarily warm and inspiring one.

I owe her a lot. I first met her when, as an assistant professor still very wet behind the ears, I was lucky enough to spend a research year in London. Barbara took me in as though I were a serious scholar. She helped me find my way around London, was generous …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2015, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Another successful year' is always good to report, and is expected of a chairman. But it really was a terrific year for the Fellowship. The only damper was the slow, painfully slow progress on the Visitor Centre. I start with thanks to the Fellowship Council, strengthened in March by the election of Joy Hunter, Joy Redfem and Linda Mayne as full members. The George Eliot Essay Prize was won in 2015 by Jen Davis, and her essay appeared in last year's Review. On a more positive side, we think Whitbread is still committed to helping create a Visitor Centre; and …

Editors' Note

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This year's issue of the George Eliot Review is the first for more than two decades that has not been shaped by the editorial hand of Beryl Gray. Beryl joined Graham Handley as co-editor in 1992 and continued until 2015, playing the leading role in making the Review more polished and professional. Working with Beryl was always a pleasure and an instruction, and the editors would like to mark her retirement by expressing their gratitude for, and warm appreciation of, her long service. 97