English Language and Literature Commons^™

Editor's Page, Jonathan N. Barron

The Robert Frost Review

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'Where Many Paths And Errands Meet': Travel Writing In The Lord Of The Rings, Will Glover

Journal of Tolkien Research

In this paper I examine The Lord of the Rings through the lens of genre criticism. I take issue with the commonplace characterisation of the work as an ‘epic’ or a ‘romance’, a tendency that has restricted interpretations of the work and tied criticism of it too exclusively to that of medieval literature. I argue that the work should be viewed as a modern novel: an open-ended and capacious text comprised of numerous generic traditions, including the previously overlooked genre of travel literature. After establishing a working definition of travel writing, I analyse The Lord of the Rings's paratextual …

A Harpy's Love, C. R. Schabel

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Ye Cinnamon Beare, Angelee Sailer Anderson

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Bleeding-Heart: A Love Story, Margaret Nevinski

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Head Over Heels, H. Lovekin

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Tobacco Seekers, Douglas A. Rossman

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Swan-Chariot, Gwenyth E. Hood

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Fleeing Woman, William Saxton

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Editing The Sky, Debbie Fersht

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Dance Of The Blind, Jefferson P. Swycaffer

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Song Of The Mother Of Waters, Evelyn Cooper

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Dry Leaves, Jo Anna Dale

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Unicorn Tapestry / Another Poem, Lawrence Schimel, Gary Barwin

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Camelot Station, Lawrence Schimel

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Sonnet For A Mystical Son, Angelee Sailer Anderson

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Poem, Gary Barwin

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Two Poems By Jo Anna Dale, Jo Anna Dale

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Letters Of Comment, Janet P. Reedman, Mary Mcdermott Shideler, Joe R. Christopher, Cindy Rako, Pat Reynolds, Diane Lynne Pavlac, Sarah Beach, Angelee Sailer Anderson, Stanley E. Anderson, Ron Blizzard

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Lynn Maudlin, Christine Lowentrout

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Mythic Circle #7, Lynn Maudlin, Christine Lowentrout

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Elessar Telcontar Magnus, Rex Pater Gondor, Restitutor Imperii, Richard Z. Gallant

Journal of Tolkien Research

The nature of the heroic-ethos changes in the late Third Age of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. At the beginning of the First Age, a Germanic ethos that Tolkien called the theory of Northern courage accompanied the exile of the Noldor. However, at the dawn of the dominion of Men, a new ethos emerges. It is an ethos of hope rather than the “sad light of fatalism” of the “long defeat.” This ethos is exemplified, ad bono exemplum, in the character of Aragorn who fuses the old ethos and tradition into a new ‘pseudo-chivalry’ appropriate for the Age …

Noir Affect [Table Of Contents], Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

Literature

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the U.S.). Instead the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts (from the U.S. to Mexico, France and Japan) manifests in a range of different media (films, novels, video games, and manga). The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: these are narratives centered …

Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies In Nineteenth-Century America [Table Of Contents], Jason Berger

Literature

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses …

Poets In The Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Sabrina San Miguel, Cecilia A. Macias

English Faculty Publications (Archived)

About the Poets:

Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press 2013) and A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre Press 2015). Her latest collection, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Texas Christian University Press. She has held consecutive positions as Poet Laureate of the city of San Antonio (2014-2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College, an MFA in poetry from Drew University, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. …

Shakespeare's Problem Comedies As Self-Critique, John-Paul Spiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I argue that Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well reveal underexplored features common to Shakespeare’s comedies. Often interpreted as “problem plays,” they are more representative of the genre than previously acknowledged. I suggest that Shakespeare wrote them to de-nature and de-familiarize his own practices. The plays present the coercion inherent in the normativizing of marriage as the basis for social and political order. The “happiness” achieved—or at least gestured towards—at the end of Shakespearean comedy restricts human possibilities and is often presented as an imposition or injunction rather than a reflection of spontaneous, collective emotion. In particular, …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Narcissus And Beauty: A Renaissance Of Paterian Aesthetics, Amir Dagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is intended as a correction to the almost universal contemporary assumption that beauty is either nonexistent or a tool of oppression, and that the arts should be judged less by their aesthetic value than their social, political, or moral dimensions. This dissertation will propose a fivefold argument. First, I will assert that the experience of beauty is real, pleasurable, and not in any way culturally determined, second, that beauty is the most significant and characteristic feature of art, third, that the rejection of the reality of beauty is motivated more by the fragility of the mass man’s ego …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …