English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Review Of Silence In Modern Irish Literature, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

A Review Of The Critical Thought Of W. B. Yeats, Matthew Gibson

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Yeats, Philosophy, And The Occult, Gregory Castle

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

Yeats’S White Vellum Notebook, 1930–1933, Wayne K. Chapman

International Yeats Studies

This essay examines the present state of affairs concerning “one of the great literary manuscripts of our time, the great vellum notebook” that Sotheby’s advertised and sold for the first time in 1985. That sale and a subsequent one in 1990 are related to the contents of the notebook as ascertained from finding aids used by the editors of the Cornell Yeats series, including Chapman, as well as from the examination of extant microfilms of the notebook, the location of the original having been lost. Particularly useful for new and on-going textual-genetic studies in Yeats collections at the National Library …

India In Yeats’S Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee And Kālidāsa, Ashim Dutta

International Yeats Studies

W. B. Yeats’s interest in India persisted throughout his variegated life and career, starting in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the final decade of his life. This article concentrates on his early years when he first came to terms with Indian philosophy, religion, and literature via the Vedāntist-Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee and the work of the fifth-century Sanskrit playwright Kālidāsa. With a view to examining critically Yeats’s creative engagement with, and appropriation of, these disparate materials, this article closely reads a discarded 1880s poem on Chatterjee’s teaching and its later 1929 version, “Mohini Chatterjee,” as well as his early …

Yeats's Re-Enchanted Nature, Seán Hewitt

International Yeats Studies

W. B. Yeats identified anti-Enlightenment principles as being central to his generation’s artistic project. Characterizing the worldview he was writing against, he argued that “the mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanized nature” (OBMV, xxvii). By charting the processes by which he reimagined nature and the poet’s (and poem’s) position in relation to it, we can begin to understand Yeats’s developing ecological relationships as a matrix for his shifting understanding of mysticism (and vice versa). Focusing in particular on the prefatory texts to The Shadowy Waters, this article …

International Yeats Studies, Issue 2

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

Leaving Neverland For Narnia: Childhood And Gender In Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, And The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Calabria Turner

English MA Theses

British gender expectations are often epitomized in mature adults, either in society or within novels, but in Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe gender roles are interpreted by the child protagonists. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan inhabits the world of the Neverland, but the gender roles of Victorian England follow them from London to the home below the tree where Peter, Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys reside in a pseudo-domestic sphere. Peter often engages in literal discussion of what it means to become an English man, while Wendy lives …

Invisible In 'The Archive': Librarians, Archivists, And The Caswell Test, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This presentation, "Invisible in 'The Archive': Archivists, Librarians, and The Caswell Test," was given at the 53rd International Congress for Medieval Studies, on May 11, 2018. It argues that medievalists, and humanities scholars more broadly, have erred in writing and theorizing about "the archive" as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers. Building on the work of M. L. Caswell, Eira Tansey, Amy Hildreth Chen, Myron Groover, and other scholars of library and information sciences, it proposes that humanities scholars adopt what I call "The Caswell Test."

Based on the famous "Bechdel Test" for gender representation in …

American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines three autobiographical texts written in post-World War II America (1959-1973) that take as their subject a straight white man’s reflection on and engagement with the exercise of male power and the forces, both internal and external, that shape the degree to which he is “self-made,” i.e., an autonomous agent able to exert his will within a life domain (domestic, public, and war). Each of these writers engages in surveillance not solely of their own power, but also of the men who influence their experience, using their observations to critique, assert, and question the gendered realities and expectations …

Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the …

Player-Response: On The Nature Of Interactive Narratives As Literature, Lee Feldman

English (MA) Theses

In recent years, having evolved beyond solely play-based interactions, it is now possible to analyze video games alongside other narrative forms, such as novels and films. Video games now involve rich stories that require input and interaction on behalf of the player. This level of agency likens video games to a kind of modern hypertext, networking and weaving various narrative threads together, something which traditional modes of media lack. When examined from the lens of reader-response criticism, this interaction deepens even further, acknowledging the player’s experience as a valid interpretation of a video game’s plot. The wide freedom of choice …

Literary Beasts: Use Of Animal Imagery In The Canterbury Tales, Morgan Kentsbeer

English and Creative Writing Independent Study Projects

Through this paper I am going to argue that animals from the Middle Ages held more worth and were often considered to be more important than their modern counterparts. This gets shown through the three types of ways that animals are used within The Canterbury Tales. First, they are used as allegorical shorthands that imply more meaning with a fewer amount of words; this concept is primarily shown in “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Secondly, animals are crafted into characters but still end up being used as tools by other characters or Chaucer himself. For this, …

Challenging Society In Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist And Bleak House, Adrienne Oliver

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The purpose of this honors project is to explore the challenging social system of Dickens’s Victorian London, specifically through the perspective of Dickens’s social philosophy characterized by the need for reformative action in the fractured society represented in both Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Divided into two documents, the first component, an annotated bibliography, focuses on the scholarly discussion of negligent and criminal institutions in Oliver Twist. The second section, an analytical paper, concentrates on Bleak House and Dickens’s representation of the city as a divided space between the gentility and isolated, vulnerable groups demonstrated by at risk …

The Phenomenological Beat: Allen Ginsberg's Many Multitudes, Joseph Karwin

English Department Theses

A considerable amount of critical commentary about Allen Ginsberg has focused on his public persona and on his relationship with the Beat Generation. This focus runs counter to Ginsberg’s own wishes, as he wished to be studied as a poet first, a serious poet, and a poet speaking for a new American voice. By focusing on the poetry and on Ginsberg’s extensive amount of self-analysis, this paper details the main strategies and techniques Ginsberg employed in his poetics, and how he used those techniques to form a modern American voice in poetry.

The paper specifically looks at Ginsberg’s relationship to …

The Novel Mystique: Depictions Of Women In Novels Of The 1950s, Sarah Fender

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Racial Classifications: Exploring Race In The Critical Dystopia, Meghan Hartnett

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Complex Humanity Of Henry V, Kaitlynn Willette

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Forgotten Fairies: Traditional English Folklore In "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Alexandra Larkin

The Criterion

While the fairies shown in the play would have been known by Shakespeare’s audience, there was a clear difference between the fairies of traditional folklore and the fairies that Shakespeare describes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In traditional English folklore, fairies were “made” for, and by, the middle and lower classes; their stories were most believed and the most encounters were experienced by these people. Fairies in folklore were alternatingly deadly and wildly helpful, giving humans who stumbled upon them presents or death. In the play, Shakespeare departs from more traditional depictions of fairies and instead characterizes these magical creatures …

Something In Nothing: A Discussion Of Madness And Wisdom In King Lear, Leela Mennillo

The Criterion

This essay argues against Shakespeare critic David Kastan’s nihilistic reading of King Lear. While I agree that nothingness lies at the heart of the tragedy, I maintain that the recurring theme of nothing does not depict a world devoid of meaning. Rather, Shakespeare suggests that the recognition of the abyss is necessary in the quest for higher meaning. I approach this debate through various philosophical lenses, presenting a reading that equates wisdom and nothingness. Cordelia’s recognition of the limitations of human knowledge first introduces this idea. I detect elements of the divine nature of nothingness in the seemingly nonsensical speeches …

"'Violent Love': Jane Austen And Eighteenth-Century Marriage Laws", Brianna Bicho

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In several of Jane Austen’s novels, her heroines are confronted more than once with the proposition of marriage. Many of the primary proposal scenes in these tales contain violent language seemingly at odds with the romantic context, and the romance convention, of a proposal scene. Austen’s rhetoric of violence functions as a critique of contemporary laws defining and regulating marriage, particularly Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. These laws negated a woman’s ownership – both personal and financial – upon her marriage: they outlined both the illegality of a wedded female to own property and the …

Time, Memory, And Consciousness In Virginia Woolf’S Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, And Between The Acts, Nicole Olivotti

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway emerges as a character gripped by the notion and passage of time. Woolf represents the chronological aspect of time through images such as Big Ben and its relentless chimes as well as the various references to clocks or bells throughout the novel. To the Lighthouse also thematically and narratively explores constructions of time, particularly by focusing on elements such as inaction and delay. The journey to the Lighthouse, for example, does not occur until the end of the novel. Both texts underscore the tension between the linear timeframe of the novel and …

Enemy Life: Theorizing Exile Through Milton, Shelley And Byron, Robert L. Berger

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation investigates the contemporary discourse and conceptions of exile as it is presented by Milton, Shelley and Byron. Utilizing biopolitical theory as a lens, it posits that the Satanic iteration or narrative of exile embodies the reality of worldly exile. As such the dissertation explores the complex framing and subsequent deconstruction of Satanic and human subjectivities found in Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound, Manfred and Don Juan. The dissertation examines Paradise Lost for its competing narratives of exile, Adam and Satan, and explores notions of home, transgression, the purification rituals which are the origin of sovereign Power and the …

Race, Slavery, And Evasion: Whitman And Melville’S Changing Perspectives And Their Glancing Poetic Treatment Of The Core Civil War Issue, Said Hail Fallaha

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Whitman and Melville’s poetry about the Civil War is almost completely silent when it comes to slavery. Both writers depict a newly emancipated person in their poems about the Civil War, but they seem to do so almost as an afterthought. Both Whitman's “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” and Melville's “Formerly a Slave” represent an elderly African American woman. These poems stand alone in their representation of an African American. Peter J. Bellis argues that both writers were concerned with how to negotiate national emotions and policies by the end of the war and these “emotions” and “policies” were vital to …

Review Of The Making Of Jane Austen, Mary Beth Tegan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Minds In Motion, Anna K. Sagal

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Anne Thell's Minds in Motion.

Review Of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Stacey L. Kikendall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Review Of The Ladies Of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, And The Legacies Of Criticism, Dawn M. Goode

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism. Bucknell UP, 2017. xxxvi + 331pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-6114-8761-9.

Review Of Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre Production Of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, Tanya M. Caldwell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article reviews the production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem directed by Tony Cownie and produced for the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in February and March 2018. In setting the play in Edinburgh and placing emphasis on its women characters, Cownie underscores the universal and timeless relevance of Cowley's play as well as its performance versatility.

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …