English Language and Literature Commons^™

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

English Sound Stucture [Book Review], Janet Mueller Bing

English Faculty Publications

Review of English Sound Structure, by John Harris. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

Taking A Perspective: Hawthorne's Concept Of Language And Nineteenth-Century Language Theory, Patricia M. Roger

English Faculty Publications

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …

'Judith' And The Rhetoric Of Heroism In Anglo‐Saxon England, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The Old English Judith differs from the Liber Judith of the Vulgate at several crucial points, and in one particularly important way. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith is a heroine in every sense of the word: she is a tropological symbol of Chastity at battle with Licentiousness, an allegorical symbol of the Church in its constant and eventually triumphant battle with Satan, and an inspirational figure who infuses her warriors with much needed courage and confidence; but the Vulgate Judith is also, in a very real sense, the agent by which God's will is executed and the …

Review Of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes Of Reading, Surfaces Of Writing, Paul Crumbley, Marta L. Werner

English Faculty Publications

In Emily Dickinson's Open Folios Marta L. Werner presents both an experimental edition of the forty holograph drafts and fragments known as the Lord correspondence and a highly suggestive analysis of this material. Werner's book proceeds from the simple seeming proposition that we must learn to see Dickinson's holographs before reading them. In this claim Werner aligns herself with Susan Howe, Martha Nell Smith, Sharon Cameron and a [End Page 111] growing list of scholars who believe that the visual complexities of Dickinson's holograph manuscripts significantly challenge generic categories such as poetry, prose, letters, and books. Werner's work most particularly …

Review Of Hardy's Literary Language And Victorian Philology. Dennis Taylor., James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

This is a book review of Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology by Dennis Taylor.

Art’S Haunted House: Dickinson’S Sense Of Self, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

Writing to Dickinson in 1869, the year before he met the poet in Amherst, Thomas Wentworth Higginson describes the discomfort that Dickinson's haunting presence could inflict on a man fully at home in domesticated art: "Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write . . ." (L461, #330a). Dickinson's writing, Higginson continues, provides him no clear target for his words: "I should like to hear from you very often, but feel always timid lest what I write should be badly …

"Some Pieces In The British Magazine" And "A Small Part Of The Translation Of Voltaire’S Works": Smollett Attributions, Barbara L. Fitzpatrick

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Selection of African-American folklore on the winter holidays.

Tips For The Academic Teacher Working With Nonnative Speakers Of English, Sue Lee, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

The international student population in the United States is growing by leaps and bounds; our need for teachers who specialize in English as a Second Language, therefore, also grows with each passing day. But everyone cannot be an ESL specialist, right? What we must also, consider is the fact that many of our students who speak a language other than English as their native language are actually born here in the United States. Surprising? Not really when we consider that the demographic composition of major urban areas today consists significantly of families whose parents and grandparents come from different cultures …

Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation Of Its Critics In A Humorous Reading Of The Text, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

In traditional Beckett criticism, the most conventional interpretation of the narrator's activity in The Unnamable posits that the narrative is attempting to establish "his" own self-identity, but "[h]is search for self-knowledge has failed because it has produced only fiction" (Solomon 83). Another variety of this interpretation poses the Unnamable's dilemma in Existential language: "Existence affirms merely that something is; essence denotes what it is ... By the time we reach The Unnamable, the collapse of essence is virtually complete; the voice is a mere existence crying out that it exists" (Levy 104). As Dennis A. Foster argues in his Lacanian …

Reconsidering The Etymology Of Bulldike, Susan Krantz

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Lost Books" And Publishing History: Two Annotated Lists Of Imprints For The Fiction Titles Listed In The Circulating Library Catalogs Of Thomas Lowndes (1766) And M. Heavisides (1790), Of Which No Known Copies Survive, Edward Jacobs, Antonia Forster

English Faculty Publications

Almost immediately upon the British Library's publication of The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue on CD-ROM (hereafter ESTC), there emerged criticism and controversy respecting the design and execution of that monumental bibliography, and of its access software. However, amidst these discussions and those surrounding the on line version, little notice has been taken of the historical inaccuracies inevitably entailed by the fact that ESTC and other union-catalog-type bibliographies only include books of which copies have survived. Certainly, for most scholars it makes sense to give bibliographical priority to cataloging books of which we still have copies, since those are the …

A Previously Unremarked Circulating Library: John Roson And The Role Of Circulating-Library Proprietors As Publishers In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

The entry in The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue on CD ROM2 for The History of Miss Dorinda Catsby and Miss Emilia Faulkner (London: printed and sold by S. Bladon, 1772) notes that it contains between volumes one and two an advertisement for the catalog of John Roson's circulating library. However, Roson's library is not included in the lists of known English circulating libraries compiled by Hilda Hamlyn and by Paul Kaufman, and evidently no actual copy of a Roson catalog has survived. Still, merely the advertisement for this catalog tells us much about Roson's library business, and the discovery that …

Anonymous Signatures, Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, And The Production Of Gothic Romances, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

Ever since circulating libraries first became commercially successful during the second half of the eighteenth century, social and literary critics have analyzed them primarily as institutions for distributing books. The dominant view has been that circulating libraries vulgarized literature, by pandering fiction to women, servants, and other people who had previously been excluded from reading by the high cost of books or by illiteracy. For instance, near the end of The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues, as many eighteenth-century critics did, that during the last quarter of the eighteenth century "the pressures toward literary degradation which were …

Southern Africa And The Themes Of Madness: Novels By Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, And Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

However different their lives, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, and Nadine Gordimer share the common heritage of having grown up in southern Africa. All three were profoundly affected by that experience. Their responses to the colonialist, racist, and sexist attitudes that permeated their lives have determined, to a major extent. the nature of their fiction. Their novels reflect the grotesque situations and bizarre human relationships created by prejudice, injustice, and the desire to dominate. These three authors focus on the mad nature of this social and political situation in southern Africa. In their works, dystopian and utopian visions of the future …

Betrayals Of The Body Politic: The Literary Commitments Of Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Reviews the book `Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer,' by Andrew Vogel Ettin.

"Proving A Thing Even While You Contradict It": Fictions, Beliefs, And Legitimation In The Memoirs Of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Robert P. Fletcher

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …

The Sexual Identities Of Moll Cutpurse In Dekker And Middleton's The Roaring Girl And In London, Susan Krantz

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Zea Mexican Dairy: 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986. By Kamau Brathwaite (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

I may be hard put to classify the latest work of noted poet, historian, literary critic, linguist, and Africanist Kamau (Eddie) Brathwaite, but I have no problem describing it - compelling, riveting, unforgettable! Begun when Brathwaite received the devastating news that his wife Doris (his Zea Mexican) was dying of cancer, it is a paean to her, a record of his efforts to deal with her dying, death, and absence, an account of their relationship, and an autobiographical confessional. The Zea Mexican Diary includes diary entries, letters, memorates, an epigraph, expressions of sympathy, confessions, autobiographical narrative, poems - but whatever …

Hotel Room With My Brother, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"That Reason Wonder May Diminish": As You Like It, Androgyny, And The Theater Wars, Grace C. Tiffany

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Two Handles Of Israel Potter, Kris Lackey

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poetry And Vision, William Olsen

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, And The Body In The Old English 'Andreas', Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Writing in the Old English Andreas is at once both a productive and a destructive activity. We first become aware of the dangerous power of the written word quite early in the poem, when we learn that the Mermedonians have subverted the normally productive activity of writing into a tool for calculating the execution dates of their prisoners (134-37). Later, the words uttered by the devil to incite the Mermedonians against Andreas illuminate the lexical relationship between the destructive nature of writing and the productive nature of torture in the semiotic context of the poem. Finally, in a sort of …