English Language and Literature Commons^™

Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and …

A Lost Tale, A Found Influence: Earendel And Tinúviel, Verlyn Flieger

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Examines two examples of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story-telling art: one an experiment in omission, the other in commission. The Tale of Earendel is established through poems about him, by references to the tale in other tales, by outlines, and by what seem to be consciously contrived omissions where it ought to have been. That there ought to be a Tale of Earendel to go with the other three now seems obvious, yet Christopher commented more than once that it “was never written.” Of the many attempts at the Beren and Lúthien story that Tolkien made over the years, “The Tale of …

Soup, Bones, And Shakespeare: Literary Authorship And Allusion In Middle-Earth, Owen Dugan, James Krasner

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Examines Tolkien’s theory of authorship and storytelling by exploring the literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Witch-king’s fall and the theory of creation in Tolkien’s description of the Silmarils. Tolkien alludes to Macbeth to undercut both the modern view of the author as an isolated genius and to critique the approach to literary allusion that reinforces this view. Fëanor’s creation of the Silmarils serves as a symbolic representation of modern authorship, suggesting that Tolkien not only disagrees with a singular model of authorship but also believes it to be a manifestation of corrupted artistry. Ultimately, both the Witch-king and …

Tolkien And Bakhtin: Symphony Of Time In The Lord Of The Rings, Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The essay reveals the nature of time and space in Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings with the help of the chronotope concept proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s classification of spatiotemporal relations in the novel identifies the type of chronotope in Tolkien’s major narrative as one close to folklore, idyll, and epic. Tolkien uses memory and its functioning to create a unique symphony of time in The Lord of the Rings. As a concept that reaches the depth of philosophical abstraction and at the same time appeals to a concrete textual context, Bakhtin’s chronotope is a surprisingly flexible …

Círdan The Shipwright: Tolkien’S Bodhisattva Who Brings Us To The Other Shore, Douglas Charles Kane

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien wrote that Círdan the Shipwright “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth” despite being a minor, incidental character in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The important role that Círdan plays in Tolkien’s secondary universe can be understood by looking at him as a bodhisattva in a Buddhist tradition. Círdan’s role throughout the Three Ages of Middle-earth chronicled by Tolkien was to come to the aid of others, to reduce their suffering, and particularly to help facilitate their sailing to the “Blessed Lands” in the West (which can be seen as a metaphor for …

A Note On Ursula K. Le Guin's Daoist Interests, Robert Steed

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This note focuses upon specifying Le Guin’s particular Daoist interests. It also serves as a beginning in mapping out various Daoist concepts that she renders creatively in her literary work, serving as a short primer in Daoist thought and Le Guin.

The Tao Masters Who Walk Away From Omelas, Sabina Schrynemakers

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Le Guin primarily intended to portray Taoist enlightenment in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” rather than a moral contemplation or lesson. She first describes Omelas as the pinnacle of human flourishing from a Taoist perspective, then how the residents of Omelas have achieved moral maturity through coming to terms with the necessity of evil, and finally she describes the even greater transcendence of those who have achieved detachment from the goods of Omelas, the Tao Masters. This interpretation is supported by parallels with the Tao Te Ching.

A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds To Donald Williams's "Keystone Or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder To Verlyn Flieger On The Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' Of Tolkien's Singular Self", Robin Anne Reid

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This response traces what the author sees as significant areas of disagreement between Flieger’s essay “The Arch and the Keystone” and Williams’s rejoinder in Mythlore #139, and touches on the wider contemporary context of pushback against diverse scholarship about and readings of Tolkien’s works.

The repository PDF of this note includes an online-only supplement.

Abolishing Man In Other Worlds: Breaking And Recovering The Chain Of Being In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy By Courtney Petrucci, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide To C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy By Christiana Hale, And A Compass For Deep Heaven: Navigating The C.S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy, Edited By Diana Pavlac Glyer And Julianne Johnson, Josiah Peterson

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

No Ordinary People: 21 Friendships Of C.S. Lewis By Joel D. Heck, James Stockton

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No Ordinary People: 21 Friendships of C.S. Lewis. Joel D. Heck. Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2022, 395 p. 9781935688228. $19.50.

The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis: Essays In Memory Of Christopher W. Mitchell, Edited By Bruce R. Johnson, Melody Green

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This is a review of The Undiscovered C. S. Lewis edited by Bruce Johnson.

Correspondence: 1927-1987 By Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Correspondence: 1927–1987 by Joseph Campbell, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Evans Lansing Smith is a fine addition to The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series. It is a solid work and a pleasure to read for fans of Joseph Campbell and his works. The book provides a balance of letters written by Joseph Campbell to friends and colleagues with letters written to him by the same people over the span of his adult life starting at age twenty-four. The letters provide a picture of the remarkable life of a man who was both a friend to many and a …

Dorothy L. Sayers, A Biography: Death, Dante, And Lord Peter Wimsey By Colin Duriez And Dorothy And Jack: The Transforming Friendship Of Dorothy L. Sayers And C.S. Lewis By Gina Dalfonzo, Gabriel Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Tolkien And The Sea: Proceedings Of The Tolkien Society Seminar 1996, Edited By Richard Cranshaw And Shaun Gunner, Kris Swank

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Review of the book Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 1996.

Pagan Saints In Middle-Earth By Claudio A. Testi, Toni Thibodeaux

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Middle-Earth, Or There And Back Again By Łukasz Neubauer, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

A Sense Of Tales Untold: Exploring The Edges Of Tolkien's Literary Canvas By Peter Grybauskas, Robert T. Tally

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. Peter Grybauskas. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2021. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-60635-430-8. $55.00 (hardcover)

Tolkien And The Classical World, Edited By Hamish Williams, Larry J. Swain

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

Restoring Paradise Through Providence: The Emergence Of The Serendipitous Hero In The Hunger Games, Alexandra Elizabeth Oberempt

Theses and Dissertations

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games enhanced the popularity of post-apocalyptic, young adult literature written between 2004 and 2014 (a genre I call millennial dystopia). A government that sends its people to war, spies on them, and sacrifices the sanctity of the community for personal profit while the powerful and wealthy watch from a secure distance is an anxiety addressed in this fiction. The hero of millennial dystopias satiates the suffering that emerges from this angst.

Through her story, Katniss is pushed to her destiny on a path that leads her to become the hero of The Hunger Games trilogy. In …

'The Fidelity Of Promising': Egoism And Obligation In Austen, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay reads the promises that permeate Sense and Sensibility (1811) in the context of late eighteenth-century discussions about the nature and value of voluntary obligations, probing Austen’s engagement with ideas advanced by thinkers including David Hume, Adam Smith, William Paley, William Godwin, and Edmund Burke. In doing so, the essay contributes to long-standing debates about Austen’s ethical vision, highlighting her simultaneous commitment to and critique of the individualist ethos structuring modern life. Austen’s approach to promises, the essay argues, is broadly aligned with that of Hume, Smith, and Paley: like these philosophers, Austen suggests that one is bound by …

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Kindness In The Bardo: Empathy As A Catalyst For Healing In Victims Of Dissociation, Julia Dorothea Chopelas

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a host of undead characters find themselves in a spiritual limbo based on the bardo. Although they won’t admit it to themselves, Roger Bevins III and Hans Vollman are most certainly dead. Despite their supernatural makeup as ghosts, Bevins and Vollman bear strong psychological resonance with the living: they are human, heartbroken, and lost. For the ghosts of Oak Hills Cemetery, the inefficient coping mechanism of dissociation perpetuates their afterlife imprisonment in the bardo. Bevins and Vollman suffer from a variety of dissociative symptoms, their minds’ psychological defense against the trauma that has …

Assimilation In The United States: Semitism And Asian Americanism, Megan Gibson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’S And Fitzgerald’S Portrayals Of Mental Illness, Cryslin A. Ledbetter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Cryslin Ledbetter's essay, "How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’s and Fitzgerald’s Portrayals of Mental Illness" examines the similarities and differences between Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Through a careful comparison of male and female writers, the author analyzes defining factors that effect the final product of each novel.

Attributions Of Successful English Language Learners In Transfer-Level English, John David Hart

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to discover what English language learners attribute their successful completion of transfer-level English at a California community college. Attribution is generally defined as the internal and external factors that English language learners identify as aiding in their successful completion of transfer-level English. The theory guiding this study was Tinto’s theory of student integration and persistence, or theory of persistence, as it identifies student characteristics and support systems that theoretically lead to student persistence. It also incorporated elements of Weiner’s attribution theory, as past experiences play a significant role in motivation, persistence, and …

An Analysis Of Simon Legree’S Dreams In Uncle Tom’S Cabin, Ellie Windfeld-Hansen

Global Tides

This paper discusses Simon Legree's moral degradation in Uncle Tom's Cabin, primarily through his two most prominent dreams in the novel. Freudian analysis of Legree's dreams explains that Legree's past mistreatment of others haunts him to the point where he is driven to the brink of insanity. Legree's suppression of his guilt showcases his inner struggle, as he values his slaveowner reputation to such a degree that he must abandon any shred of humanity.

Dismantling Structural Systems Of Oppression Through A Revolutionized Pedagogy, Ambar A. Quintanilla

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

"I Don't Believe One-Half Of It Myself": The Role Of Folk Groups In Supernatural Legend Interpretation, Melanie Kimball

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A range of interpretations can characterize supernatural legends as religious or non-religious—or somewhere in between. Religious audiences quickly categorize supernatural religious legends as such, but they hesitate when interpreting supernatural non-religious legends and supply multiple interpretations. Folk group paradigms influence these interpretations, and a variety of factors in turn influence which paradigms are used. The most important of these factors is a hierarchy of folk groups, which each individual has uniquely created and to which they refer when interpreting stories and experiences. When the most important of these folk groups fails to fully interpret a narrative, individuals will use folk …