Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

How “Interested” Criticism Fueled The Formulation Of Nineteen Eighty-Four’S Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch

All Theses

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a “cultural afterlife” as a result of “interested” criticism, which has a set political/practical barometer or motive. While everyone agrees that the novel presents a frightening dystopia, many also consider it a prophetic piece that illuminates the possible corruption of executive power of a nation thanks to this cultural afterlife; the modern and popular term “Orwellian” resulted from these sorts of analyses and have only escalated in the years since its inception. As a result, within the past decade, multiple scholars, analysts, and journalists have referenced Orwell’s novel as a factual representation of this executive …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines the connection between the motif of the Old English warrior woman and Tolkien’s female characters. It provides a critique of Leslie Donovan’s paper “The valkyrie reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen” and contrasts previous research on Tolkien’s female characters focussed either on gender-studies or on a “Germanic” influence with a more direct and specific connection between Medieval English and his works. The motif of the Old English warrior woman is established by investigating the female characters Judith, Elene, and Juliana from the Old English poems Judith, …

Not So Dystopian: A Historical Reading Of Eugenics In Science Fiction, Riley Sanders

The Forum: Journal of History

Broadly, this paper is an effort in complicating traditional readings of eugenic themes in science fiction. Two landmark novels, Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), are highlighted as representative of the early and late stages of eugenics. By focusing on the troubling historical context surrounding these authors, I denounce the simple reading of these works as merely “dystopian”. Scholars like Francis Fukuyama advance these simplistic readings by instinctively assuming that Wells and Huxley were against eugenics. This paper continues the tradition that David Bradshaw popularized in his book The Hidden Huxley, which argues …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Review Of Writing And Constructing The Self In Great Britain In The Long Eighteenth Century, Edited By John Baker, Marion Leclair, And Allan Ingram, Kelly J. Plante

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

A review of Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram. Written by Kelly Plante.

Remaking Divinity In Aldous Huxley’S Brave New World 2021, Sebastian Vignone

Master's Theses

Humanity is an experience. Shaped through both individual and collective encounters, we understand the self and the world around us as an amalgamation of interactions over the course of our lives. Arguably, one of the most common experiential archetypes is religion, and more specifically the relationship one has with a divine being as it has been framed by a religious institution. While the United States does not have an official religion, there is a host of people who refer to the U.S. as a “Christian nation,” and it is therefore irresponsible to elide the panoply of inequities that run through …

The Failure Of Chivalry, Courtesy, And Knighthood Post-Wwi As Represented In David Jones’S In Parenthesis, Taylor L. Hubbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes David Jones’s In Parenthesis to demonstrate the failed notion of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood in modernity during and after the war. Jones’s semi-autobiographical prose poem recounting his experiences of WWI was published in 1937, nineteen years after the war ended. Jones applied the concepts of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood to his experiences during WWI through In Parenthesis. Jones used these concepts, which originated in the classical period and the Middle Ages, to demonstrate how they have changed over time, especially given the events of WWI. The best way for Jones to demonstrate the impact of WWI …

“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.

Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency …

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren

Other Faculty Materials

Remix the Manuscript is a digital humanities research project centered around a single medieval manuscript, the Dartmouth Brut Chronicle (Rauner Codex MS 003183). This ongoing experiment with digital tools uses this one example to explore one broad question: How are the digital tools available today determining what we will know 100 years from now about things that happened 1000 years ago?

Alt Wars Of The Roses: A Guide To The Women In Shakespeare's First Tetralogy (Especially Richard Iii) For Fans Of Philippa Gregory's White Queen Series, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Since The Other Boleyn Girl made such a splash, especially with its 2008 film adaptation starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, novelist Philippa Gregory has turned out book after book of first person female narratives, historical fiction of the era of the early Tudors and the Cousins’ War. (Gregory has an aversion to calling it "Wars of the Roses" but seems to be the sole voice against that classification.) With the film series of The White Queen released in 2013, we have what some consider a fuller pop culture alternative perspective on the women who intersect with the plays that …

Shakespeare’S Deviation From His Predecessors: Aligning "Romeo And Juliet" With Italian Renaissance Marriage Culture, Tara Lynn Hohn

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Women And World War One: Perspectives On Women's Role In Wwi Literature, Rachel Michelle Brown

All Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the changing gender roles of British women who served as caretakers in World War One. Often overlooked for their contributions, the women who worked on the frontlines of the war defined the changing role of women during and after the war in several crucial ways: 1) the general expectations of women’s gender role, 2) how women perceived and acted in motherhood, and 3) how women constructed and maintained heterosexual, homosocial, and platonic relationships. Using a gender theory approach, this thesis analyzes two semi-autobiographical fictional texts, Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War, published in 1930, and …

Witch Pamphlets, Tsea M. Francisconi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The witch hysteria that overtook Christian Europe during the Early Modern era inspired a mass paranoia over the conspiratorial belief that the Abrahamic religion’s personification of the world’s evils, also known as Satan, the Devil, demons, or Lucifer interchangeably, was attempting to rise up and cause harm to Christian communities during this time period. It was believed that in order to achieve this goal the Christian version of the Devil had been recruiting humans within Christian communities and turning these chosen humans into witches by granting them the ability to wield magical powers to spread their destruction, murder, and terror …

From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological …

Barnacle Geese And Sky Burials: Relativism In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

As a medieval travel narrative, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was immensely popular for everyone from bookworms to world travelers in 14th and 15th century Europe. Given its popularity, and the period in which it was produced, one might expect the fictitious travelogue to display an incredible level of intolerance towards the various peoples and cultures it depicts. However, the Travels frequently surprises modern readers with its message of tolerance towards greater humanity, and its recognition of the universality of human experience as it is mirrored in the lives of people of different ethnic and cultural groups. In order …

Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Extant in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, the Middle English romance Emaré has nevertheless captivated modern scholars and readers. The majority of studies have focused on the text’s material culture, centred on the description of a luxurious cloth that takes up 10% of the poem. A recent global turn in medieval studies has consistently highlighted the role of medieval Europe in defining and supporting imperial projects, simultaneously challenging the Eurocentrism of medieval studies and the supposed neutrality of medieval European culture. This article brings Emaré into conversation with material culture and postcolonial critique to investigate the imperial politics of the text. …

"The Most Glorious War Recorded In The British Annals”: Portugal In British Figurations Of The Peninsular War, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“THE MOST GLORIOUS WAR RECORDED IN THE BRITISH ANNALS,” AS ROBERT Southey described it in the dedication of his History of the Peninsular War,1 the conflict that brought together Portugal, Spain, and Britain against Napoleon’s armies between 1807 and 1814 was a dominant preoccupation of the British public in general, and of the first generation of Romantics in particular.2 Many critics have shown the extent to which the Iberian uprising against the tyranny of Napoleon galvanized the British people, united the British nation, and afforded Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge a renewed opportunity to sympathize with the cause of …

The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie

Richard Rawlinson Center Series

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

Tolkien's Work On The Oxford English Dictionary: Some New Evidence From Quotation Slips, Rachel A. Fletcher

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article presents previously undiscussed material, in the form of citation slips, relating to Tolkien’s work on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The separation of these slips from the OED archives means that they have been almost entirely overlooked, and their relevance to Tolkien studies has not been recognised. Nevertheless, they have the potential to be a valuable resource, especially for understanding the specialist skills Tolkien brought to the dictionary as a scholar of Old English. One item is of particular biographical interest, as it suggests that Tolkien was carrying out work for the OED earlier than previously …

‘Written In A Fair Hand’: The Living Tradition Of Medieval Scripts In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Calligraphy, Eduardo B. Kumamoto

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines J.R.R. Tolkien’s calligraphic work in the light of the medieval scripts that possibly or certainly inspired him, aiming to demonstrate how his art was informed by the philological and paleographical dimensions. At first, we explore the context in which Tolkien’s calligraphic skills flourished. After that, the influence of the Anglo-Saxon Square Minuscule, the Insular Half-uncial, and the Uncial scripts is investigated by means of examples taken from Tolkien’s illustrations and manuscripts. The impact of the English Carolingian Minuscule, via Edward Johnston’s Foundational Hand, is also discussed. In the last section, the lettering in the maps prepared for …

Paper Monuments: The Latin Elegies Of Thomas Chambers, Almoner To Cardinal Richelieu, Kelsey Jackson Williams

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Latin poems by Thomas Chambers (or Chalmers), the younger, a well-connected mid-17th century Catholic priest who spent time in Rome and Scotland as well as in France, where he was almoner to Cardinal Richelieu, based on a manuscript collection of elegies Chalmers copied into George Strachan’s manuscript album amicorum, and on other elegies known from their use on monuments or tombs.

'You Must Fire On Them': Protest And Repression In Pulteneytown, Caithness, In 1847, James Hunter

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines based on contemporary accounts the protests in the small coastal town Pulteneytown, Caithness, on Wednesday, 24 February, 1847, against the export of grain; the circumstances in which a small detachment from the British Army’s 76th Regiment opened fire on the protesters; and local and London newspaper comments about the confrontation and the military response.

Joe Corrie’S In Time O’ Strife, The General Strike Of 1926, And The Impasse Of Insurgent Masculinity, Paul Malgrati

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the ex-miner and labour journalist Joe Corrie's three-act play In Time o’ Strife, set in West Fife ("the most significant working-class play written about the 1926 General Strike"), setting it in the context of Corrie's writing career, and exploring the psychological, familial, and political conflicts, including conflicts of gender roles, which it dramatizes.

Afterword: 'A Wrong-Resenting People': Writing Insurrectionary Scotland, Christopher A. Whatley

Studies in Scottish Literature

A broadranging review of "conflictual events" in Scottish history from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries, exploring attitudes towards protest or insurrection, both on the part of the protesters and of the local and central governmental authorities, arguing for the value of interdisciplinary research on the sources, and providing references for literary students to some of the relevant historical scholarship.

Introduction: A Glorious Phantom: Insurrections In Scottish Literature, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the SSL symposium on Insurrections by tracing themes from James Kelman's play Hardie and Baird: the Last Days (1978), about the Scottish Insurrection of 1820.

Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding

Senior Honors Theses

Though established English history portrays Elizabeth I (1533-1603) as uniting England under the new Protestant religion, recent historical evidence reveals that extensive counter-currents still existed. This thesis examines how the politico-religious beliefs of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights manifest themselves in their drama, particularly through imagery and allusions. It draws especially from Frances Yates to assert that imagery of white magic, Christian Cabala, and alchemy in these dramatists’ works refers to the pure imperial reform movement of Elizabeth’s reign, and also from Clare Asquith to illuminate a reading of Shakespeare as a playwright who encoded in his plays a Catholic message …