English Language and Literature Commons^™

Meeting The Next Generation: ​ A Cross-Campus Collaboration Via A Scholarship Workshop, Lora Winters, Ruth Monnier

Faculty Submissions

Reaching high school students before they set foot on campus would allow writing centers to increase awareness of services while also making personal connections to students, which has been proven to increase student retention. Targeting these students can be difficult and expensive, but our writing center collaborated with library services and our admissions office to create a program about finding scholarship opportunities/writing scholarship essays that was inexpensive, targeted local high schools, and initial results indicate that this program is beneficial to our university’s recruitment efforts. We will discuss our findings and how this program could be replicated by other institutions.

Henry James's "Poor Sensitive Gentlemen" And The Quest For Meaning (And Happiness) In Three Late Tales: "The Altar Of The Dead," "The Beast In The Jungle," And "The Jolly Corner", Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

“Happiness” is not an emotion we immediately associate with the life of Henry James or with the characters in his fiction. It is true that some of his characters comment on the idea of happiness, but not without persistent irony. The protagonists of James’s late tales express no explicit interest in happiness; however, their desire to understand their journeys results in an important insight into the complex, and perhaps contradictory, nature of personal fulfillment. It is an experience, I argue, that offers a moment of painful joy, and it is the closest thing to happiness possible for James’s characters, and …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2800 (Great Works Of Literature I), Joseph Riccio

Open Educational Resources

In this course, we’ll be exploring a wide range of texts from ancient, medieval, and early modern cultures; from oral and written literary traditions; in a variety of genres (epic, lyric, tales, and drama). We will trace the development of themes, ideas, and characters across time and space. Our conversations about these texts will be shaped loosely around the role of literature and storytelling in relation to empires and various formations of power. We will read each of these works in context, thinking about the cultures that produced them, and consider how they relate to our own present moment. And, …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2150t (Writing Ii), Cathryn Crosby Grundleger

Open Educational Resources

Writing II is an intensification of Writing I. This course encourages students to read, reflect on, write about, and synthesize ideas from a range of genres and literary forms. Students examine and learn how to employ different styles, various appropriate uses of evidence and counter-evidence, multiple methods of interpretations, close readings of texts, and, finally, literary-cultural contextualizations. As the course proceeds, students further develop competency in the use and evaluation of multiple external sources as they shape and express their own ideas and cast them into well organized, thoughtful, and persuasive argumentative essays. This course is required for all undergraduate …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol 31, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Real America: A Speech about Sinclair Lewis by Lion Feuchtwanger,” with an introduction and translation by Sean Nye, University of Southern California

“‘Good Morning, America!’: A Retrospective of the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Virtual Conference,” by Shaun F. Richards

“Opening Remarks for the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Conference,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre,” by Marcia Noe

“Robert L. McLaughlin’s Sinclair Lewis Scholarship”

“Play of Main Street Produced at University of Minnesota Duluth,” by George Killough, College of St. Scholastica

“Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal,” by …

“The Time Has Not Been Wasted”: The Accounting Diaries Of Marian Evans And Louisa May Alcott, Ashley A. Alvarado

Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire for utility, respectability, and self-improvement became deeply ingrained in daily life, and consequently, the diary grew to be a popular tool to measure and evaluate time management and personal development. Accounting diaries, in particular, set out to provide a record of activity and achievement (or conversely, inactivity and failure). This thesis performs a case study of the accounting diaries of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and Louisa May Alcott, exploring how they document progress towards their personal goals of utility, morality, and productivity. Specific diary-writing techniques—such as an efficient style, income tracking, illness recording, …

Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the differences between dialects along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines with a specific focus on Black and Latine students inside the public secondary classrooms of America. The focus of the paper is on two linguistic tactics: “code-switching,” a linguistic practice which teaches students to separate their home language from the language they use in formal or professional settings, and “code-meshing,” a linguistic practice to teach students how to mesh together multiple dialects with which a student is familiar. Through the creation of a historical framework and an analysis of existing literature, theory, and pedagogical practices regarding the …

Transmuting Grief: More Than One “Feat Of Creation” In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Taylor Cripe '26

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

No abstract provided.

"A Kind Of Insanity In My Spirits": Frankenstein, Childhood, And Criminal Intent, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

Criminal responsibility in England underwent an important shift between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this period, jurists focused less on whether a person meant to commit an act and more on whether the individual committed it. English law thus made little distinction between children and adults. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, criminal responsibility became linked to new ideas about human understanding. Jurists such as Matthew Hale and William Blackstone maintained that individuals could not be guilty of crimes unless they fully understood and intended the consequences of their actions. In this essay, I argue …

The Man Nobody Knows: George Babbitt And Religion, Sally E. Parry

Faculty Publications – English

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reading English Verse In Manuscript, C. 1350-C. 1500, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Speculative Pasts: American Historical Fiction In An Age Of Empire, Gregory William Deinert

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies a new generic form termed here the “Speculative Historical Novel” within contemporary American fiction. The works that Speculative Pasts collect all agonize over the erasure of the past, and question how we can incorporate history into the present while accepting that full recuperation may be impossible. In their emphasis on the erasure of the past, these novels trace the manifold silences created by the imperial conquest of the New World and articulate how this past continues to structure the lived experiences of everyone on this continent.

This speculation is, on the one hand, necessarily suppositional. When faced …

Embodied Participation In Digital Publics: Somnambulance, Surveillance, And The Construction Of Identity, Adam S. Padgett

Theses and Dissertations

In our current information landscape, routine surveillance has changed the nature of rhetorical engagement in public spheres. Scholarship in publics theory have done productive work to map out the complex field of discursive participation. Michael Warner has demonstrated how, through the circulation of common texts, people no longer have to be in public in order to participate in publics. However, in the wake of ubiquitous surveillance, this focus on publicness has offered little attention to privacy in publics theory. I argue that legal and postmodern theories of bodies-as-texts is problematic for reading and writing bodies online. Intersecting with embodiment and …

Literature As A Monument: Uncle Tom’S Cabin Reflecting The Morality Of A Nation, Shalane Parcenue Conrads

Theses and Dissertations

This essay studies the critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by studying the novel’s critical reception from publication and into contemporary America to understand how the novel remains an institution of Civil War remembrance. In accepting the polemical status of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both a literary and historical document, I argue that the novel is a monument in American culture. In studying the wide spectrum of critical response to the novel since its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a social barometer that reflects the controversial race relations in the United States from the Civil …

Vox Populi Or News From Spain, Translated According To The Spanish Copy Which May Serve To Forewarn Both England And The United Provinces How Far To Trust To Spanish Pretenses, Imprinted In The Year 1620, Thomas Scott

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

Exploring Transnational Dimensions Of Activism In Contemporary Book Culture, Rachel Noorda, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Elizabeth Le Roux

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The board book A is for Activist is an ABC children’s title written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, an Indonesian social justice graphic designer living in the United States. The title started out as a self-published book crowdfunded on Kickstarter for his own child in 2012, was then picked up by independent publisher Seven Stories Press, and has since achieved bestselling sales status. While originally published in English, it has been translated and sold all over the world, including by Seven Stories’ Spanish-language imprint Siete Cuentos, in an edition with Martha Gonzalez’s translation and an audio version from guitarist and …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

“Nothing To Do But Be Borne And Steered”: Unpacking Feminist Scripts In Elana Arnold’S Damsel, Jenna Spiering, Nicole Ann Amato

Faculty Publications

Feminism in novels marketed for young adults often reflects the values of a popular feminism that relies on individual and personal means of empowerment, rather than critiquing or seeking to dismantle systems of domination. In this paper, we illumminate frameworks and methods for engaging students in careful readings and evaluations of texts marketed as feminist, through an analysis of Elana Arnold’s feminist fairy tale, Damsel (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of popular feminism, feral feminism, and theories of becoming, the authors use Critical Content Anlaysis to explore several tenets in contemporary feminist thought in order to analyze Arnold’s text and …

Critical Insights: The Lord Of The Rings (2022), Edited By Robert C. Evans, Mariana Rios Maldonado

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Mariana Rios Maldonado, of Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings (2022), edited by Robert C. Evans

Jane Austen: A Study On The Influences, World, And Character Of An Eighteenth-Century Novelist, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Jane Austen is one of the most influential authors in history and her works are regarded as timeless classics. Her ability to harness the motif of the strong, independent woman in a time when society wanted women to have neither attribute is incomparable in contemporary works. This article examines Austen's life and the variety of factors (family, religious, intellectual, historical) that molded her mind and character and thus informed the characters she created and the stories she crafted.

Class Size And Self-Esteem As Determinants Of Student Learning Outcomes In Essay Writing, Kehinde Olufemi Ogunyemi

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

This study was carried out mainly to investigate the effects of class size and self-esteem on student achievement in—and attitude toward—English essay writing. The study was influenced by earlier research reports indicating that the large class sizes prevalent in Nigerian schools may be detrimental to student academic and emotional well-being. The study employed an ex post facto research design, as no attempt was made to alter the pre-existing conditions in the schools. Three hundred and thirty-five (335) Senior Secondary School 2 students from nine purposively selected schools participated in the study. An achievement test in essay writing (r = …

The Bond Of Empathy In Medieval And Early Modern Literature, David Strong

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters’ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another’s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters’ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim of this book is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and …

Awdry V. British Rail: The Politicization Of Thomas The Tank Engine, Matthew J. Bea

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Bibliography For "Fiction Novels And Poetry By Hispanic Authors" Display, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about literature by Hispanic authors for Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

“Tolkien And The Art Of The Manuscript.” Exhibition, Haggerty Museum Of Art (Milwaukee, Wi). Reviewed By David Emerson., David Emerson

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

Hearing Tolkien In Vaughan Williams?, Keri Hui

Journal of Tolkien Research

In recent years, musicians and Tolkien readers alike have associated Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music, particularly Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), The Lark Ascending (1914), and Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934), with Tolkien’s fantasies. This article explores this tendency to hear Tolkien’s Middle-earth in Vaughan Williams’ musical fantasies, calling attention to the similarities in their shared devotion to the idea of English consciousness, interest in combining ecclesiastical and folk materials, and pastoral vision. A juxtaposition of their approach and philosophies not only helps explain the musical echoes, however, but also confirms an appealing mark of Tolkien’s craft is its …

Creative Writing Introduction, Keith Gandal

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Finding Your Inner Drag: How Drag Culture Helped Form Freedom Of Expression For The Lgbtq Community, Sylvia Zobel De Ayala

Pop Culture Intersections

This research paper discusses the history of the LGBTQ community, the effects of the drag community and the comparison to the behaviors and attitudes from the past to the present. This article goes in depth to different scholarly articles that help understand the history of the LGBTQ community. This article will also discuss personal stories and experiences that describe the emotional aspect of the moments of history mentioned. The three main topics discussed in this paper are the Stonewall Riot, the AIDS epidemic and the uprising of the transgender community. After understanding the history and the present attitudes, they will …

Popular Culture’S Grip On The Lgbtq Community, Connor Grogan

Pop Culture Intersections

The purpose of this research is to identify the causes and consequences of forming groups within this cultural sphere, specifically focusing on the LGBTQ community. I would contend that the inclusion and exclusion of this marginalized group which exists within a larger community can be promoted or amplified by hegemonic forces through the use of popular culture and mass media. Firstly, with regards to this paper, I will identify what hegemonic power dynamics are within the context of the thesis, as well as what it means to be a marginalized group without much force within a power dynamic. Secondly, I …

William Shakespeare’S All Is True, Lord Chamberlain’S “Truth,” And Civil Religion, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first title for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII—All Is True—may reflect standard early modern usage signifying that all is an aspect of ‘troth’ or loyalty, all is common understanding, or all is received from a divine source. In the play, the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s only character so named, serves the Henrician monarchy’s “truth” by serving Henry’s religious and monarchic goals as the Jacobean Lord Chamberlain similarly served James I’s goals, assuring audiences of the integrity, truth, and legitimacy of the monarchy and its faith. The play shows the Lord Chamberlain working to strengthen the loyalty of Henry’s realm …