English Language and Literature Commons^™

Stand Perfectly Still: Statues, Nudity, And The Pygmalion Myth In Victorian Theatre And Culture, Maggie Elizabeth Wallen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stephen Guy-Bray argues that though the story of Pygmalion has taken various forms in the nineteenth century, “it is often read as a story of artistic and sexual triumph” (447). But a sexual triumph for whom? My thesis addresses questions pertaining to how the nude female body is vieon the theatrical stage by focusing specifically on the myth of Pygmalion as presented in W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I argue that the image of the moving statue, especially in the melodramatic tradition of the pose plastique and tableau vivant, creates instability for the viewer …

Disability Poetry: An Exploration In Three Parts, Daniel Sarmiento

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Sink Hollow 2017 Creative Writing Contest Edition

Sink Hollow

This special edition of Sink Hollow presents the winning entries of the Utah State University Creative Writing Contest, which is open to all USU undergraduate and graduate students from all departments and disciplines. We want to thank all our contestants this year for yet again raising the bar with their excellent work, and for helping to create such a vibrant and inclusive writing community here at USU and in Cache Valley.

Many thanks for the generosity and discriminating taste of our contest judges: Alex Baldwin, Matt DiOrio, Mary Ellen Greenwood, Brian McCuskey, Bonnie Moore, Paige Smitten, and Isaac Timm. Thanks …

Sink Hollow Volume 4

Sink Hollow

Sink Hollow is growing up.

Our fledgling magazine is not so fledgling anymore. Bounding into a maturity that even the most passionate founding members could not have envisioned, Sink Hollow is here to stay. It is my pleasure, as this magazine’s third Managing Editor, to present to you my inaugural publication: Sink Hollow Volume IV.

This issue presents a raw, magnifying view into the ever-changing human experience. It reminds us that, no matter where we come from or what has shaped us, we are all uniquely, gloriously human. In these tumultuous times, it is essential that we allow ourselves to …

Sink Hollow Volume 3

Sink Hollow

It's difficult to believe that my time with this journal has come to a close. It has been one of the greatest experiences of my undergraduate career to be an integral part of its publication.

At the time of this writing, our previous issues have been read over 5,500 times, with this volume set to increase that number substantially. We have worked with undergraduates across the United States and from many other countries as well. A great thanks goes out to all our submitters. Without you there is no journal.

Though I'm moving on to other things, I trust the …

Edward Irving: Coleridge, Sign, And Symbol, Peter J. Manning

Department of English Faculty Publications

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Valkyrie, Eric Philip Yanders

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

My thesis is a science fiction novella, entitled Valkyrie. My novella focuses on the character Valerie Byrne and her mission to save a utopian city, created in the wake of a third world war, from a megalomaniac android named Dr. Viper. Valerie witnessed her parent's death when she was nine years old, at the hands of the tyrannical government that was responsible for the war. During the conflict, she willingly transformed herself into a cyborg so that she may enact her revenge, and helped overthrow the tyranny that murdered her family. The novella follows her twenty years after the war …

Mementos: A Collection Of Essays, Linda S. Foster

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction about my journey from fiction student to nonfiction writer. I use quotes from Michel de Montaigne, Lee Gutkind, Phillip Lopate, Joan Didion, Mark Doty, Jo Ann Beard, and others, to discuss nonfiction writing as a genre. I develop the idea that the nonfiction writer is influenced by past experiences or memories, and uses those memories to create a work of nonfiction. The research and reflection necessary to the writing of nonfiction often allows the writer to be shaped by the narrative she is attempting to shape. This often results in a journey of …

God As Columbo, Nicholas S. Boone

Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Living Lawn Ornaments: Middle Class Status Anxiety In George Saunders’S 
“The Semplica Girl Diaries”, Joseph M. Gorman

The Graduate Review

This paper offers an analysis of writer George Saunders’s satirical short story “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” I argue that by situating the story in the historic context of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, Saunders’s story not only examines middle class status anxiety, but also acts as a reflective lens for the upper class readers of the story’s original publisher: The New Yorker. I first provide a brief discussion of the economic situation faced by middle class America between 2008 and 2013. I then provide an analysis of the fears of middle class American citizens by examining the …

Assimilation And The Impossibility Of Transculturation: Reading Herland As A Captivity Narrative, Rachel-Beth Gagnon

The Graduate Review

Although the structure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel, Herland, mimics that of a captivity narrative, there has been no scholarship that analyzes how the work fits into this tradition. This paper addresses how the themes of the captivity narrative shift under the weight of Gilman’s scientific and social preoccupations as an early twentieth-century writer, as well as the novel’s position within the genre of utopian fiction. Despite the captivity narrative’s ability to provide ground for cultural and social exchange through the process of transculturation, Gilman’s evolutionary theories and the utopian genre’s anxieties about miscegenation prevent any transmission of culture. …

Kathleen And Bill Adams - Memories Of Old Friends, Michael Harris, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

About 55 years ago when we were engaged to be married, Ruth came down from Scotland to Coventry for a holiday, and I was concerned to demonstrate to her that Warwickshire had much to offer to the visitor and prospective resident. Having, as I thought, exhausted the possibilities of Coventry, Kenilworth, Warwick etc., I asked her if there was anywhere else she would like to visit. I ought not to have been surprised, knowing that she had an English degree and was an English teacher, when she expressed a wish to discover more about George Eliot. So we took the …

Against Egology: Ethics And Style In George Eliot And Emmanuel Levinas, Athanassia Williamson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I will argue that the ethical pluralism characteristic of Eliot's late writings anticipates Levinas's rejection of legislative, deontological ethics in the early 1960s, especially from Totality and Infinity (1961) onward. Both Eliot and Levinas problematize an intellectualist or theoretical ethics that fails to attend to our moral experience as an embodied and affective process. They are both sceptics of their inheritances of moral theory, and in their work attempt self-consciously to re-orient or reconstruct that inheritance. For Eliot, Feuerbach is a major encouragement to rethinking the grounds for moral agency; for Levinas, it is the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger …

'A Being Apart': Sympathy And Distance In Middlemarch, Charlie Tyson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I wish to contend that Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-2) frequently tries to attenuate the sympathy that we, her readers, feel for her characters, and that this process of attenuation relies on emphasizing, rather than diminishing, forms of distance between reader and character. She checks our sympathies through techniques of visual staging that press her characters farther away from us in our imagined fields of vision, and through philosophical commentary that emphasizes the commonplace nature of the yearnings and sufferings these characters experience, instead of allowing us to see those circumstances as highly particularized. Despite the standard moral-philosophical observation that sympathy …

Felix Holt And 'A Fine Sight Of Lawsuits', Sheila Woolfe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

During the festivities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, much was said about his Warwickshire roots, and commentators noted, not for the first time, his use of Warwickshire dialect. The same is frequently said about George Eliot, of course. A good example occurs early in Felix Holt, in the coachman's words as he takes passengers up the hill past the village of Little Treby:

How many times in the year, as the coach rolled past the neglected-looking lodges which interrupted the screen of trees, and showed the river winding through a finely-timbered park, had the coachman answered the same …

Review Of Victorians Undone: Tales Of The Flesh In The Age Of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a superb book, written with deep scholarship by one of our leading biographers, which breaks new ground in its attention to the physicality of its subjects. In her introduction Kathryn Hughes says that she has felt 'chronically short-changed by the lack of physical detail in biography'. This book, she says, is 'an experiment to see what new stories emerge when you use biography .... to put mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth century' by introducing 'a certain lumpiness to canonical life narratives that have previously been rendered as smooth, symmetrical, and as strangely unconvincing as a …

Review Of Victorian Narratives Of The Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction, Helen Kingstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century saw a number of ways in which amateurs and professional historians and novelists approached the presentation of history, especially histories of the recent past. Eminent, professional historians at universities, and those aspiring to join them, increasingly avoided commenting on periods within living memory on the grounds that one could quickly lose credibility debating subjects not yet fully digested. Kingstone clearly illustrates the point in chapter 9, Conclusions: writing 'both before and after the United Kingdom's 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, I am aware that any arc I try to draw, any judgment I try …

Japanese Branch Report, Masako Kimura

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 10 December 2016, the Twentieth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held in Otani University. The morning session, moderated by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), began with an opening address by Yoriko Murase (Otani University). Thereafter, two papers were presented. The first paper 'The Influence of Adam Smith's Discussion of Sympathy on George Eliot: Reading Si/as Marner with The Theory of Moral Sentiments' was read by Chiyo Fujiwara (Kobe College). The second paper 'Women's Education inAdam Bede' was read by Chiyuki Kanamaru (Aichi Bunkyo University).

Review Of The World Of Mr Casaubon: Britain's War Of Mythography, Colin Kidd

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title of this book is interesting, as the subtitle describes what it is about but the main title refers to a fictional character from Middlemarch, part of a novel recently voted the greatest in English. Such a title makes the book much more marketable to a general audience and more likely to be reviewed in some of the broadsheets than a title which indicates that this is a book that 'venture[s] into the thickets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarianism' (vi). But the downside of the more appealing title is that readers who expect Middlemarch to play a central role …

Review Of The Transferred Life Of George Eliot: The Biography Of A Novelist, Philip Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have been several good new biographies of George Eliot in recent years but none quite like this. Davis's subtle and searching analysis focuses almost exclusively on the writing as he traces the complex ways in which the experience of Mary Ann, or later Marian, Evans is 'transferred', to use the term of his title, into the creation of George Eliot and her work. The first life of relative failure, unhappiness and unsuccessful relationships is transformed into a second life as George Eliot, successful novelist and woman of letters, and this closely written and argued study explores the relationship between …

In Memoriam, Kathleen Adams (1929-2016), John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The sheer number of years, forty, that Kathleen Adams was Secretary of the George Eliot Fellowship, is extraordinary, but that number does not do justice to the prodigious amount of time, energy and dedication that she devoted to the job.

Like many others, Kathleen came to George Eliot via her life rather than her works. As a grammar school girl from Barrs Hill in Coventry she had heard about Eliot; as an adult she learned details of her extraordinary life. That took her to the novels and then a commitment to tell people about them which was to dominate her …

Kathleen Adams: A Tribute, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

All but 50 years we knew each other. And I think George Eliot owes Kathleen Adams a lot. This is common knowledge - for where would the Fellowship be without her tireless efforts. Westminster Abbey, the Nuneaton statue, membership numbers: these are all well known. But that small terrace house in Stepping Stones Road, Coventry, visited by so many important figures, represents for me the championing of the ordinary folk and their appreciation of George Eliot's work. I remember an American academic being disappointed at the Newsletter Kathleen prepared so diligently, and how it was not on the intellectual level …

Review Of Writing The Stage Coach Nation: Locality On The Move In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Ruth Livesey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Starting from the observation that so many of the major Victorian novels are set, not in the railway age in which they were written, but in the horse-drawn world of the previous generation, a world that is 'just past', this fine study explores the ways in which novelists from Waiter Scott to Thomas Hardy use the stage coach to connect particular localities, often closely observed and substantially realized, to the larger framework of the nation. This turning back to the past is not, Ruth Livesey insists, a retreat from the complications and dislocations of a modern present into a simpler …

Living With George Eliot: A Tribute To My Parents, Will Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was a strange but much-appreciated honour to be asked to address the annual George Eliot Fellowship lunch in 2016. It was strange because I'd attended many such events long ago - fewer more recently - and had always sat with the 'rank and file' on the lower tables while Mum and Dad, officers and distinguished guests occupied the top table. So, when on Sunday 20 November, I rose to speak, I was quite miffed to find that there was no top table! All very egalitarian, but it left me wandering up and down the floor as I imparted my …

Radical Politics In The 1860s: The Writing Of Felix Holt, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While Felix Halt the Radical was being written there was a transformation in the atmosphere surrounding further parliamentary reform in Britain. In March 1865, when George Eliot began the novel, the Liberal Prime Minister Palmerston remained cautious about an extension of the franchise. Yet Felix Holt was finished on 31 May 1866 amidst great political excitement: a Reform Bill was being debated and the outcome uncertain. This change in emphasis in the political mood had its effect on Eliot 's writing, since the 'reform campaign had not gained enough momentum' I to explain Eliot's initial choice of subject. To say …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2016, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The most noteworthy events of 2016 were the deaths of Bill and Kathleen Adams, a couple whose extraordinary dedication and hard work from 1968 until 2008 enabled the Fellowship to prosper and become a genuinely influential literary society. Bill was the first to die, just a couple of days after laying the wreath for us in June in Nuneaton, an event he loved, and where he met and chatted to so many old friends.

The AGM in March saw the existing team of Council members renewing their positions, with a request from Hon. Treasurer Jill Bridgewater that we should find …

When Howard Met George: A Play In Two Acts, Susan Ryley Hoyle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dramatis Personae (in order of appearance)

Marian Evans (Mrs. Lewes) (George Eliot) (left) was born near Nuneaton in 1819 to a prosperous land agent and his (second) wife. She has lost whatever regional accent she may have had, and has often been complimented on her melodious voice. She speaks quite slowly, rarely with emphasis, nearly always with a shy earnestness and a dry sense of humour. At the time of this play, only her husband and (very recently) her publisher know that she is 'George Eliot', the author of the huge best-seller Adam Bede (1859), and of the only …

Tl;Dr - Communicating In The Age Of Social Media, Julia L. Czekaj

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This thesis uses a literature review and post analyzation to explore Facebook and Twitter as methods of communicating. This thesis examines social media history, genre, and rhetorical aspects.

A Merrier World:' Small Renaissances Engendered In J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Dominic Dicarlo Meo

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

After surviving the trenches of World War I when many of his friends did not, Tolkien continued as the rest of the world did: moving, growing, and developing, putting the darkness of war behind. He had children, taught at the collegiate level, wrote, researched. Then another Great War knocked on the global door. His sons marched off, and Britain was again consumed. The "War to End All Wars" was repeating itself and nothing was for certain. In such extended dark times, J. R. R. Tolkien drew on what he knew-language, philology, myth, and human rights-peering back in history to the …

Surface Reading The Upside Down Chandelier: Interface “Mastery” And Feminism, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay compares the literary interfaces of one artwork, The Upside Down Chandelier [UDC], in two settings: a large-scale installation taking up a gallery room, and in a browser window. UDC is a generative, multimedia artwork authored in Flash by four women electronic literature artists using four spoken languages. It uses the same code base for both settings. The installation’s embodied and site-specific context at the gallery created multiple vantages from which to “read” the work’s design and purpose. In browser, UDC’s words are the only point of access. The reader’s urge to decode the words in …