English Language and Literature Commons^™

Using Textual Features To Predict Popular Content On Digg, Paul H. Miller

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Over the past few years, collaborative rating sites, such as Netflix, Digg and Stumble, have become increasingly prevalent sites for users to find trending content.  I used various data mining techniques to study Digg, a social news site, to examine the influence of content on popularity.  What influence does content have on popularity, and what influence does content have on users’ decisions?  Overwhelmingly, prior studies have consistently shown that predicting popularity based on content is difficult and maybe even inherently impossible.  The same submission can have multiple outcomes and content neither determines popularity, nor individual user decisions.  My results show …

City Of Slow Dissolve, John M. Chavez

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

City of Slow Dissolve examines identity, displacement, and construction of the self. Beginning with the persona’s root location of Colorado Springs, Colorado, moving to Detroit, Michigan and concluding with Las Cruces, New Mexico, the speaker of the included poems articulates the complexities of lived emotion (e.g., anxiety, anger, guilt, and eventual acceptance), of the critical evaluation of one’s surroundings, and of the fractures of the self as the result of elected displacement in the service of personal advancement. It is with this in mind that these poems avoid thematizing what it means to be a Latin@ living in the United …

After The Rainbow, Rachel Hruza

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis contains a multi-genre collection featuring fiction and memoir. It explores characterization through relationships by focusing on the external and internal forces that influence a person’s connection to herself or another. Some pieces verge on the plane of magical realism while others are factually based. While most of this collection is serious in tone, the author hopes the reader will find joy in the small moments as well as the momentous.

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Women On The Ground: Bringing Theory And Activism Together Through Domestic Violence Narratives, Kacey J. Barrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis works toward bringing domestic violence activism and feminist theory together by refuting that these two approaches are necessarily in binary opposition. It is centered on changing the way we make sense of violence against women by addressing why the authors that include personal narrative in their writing should be help up as examples of theory. By analyzing literary domestic violence narratives, the author demonstrates that narrative is itself theory. In addition, this essay creates a third space where the author‘s own domestic violence narratives complement the literary narratives. The author shows how we can analyze victimized characters in …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924–1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Up Too Late: A Novel Excerpt, Peter Bayless

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Tyler Sexton is a male in his mid-twenties whose life seems to have ground to a halt before it truly began. Despite the opportunities afforded him by a successful college education and an upper-middle-class family background, Tyler's life since the death of his father from heart disease has become one dominated by malaise, living alone and working a dead-end job as a grocery store customer-service manager, clinging to the family members he has left. Now, with his mother suffering from a debilitating fight with cancer and his sisters either starting their own families or withdrawing even further into episodes of …

My Secret Life In Film: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir, and consists of the first two sections of my book, My Secret Life in Film. I believe that my book speaks to contemporary experiences of childhood, violence, sexuality, and faith, and complicates conceptions of a ‘normal’ family. When I was three weeks old, my mother, who worked as a prostitute, was murdered near downtown Los Angeles. Her case remains unsolved, and I do not know my father. Her own parents were unwed. At first I lived with my maternal grandmother and the woman I believe to have been …

Queen Of The Platform: Inventions On The Life Of Matilda Fletcher, Laura Madeline Wiseman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation explores the 19th century lecturer, poet, and suffragist, Matilda Fletcher (1842-1909). The fifth of fourteen children from abolitionist parents, Matilda was born in Illinois. Like her brother, who served in the Civil War, Matilda imagined herself in the public sphere. After the death of her one and only child, Matilda joined the lecture circuit. She spoke to support herself and her first husband, until his death. He died of tuberculosis, a disease he contracted during his service to the Union. Her lectures were a series of talks so powerful a man named a silver mine after her. Another …

Review Of Victorian Biography

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

No abstract provided.

Review Of Daniel Deronda, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Alain Jumeau's new French translation! of Daniel Deronda is the first since Ernest David's in 1881,1882 and 1886, no longer easily accessible. Jumeau is an excellent George Eliot scholar as well as an experienced translator - his translations include The Mill on the Floss and The Way We Live Now - and he has produced a graceful and fluent translation with preface and notes, introducing the great Victorian novel, so radically experimental in psychology and narrative form, to a new Francophone readership."

Whether Jumeau is aware of translation theory or not, his version exemplifies the chief processes of translation technically …

Review Of George Eliot's Grammar Of Being, Melissa Anne Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers of The George Eliot Review will be familiar with the work of Melissa Anne Raines, which began with the publication of her prize-winning essay for the George Eliot Fellowship, and was followed by several articles, two in this journal, now part of this important book. It had its origin in words from Felix Bolt: 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of human existence', said to be 'a precursor to the famous lines ... from Middlemarch ... "the roar that lies on the other side of silence'“, and the first statement of what …

Narration In Middlemarch Revisited, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In a previously published article entitled 'The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels',1 I attempted to defend her narrator (particularly in regard to Middlemarch) from a variety of critical attacks. The main points of my argument were: (I) that the narrator should not be identified with Eliot herself as it often is but is a persona with a tone of voice separate from the author and thus both integrated into the fiction and central to its structure; (2) form and realism were reconciled by the fact that the narrator was represented as a historical novelist writing a novel …

The George Eliot Review- Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 2011: No. 42, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ........................................................ .5

ARTICLES Sarah Bunney: Mr and Mrs Cross with the Artist John Wharlton Bunney in Venice, June 1880 (Prize Essay)................................................................ 7

K. M. Newton: Narration in Middlemarch Revisited...................................................... .19

Rosemary Ashton: The Mill on the Floss and the Difficulties of Relationships (Thirty-Ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2 October 2010)....................................................26

Marilyn Orr: 'Even our failures are a prophecy': The Mill on the Floss and the 1860s.................................... 38

Kathryn Hughes: Enter the Aunts.............................................................49

Alain Jumeau: Translating The Mill on the Floss into French.................................................. 63

Catherine Brown: The Mill on the Floss on the BBC in 1978........................................... 70 …

Review Of Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers And Travellers, Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, John Jordan

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Two of the essays in this volume take George Eliot's Romola as their subject. Both reward attention, and they may be in danger of escaping deserved notice given the major concentration here on the life and writing of Dickens. This is the second of three publications projected by the organizers of a conference on 'Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy', held in Genoa in 2007. The advance poster for the conference, still on the web, inadvertently does the book a slight disservice: 'At present', the organizers write, 'we are considering any or all of 1) A volume of the very best papers …

Japanese Branch Report- 2010, Naomi Ohno

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 4 December 2010, the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Okayama University.

The morning session began with an opening remark by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), followed by a Welcome Address by Shintetsu Fukunaga (Okayama University). In the morning, we had three papers presented. The first two papers were introduced and commented upon by Shota Nakajima (Tokushima Bunri University), and the third by Mizue Aida (Nihon University).

The first paper was 'The Seductive Power of Eyes - Re-examining Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss' by Eri Yoshimura …

Translating The Mill On The Floss Into French, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before dealing with my personal experience of translating The Mill on the Floss into French, I shall start with a few remarks on George Eliot's literary status in France compared with that in English-speaking countries. In Britain, in the States and other English-speaking countries, George Eliot is usually regarded as a great novelist, of the same magnitude as Dickens perhaps, although her novels are definitely more 'high-brow'. It might even be argued that she is the greatest female English novelist. In France, her reputation is quite different and it is possible to find educated people who have never read her …

Review Of The Cambridge Companion To English Literature, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This anthology, edited by Joanne Shattock, with an introduction and contribution by her, contains a rich variety of essays by scholars from British, American and Canadian universities. It begins its survey of Victorian culture in the seven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, because that allows for discussions on the influence of Romanticism, and ends with 1914, because, in the two decades or so before the outbreak of the Great War, it is argued, Victorianism overlapped Modernism, at least in some parts of the English speaking world. Along the way, the Companion considers the enormous range of texts …

Conference Report- The Mills On The Floss, Juliette Atkinson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'The Mill on the Floss is everyone's favourite novel' was the provocative declaration that launched the conference, devoted to Eliot's second novel, held at the Institute of English Studies on 6 November 2010. Barbara Hardy's opening statement was given some weight by the day's papers which, in tackling subjects as diverse as translation, inheritance, idleness, and adaptation, repeatedly expressed the speakers' highly personal relationship with the novel.

In the first of two hour-long papers, entitled 'Inheritance and parental investment in The Mill on the Floss' , David Amigoni (Exeter) offered fresh insights into the intersection of aesthetic and scientific concerns …

Review Of The Mill On The Floss On The Bbc In 1978, Catherine Brown

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The 2010 London conference on The Mill on the Floss was designedly conscious of its distance in time from its subject - this distance being measurable by a round number. It was as important to keep in mind, however, the distance between the novel's composition and its setting. As it happens, this was the same as that between the conference and the 1978 BBC TV adaptation of the novel on which this paper reflects. For Eliot, the temporal setting corresponded to her childhood, as it would have done for some of her readers, and as will also be true of …

Review Of Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics Of Austen, Eliot And Hardy, Kay Young

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Imagining Minds sets out to read nineteenth-century fiction in the context of modern theories of human cognition and of the mind/body relationship, making the central contention that 'the novel is an aesthetic map to and experience of the nature of the mind-brain' (9; Young's italics). Young takes up concepts from a range of modern psychological theories, especially those of Antonio Damasio, and also makes frequent reference to the revolutionary, and still seminal, work of William James, as a framework within which to investigate how the three major novelists of the title represent the mind's problematic relations with the world as …

Enter The Aunts...., Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and Uncles' and the three redoubtable Dodson sisters are indeed accompanied by their husbands, the Uncles, as they descend upon Dorlcote Mill for a family summit about their nephew Tom Tulliver's education. Yet while Messrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane subsequently play their individual parts in the unfolding of the novel's plot, it is the Aunts …

A Portrait Of Lucy Deane, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The young woman lifted her hands from the keys, and swivelled on her piano-stool to smile at the large bald-headed man comfortable in a crimson armchair.

'Well, sir, was that to your liking?'

'I seem to remember the piece, my dear, but not the composer. Is it something you haven't played for a long time? By one o’ your Germans? You know I never was musical, though I played the flute when I was a young man. Trade opened my eyes and sharpened my wits but I didn't have your expensive schooling.'

'No, papa, not one of my Germans but …

Annual Report 2010, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is pleasing to report another successful year for the Fellowship, albeit with the occasional blip where we were perhaps over-ambitious in our plans: we had to cancel two of our George Eliot Country Tours. We lost a few members, either as a result of age and infirmity or the increase in our subscription rates, but we also gained new ones, and made many new contacts as a result of our activities through the year

I start with thanks to the Fellowship Council, strengthened at the AGM with new members; I am glad to report that our Council meetings are …

Mr. And Mrs. Cross With The Artist John Wharlton Bunney In Venice, June 1880, Sarah Bunney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The dramatic incident in Venice on the morning of 16 June 1880, when the newly married John Walter Cross jumped into the Grand Canal from his hotel room's balcony, has attracted much curiosity and speculation. Understandably Mrs. Cross (George Eliot) was reticent about the happening in her journal and letters, and also wrote little about her stay in Venice before and after the event. But there is another source of information about the couple's Venetian experiences - the personal recollections and correspondence of the English artist John Wharlton Bunney (1828-82).

Bunney, described by Marian as 'an excellent painter and an …

'Pier Glass Imagery' In George Eliot's Middlemarch And Its Fictional Treatment Of Spinoza's Ethics, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 'George Eliot's Middlemarch as a translation of Spinoza's Ethics' (GER 40), Miriam Henson refers to the author's use of 'pier glass' imagery to illustrate her theory of morality and to show how an individual looks at the world from his self as the centre of moral vision and limitation. It is well known that Spinoza expounds his ethical theory in terms of geometrical concepts and physical theories of concentric and eccentric circles and lines etc. He was a lens grinder by profession and it is natural that he used to explore the mechanism of his trade in terms of …

Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 22 June 2010, Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It seems extraordinary to think that ISO years ago Mary Ann Evans, a young woman with very few resources apart from a strong conscience and an enquiring mind, almost ruined her life by revealing to her father that she was no longer certain that the Bible was the literal word of God. Might it not instead be the work of men, she wondered, reaching out to report their sense of God at work in their own lives? Was it not, in fact, a record of human rather than divine history?

For this piece of heresy, as we know, Mary Ann …

Between Deafness And Sound: Aurality And The Limits Of Sympathy In The Mill On The Floss, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his review of The Mill on the Floss on 19 May 1860 for The Times, E. S. Dallas began by arguing that Eliot's first novel Adam Bede was successful because 'the temporary delight of listening to a pleasant tale' it gave its readers helped to achieve 'the permanent good of an increased sympathy with our kind'.1 Although the publication of The Mill on the Floss proved, according to Dallas, that 'George Eliot' was 'as great as ever', it could not match the triumph of Adam Bede because she was determined not to repeat the idealism of a world that …

The Thirty-Nine George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2010- The Mill On The Floss And The Difficulties Of Relationships, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By late 1859, when she had almost finished writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was still unsure of its final title. The working title was 'Sister Maggie', which was particularly appropriate to the first two thirds of the novel, where interest is concentrated on the pleasures and pains of the childhood relationship between Tom and Maggie Tulliver. But in the last third of the book, attention had turned to the romantic relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest, itself intruding into Maggie's near-engagement to Philip Wakem, with Tom kept in the background until the death of brother and sister …

'Even Our Failures Are A Prophecy': The Mill On The Floss And The 1860s*, Marilyn Orr

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet' " written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a prophecy that shaped an aesthetic for the rest of her career.

Also known as 'My Vegetarian Friend’, this poem traces many of the important ideas that Eliot has been working with from the start of her career. It begins as a humorous characterization of 'a vegetarian seer', who anticipates a glorious 'Millennium' …