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Articles 1 - 30 of 5471

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, British Isles

Miscellaneous, Bruce R. Johnson Sep 2026

Miscellaneous, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

No abstract provided.

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The Tragicomedy Of C. S. Lewis The Bald: Reflections On An Unpublished Play, Jahdiel Perez Sep 2026

The Tragicomedy Of C. S. Lewis The Bald: Reflections On An Unpublished Play, Jahdiel Perez

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"Within the pages of a Vice-President’s Register (1920–1984), held in the Old Library archives of his Oxford College, Lewis handwrote, in mock Shakespearean English, 'The Tragicomicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald.' As far as we know, this is the only complete play in his corpus. Mostly unpublished until the recent release of C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (2024) by Simon Horobin, this piece has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In what follows, I seek to address this gap through a close analysis of portions of the text and its broader implications for Lewis’s approach to writing."

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A Moving Image Of Eternity: Exploring C. S. Lewis's Philosophy Of Time, Brian C. Roden Sep 2026

A Moving Image Of Eternity: Exploring C. S. Lewis's Philosophy Of Time, Brian C. Roden

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"The “Time Graph,” as it will be labeled in this essay, is obscurely nestled in C. S. Lewis’s personal manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Comprised of mathematical sketches and cryptic commentary, the document has apparently escaped formal study regarding why Lewis produced it or how it might relate to his published works. More broadly, does it have any bearing on a coherent philosophy of time that Lewis may have held? The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that the Time Graph is very likely an early draft of the mechanics of time travel …

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Tracing Sehnsucht: Longing For The "Hidden Country", Charlie Reeder Sep 2026

Tracing Sehnsucht: Longing For The "Hidden Country", Charlie Reeder

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"This thesis will argue that Lewis employs a consistent set of literary themes and biblical echoes to articulate longing throughout his career, and that his early non-Christian, and often anti-Christian, poetry, such as Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919) and Dymer (1926), plays a formative role in shaping his later depictions of Sehnsucht. Although his theological commitments and vocabulary evolve significantly after his conversion, an engagement with a predominantly Judeo-Christian literary inheritance is apparent from the outset. A central focus here will be Lewis’s use of place. In his early poetry, recurring biblical resonances, conceptual images, and spatial …

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The Mythos Of Gender In Till We Have Faces, Annie Crawford Sep 2026

The Mythos Of Gender In Till We Have Faces, Annie Crawford

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"In Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis draws from the mythic imagery of Cupid and Psyche to offer a potent meditation on the symbolism of gender. Through the recurring imagery of mountain, temple, and womb, Lewis reinterprets classical archetypes within a Christian imagination to reveal gender not as a social construct or biological accident but as a spiritual polarity woven into the fabric of creation. In this symbolic cosmos, mas- culinity and femininity signify the dynamic interplay of divine initiative and creaturely receptivity—the eternal rhythm of giving and receiving that structures both nature and grace. Read in this light, …

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C. S. Lewis, The Expert Communicator, Steven A. Beebe Sep 2026

C. S. Lewis, The Expert Communicator, Steven A. Beebe

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"What evidence supports the claim that Lewis is an expert communicator? He remains a popular author, one of the most read authors of all time. He was a professional communicator; he earned his living communicating: teaching, writing, and speaking. And, as this essay has documented, he was a professor of communication. He made insightful observations about the role, nature, and function of communication throughout the corpus of his work. Although his planned book with J. R. R. Tolkien, “Language and Human Nature,” was never published, his initial ideas found in the draft of the partial opening chapter, coupled with a …

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Screwtape In Wartime, Joe Ricke Sep 2026

Screwtape In Wartime, Joe Ricke

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"This essay looks closely at the connections between Lewis’s wartime message to his listeners in his now famous, but then unlikely, sermon, “Learning in Wartime,” on 22 October 1939 and his wartime novel, The Screwtape Letters. It will range widely from biography to history to literary influences and to close reading of the texts to help reflect on its place not only in Lewis’s oeuvre but in his life and the lives of all those who, then and now, attend to the distinction between what Lewis (and, surprisingly, Screwtape) makes between the local wars of time and space and the …

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Signifying Nothing? Narnia, Inanity, And A. L. Rowse, Michael Ward Sep 2026

Signifying Nothing? Narnia, Inanity, And A. L. Rowse, Michael Ward

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"This essay explores the origins of the word Narnia, the name that Lewis gave to the fictional kingdom in which his seven Chronicles of Narnia are mostly set. How did he come by it? What, if anything, does the word mean?...I will be pursuing two lines of enquiry and two sets of intriguing connections that strike me as potentially illuminating. What follows is more of a theory for consideration than a hard-and-fast conclusion for acceptance. But though I write with a degree of tentativeness, I hope, nonetheless, to shed some light upon Lewis’s statements about his naming
of Narnia and …

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"Expressing The Great Myths": Hugo Dyson And Shakespeare In C. S. Lewis's Conversion Narrative, Sarah R. A. Waters Sep 2026

"Expressing The Great Myths": Hugo Dyson And Shakespeare In C. S. Lewis's Conversion Narrative, Sarah R. A. Waters

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"The conversations that took place on the night of 19 September 1931 in Addison’s Walk might, as David Downing has put it, “be considered the defining moment in Jack’s life.” And Lewis’s letters to Greeves are recognized to be a key source in this narrative, with Alister McGrath noting, for instance that these letters “explain the events of the night and their significance for his reflections on religious faith.” Often ignored in accounts of these conversations, however, is the importance of Dyson in the story, and often ignored in these letters are Lewis’s reflections on his current reading matter, including …

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"Lewis Dodged": T. S. Eliot's Silence, C. S. Lewis's Critique (1931 - 1947), Hannah F. Roux Sep 2026

"Lewis Dodged": T. S. Eliot's Silence, C. S. Lewis's Critique (1931 - 1947), Hannah F. Roux

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"Most agree that Lewis’s critique of Eliot’s work is important to his literary scholarship—whether they think that critique changes or not. There is no academic book of Lewis’s from the 1930s and 1940s in which he does not at some point engage with Eliot by name. The opposite question—whether Lewis’s work was important to Eliot—is comparatively neglected. This paper investigates this neglected question."

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What Did Tolkien Really Think About Narnia?, Holly Ordway Sep 2026

What Did Tolkien Really Think About Narnia?, Holly Ordway

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

"We are presented with two questions: “what did Tolkien really think about Narnia?” and “how did the idea that Tolkien hated Narnia become accepted as common knowledge?” In this essay, I will address both questions and conclude by suggesting why they matter for Inklings scholarship. At the outset, I will merely observe that since Tolkien and Lewis are two of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century, it is worth knowing what one of them thought of the other’s work. …I have drawn my primary evidence from Tolkien’s published Letters (in the Revised and Expanded Edition), unpublished letters, and …

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Frontmatter (Volume 19 Issue 2), Bruce R. Johnson Sep 2026

Frontmatter (Volume 19 Issue 2), Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

No abstract provided.

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Unsex Me Here: Gendered Psychology In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies And Comedy, Md. Abu Bakkar Sep 2026

Unsex Me Here: Gendered Psychology In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies And Comedy, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how gender shapes psychological experience across five of Shakespeare’s major plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Existing scholarship treats Shakespeare’s tragic women, tragic men, and comic heroines as separate problems; this article asks whether one framework connects them. Its starting point is the reversal in psychological positions between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: he resists killing on moral grounds and then grows recklessly violent, while she plans the murder with cold resolve and is later overwhelmed by guilt. The study asks whether this pattern recurs more broadly, and why. Drawing …

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Tolkien’S Medievalism In Ruins: The Function Of Relics And Ruins In Middle-Earth (2025) Edited By Nick Katsiadas And Carl Sell, Deborah Sabo Aug 2026

Tolkien’S Medievalism In Ruins: The Function Of Relics And Ruins In Middle-Earth (2025) Edited By Nick Katsiadas And Carl Sell, Deborah Sabo

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Deborah Sabo, of Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth (2025) edited by Nick Katsiadas and Carl Sell

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Cardinal Vices In Middle-Earth (2025), By Martina Juričková, John Wm. Houghton Aug 2026

Cardinal Vices In Middle-Earth (2025), By Martina Juričková, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of Cardinal Vices in Middle-earth (2025), by Martina Juričková.

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Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber Jul 2026

Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber

Journal of Tolkien Research

Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-earth is a remarkable achievement, yet Christopher repeatedly acknowledged how difficult the material was to present in print form and that “that there was no really satisfactory solution”.  This paper contends that a printed book is not scholarship but just one way of presenting its results. It explores how digital philology can overcome some of the limitations of print, giving examples from the Digital Tolkien Project. It shows how structural markup, version alignment, parallel reading environments, and other approaches can make relationships between drafts and published texts clearer. Importantly, these methods do not replace Christopher’s …

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Eschatological Echoes: Reading The Bible And The Harry Potter Series, Athira Mohan Dr Jul 2026

Eschatological Echoes: Reading The Bible And The Harry Potter Series, Athira Mohan Dr

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Death has been a major topic in children’s and adolescent literature , which has invited scholarly discourse over different ages. While death was very commonly featured in the puritanical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also deemed to be a subject too sensitive for the genre of children’s literature in the early twentieth century(Aries 1975), due to a combination of factors such as lowered child mortality rate and heightened concern for childhood as a special social category. However, contemporary children’s and adolescent literature focuses on death as an important part of human life, and invites discussions on …

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The Music Of The Spheres In The Western Imagination (2022), By David J. Kendall, Brad Eden Jul 2026

The Music Of The Spheres In The Western Imagination (2022), By David J. Kendall, Brad Eden

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Bradford Lee Eden, of The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination (2022), by David J. Kendall

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Arda Notebooks: The Best Of I Quaderni Di Arda (2026), Ed. By Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi And Wu Ming 4., Andrew Higgins Jul 2026

Arda Notebooks: The Best Of I Quaderni Di Arda (2026), Ed. By Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi And Wu Ming 4., Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Arda Notebooks: The Best of I Quaderni di Arda (2026), ed. by Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi and Wu Ming 4.

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"Then Daddy Began A Story": Storytelling In Tolkien’S Home And Our Own, Josh Renaud Jul 2026

"Then Daddy Began A Story": Storytelling In Tolkien’S Home And Our Own, Josh Renaud

Journal of Tolkien Research

"Then Daddy began a story, and this is what he said." That's how J.R.R. Tolkien began the first manuscript version of "Farmer Giles of Ham," one of a few moments of fatherly storytelling to be found in his fiction. Tolkien is remembered today as a great author and artist, but in his home he was a loving parent who regaled his children with tales — a "story-telling presence," as his daughter Priscilla Tolkien put. In this presentation, I reflect on Tolkien as a "daddy" and oral storyteller, drawing on examples from Tolkien's life and writing. I also consider what storytelling …

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Tolkien, Modernism, And Mass Art, Matthew Thompson-Handell Jul 2026

Tolkien, Modernism, And Mass Art, Matthew Thompson-Handell

Journal of Tolkien Research

A good deal has been written in the last 30 years on the extent to which Tolkien's work can be aligned or associated with literary modernism. Arguments have been made both for and against, though in spite of the range of perspectives that have been considered, what has been missed is the question of difficulty. A central characteristic of modernism is its difficulty, its inaccessibility to a non-specialized reader. The Lord of the Rings is not difficult, nor inaccessible - indeed it can readily be characterised as mass art by virtue of its accessibility.

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Fifteen Years Of Open-Access, Feminist Editing And Beyond: Laura L. Runge Transitions From Editor-In-Chief To Co-Director Of Abo Editorial Board As Of Abo Vol. 16, No. 1, Kelly Plante Jun 2026

Fifteen Years Of Open-Access, Feminist Editing And Beyond: Laura L. Runge Transitions From Editor-In-Chief To Co-Director Of Abo Editorial Board As Of Abo Vol. 16, No. 1, Kelly Plante

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

This is an editor's note thanking Laura L. Runge for her more than 15 years service as the founding editor of ABO. The current editors thank Laura for her foundational work and we commit to carry on her editorial vision.

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Retrospective: The Burney Centre, Mcgill University, 1945-2024, Peter Sabor Jun 2026

Retrospective: The Burney Centre, Mcgill University, 1945-2024, Peter Sabor

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

The origins of McGill University’s Burney Centre go back to 1945, when Joyce Hemlow was appointed to McGill’s Department of English. After publishing a major biography of Frances Burney in 1958, Hemlow initiated what she termed the Burney Project: a research centre devoted to producing scholarly editions of the journals and letters of Burney and her father, the music historian Charles Burney. The Frances Burney edition was completed, in 25 volumes, in 2019; five volumes of the Charles Burney edition have appeared to date, with a sixth and final volume to follow. Joyce Hemlow was succeeded as Director of the …

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A Review Of The South Central Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies (Scsecs) Annual Conference (Pinehurst, Nc 19-21 February 2026), Laura Runge-Gordon Jun 2026

A Review Of The South Central Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies (Scsecs) Annual Conference (Pinehurst, Nc 19-21 February 2026), Laura Runge-Gordon

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

A conference review for the South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference held in Pinehurst, North Carolina February 19-21, 2026.  The conference was organized by SCECS President Catherine Parisian and featured the keynote speaker Peter Radford.

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A Review Of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights Of London (University Of Delaware Press, 2024), Mattie Burkert Jun 2026

A Review Of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights Of London (University Of Delaware Press, 2024), Mattie Burkert

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

A review of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London by Mattie Burkert.

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A Review Of Karen Bloom Gevirtz 'S The Apothecary's Wife (University Of California Press, 2024), Annika Mann Jun 2026

A Review Of Karen Bloom Gevirtz 'S The Apothecary's Wife (University Of California Press, 2024), Annika Mann

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

A review of Karen Bloom Gevirtz's The Apothecary's Wife by Annika Mann.

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Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens Jun 2026

Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens

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

Digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that applies digital methodologies and technologies to the humanities, is an excellent lens through which to approach the eighteenth century.  I integrate digital humanities tools and workshops alongside primary source readings in all of my eighteenth-century British literature classes to help students better understand those texts and the world in which they were created.  In my upper-level undergraduate class on late eighteenth-century literature, I teach four digital humanities tools to students, two of them (StoryMapJS and Voyant) in connection with Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). These tools train students how to uncover historical and geographic contexts …

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Teaching Frances Burney's Evelina With Netflix’S Bridgerton, Willow White Jun 2026

Teaching Frances Burney's Evelina With Netflix’S Bridgerton, Willow White

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

This pedagogical essay explores strategies for teaching Frances Burney's first novel Evelina (1778) through comparison with Netflix's popular series Bridgerton. The essay demonstrates how Bridgerton's widespread popularity has renewed interest in Georgian literature and provides an engaging and accessible entry point for undergraduate students to explore Evelina's themes of social anxiety, gender, and coming of age.

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Teaching A Stand-Alone Course On Burney, Lorna J. Clark Jun 2026

Teaching A Stand-Alone Course On Burney, Lorna J. Clark

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

This essay outlines a stand-alone course on Frances Burney, suggesting that she offers a good entry point into eighteenth-century studies. Given that she wrote in so many genres—novels, plays, journals, and letters—such a course avoids the narrowness which often marks a single author course. In twelve weeks, the course studied ten works: four novels, five plays (three comedies and two tragedies) and a selection of journals and letters. The latter describes well-known figures in Burney’s social and literary networks in eighteenth-century London and leads to discussion of techniques of the epistolary, of diary-writing and of women’s life-writing. Burney’s novels are …

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Reading Burney’S Mastectomy Letter: Presentist Thinking And Personal Responses In The Classroom, Heather Meek Jun 2026

Reading Burney’S Mastectomy Letter: Presentist Thinking And Personal Responses In The Classroom, Heather Meek

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

Frances Burney’s mastectomy letter, in its graphic and detailed depiction of the operation she underwent without anesthetic in 1811, does not always lend itself immediately to standard, scholarly classroom discussion. It tends, rather, to incite unusually intimate responses, as well as conversations about medicine and health today. In my teaching of the letter in literature courses at Université de Montréal over the course of the past 13 years, I have found that students are inclined to seize upon the subject of breast cancer as especially contemporary in its relevance and to share their own anecdotal knowledge of the disease. I …

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