Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Time Served In Prison Shakespeare, Niels Herold, Matt Wallace

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

A Literary Tour Of Ireland, Lisa K. Miller

DLPS Faculty Publications

This Powerpoint presentation offers an overview of some of Ireland's greatest writers, from Dublin, Limerick and the West, and Belfast and the North. Includes an audio file of W.B. Yeats reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The Powerpoint is available below under "Additional Files."

The Best Laid Plans Of Librarians And Faculty: Information Literacy Instruction In A General Education Literature Course, Difficulties And Successes, Kelly Diamond, Lisa Weihman

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Members of this panel (a librarian and faculty member) began collaborating to create information literacy sessions for English 272: Modernist Literature. Assuming that students enrolled would be English majors or similar, we created sessions and assignments focused on higher-order research skills, such as working with and analyzing primary sources.

However, this section of English 272 fulfilled a General Education Curriculum (GEC) requirement. At our institution, students take 43 credit hours to fulfill GEC requirements, courses from a broad range of disciplines. Unfortunately, many students enroll in GEC courses for which they are under-prepared, have no personal interest, and are not …

Modernism's Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies From The Modernist Wars, Jean Ashley Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Modernism's Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies from the Modernist Wars" begins the process of recuperating the lost history of Spanish Civil War pacifism. It studies the ways in which writers and artists employ the aesthetic techniques of modernism, so often ensconced in violence and militarism, to articulate a program of peace. By approaching the Spanish Civil War as a pivotal site of production and inspiration for an international network of writers and artists, this project reworks what is generally accepted as the very center of modernism. "Modernism's Impossible Witness" explores the connections among art, violence, war, and peace in the twentieth …

The Librarian In Rowling’S Harry Potter Series, Mary P. Freier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Librarian in Rowling's Harry Potter Series" Mary P. Freier discusses Hermione Granger's skills as a librarian and researcher which lead to the defeat of Lord Voldemort. In each novel in the series, Hermione's research provides the necessary information for the solving of the mystery. Throughout the series, Hermione proves to be the only character who can use books effectively without putting herself or others in danger. Hermione begins the series as a child who loves the library, but does not always know how to use it effectively, while Madam Pince begins the series as a stereotypical …

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

Charleston Library Conference

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

Middle-Earth's War On Terror: A Post-9/11 Reception Study On The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, James William Peebles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Americans can and do interpret Tolkien's works in light of 9/11 and its proximity to Peter Jackson's film adaptations hitting theaters.

The Diathesis-Stress Model Of Corruption By The Ruling Ring: Nature, Power, And Exposure In J. R. R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Faith R. Holley

Student Scholarship

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring seems to exert power over some characters more than others. Though these differences could seem like an oversight or a lack of continuity, they also offer the opportunity to examine the effects of the differential power of the Ring. If the Ring is addictive, as Tom Shippey claims in The Road to Middle Earth, then it is possible to examine the etiology of addiction to the Ring (126). In this thesis, I present a psychological reading of Tolkien that relies on a modern psychological theory, namely the …

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

"Every Child In Our World Will Know His Name!": Malcolm Gladwell's Theories As An Explanation For The Cultural Phenomenon Of Harry Potter, Alicia Morgan

Masters Theses

When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hit stores in the United States in 1998, children and adults alike went wild. Not only had Rowling's first book made huge waves in the UK, but Americans were talking about the struggling, single-parent who had penned a children's classic before the book even reached American stores. American audiences accepted Rowling's first novel with open arms, making it one of the first children's books to reach and occupy The New York Times best-seller list for so long. While certain marketing techniques and the rise of the Internet did contribute to Harry Potter's initial …

Bringing Down The Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, And Individualized Leadership In Nuñez’S Novel Prospero’S Daughter, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

“Bringing Down the Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, and Individualized Leadership in Nuñez’s novel Prospero’s Daughter” offers an analysis of Elizabeth Nuñez’s (2006) novel Prospero’s Daughter and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), both of which draw upon multicultural tradition of European and Caribbean literatures, retelling Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The paper is concerned with the ways in which leadership has been transformed from the original story, through Césaire’s text, and into Nuñez’s. Each work acts as an agent of leadership in literary and social terms, attempting to enact paradigmatic shifts away from hierarchy and classification and toward individualized transformational leadership.

Footnoted Folklore: Robert Burns's "Hallowe'en", Corey E. Andrews

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines Robert Burns's poem "Hallowe'en," first published in the Kilmarnock edition (1786), both in relation to its background in Scottish folklore and in terms of the way Burns presented it on the page, with numerous footnotes, arguing that "throughout the poem Burns acts as a participant observer in the classic anthropological sense."

From Womb To Tomb: A Deconstructionist And Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Death In James Joyce's Dubliners, Bailey Gunn

Senior Capstone Theses

Intentionally absent.

A Study In Sherlock: Revisiting The Relationship Between Sherlock Holmes And Dr. John Watson, Rebecca Mclaughlin

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Dear Christopher, Abby Shelley

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

Second Place

Wisdom From A Lost Friend To A New Friend, Veronica Murphy

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

Third Place

Acting, Integrity, And Gender In Coriolanus, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Shakespeare's Coriolanus... anticipates and corroborates modern-day analyses emphasizing the sociopolitical dimensions and determinants of antitheatrical discourse. In the present essay, I would like to shift my focus from questions of class/status to questions of sex/gender, endeavoring to trace the links between Coriolanus’s antiperformative zeal and his ultra-masculine identity. For though it is true that Coriolanus opposes the dissimulation of others on political grounds (i.e., it creates social confusion), what causes him to reject play-acting in his own person is the sexualized fear that it will unman him (i.e., turn him into a squeaking virgin or crying boy). In this manner, …

[Introduction To] Leadership And Elizabethan Culture, Peter Iver Kaufman

Bookshelf

Bringing together contributions from political, cultural, and literary historians, Leadership and Elizabethan Culture identifies distinctive problems confronting early modern English government during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

This diverse group of contributors examines local elites and church leadership, explores the queen, her councillors, as well as her struggles with Mary Stuart and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, raises questions about Elizabeth's leadership, and the advice she received as well as the advice she rejected.

Selected, influential works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Sidney, and Bacon are put in their Elizabethan and contemporary critical contexts, rounding off the study of Elizabethan …

A Passion For Scholarship & Collecting: The G. Ross Roy Collection Of Robert Burns & Scottish Literature, Thomas Keith

Studies in Scottish Literature

Pays tribute to G. Ross Roy as book collector, describing the origins and growth of the Robert Burns collection begun by his grandfather W. Ormiston Roy (1874-1958), of Montreal, Canada, but greatly developed by Professor Roy, before finding a permanent home in the University's Irvin Department of Rare Books.& Special Collections. Notes the range of Scottish authors now included in the collection and describes briefly many of the most distinctive and important Burns items.

Respect Des Fonds D'Archives: Theory And Application, Danielle Lee-Muma

Data and Test Instruments

This paper examines the principle of Respect des fonds, its history and reason for becoming a dominant principle, and what its aspects mean: interpreting original order as an internal arrangement, and discussing external arrangement in the principle of provenance. Case studies (both real world examples and hypothetical examples based on real fonds and archives) will be used to discuss how the twin principles of respect des fonds, original order and provenance can be put into practice. The case studies are used to discuss what problems can arise in the application of respect des fonds.

For The Benefit Of Others: Harriet Martineau: Feminist, Abolitionist And Travel Writer, Laura J. Labovitz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

One of the distinctive and remarkable traits of Harriet Martineau was her need to publish information that she believed would benefit society. Her publications - Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) - have the distinct characteristic of being published with the intent to inform and educate the British public. Scholars have focused on her later 1848 publication, Eastern Life: Present and Past, as her most important publication. Yet I will argue that it was her earlier works which set the stage for this later, better known book. Her travel to the …

The Privilege Of Ambivalence: Saturday’S Henry Perowne On The ‘War On Terror’, Jax Lee Gardner

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay considers the relation between personal privilege (class, race, nationality, sex) and political ambivalence toward the Iraq war as it manifests in the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Henry Perowne “feels culpable somehow, but helpless too” in his shifting opinions of the coming invasion. Throughout the text we are shown Henry’s multiple perspectives regarding Iraq. Such ambivalence is, in itself, a form of complicity in war. Henry neither tangibly opposes the actions of the government (as the protesters do), nor does he consider sacrificing any of his creature comforts in support of the war (as the soldiers do). I …

Acting Virtuous: Chastity, Theatricality, And The Tragedie Of Mariam, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Given the interrelation of female chastity and female theatricality in early modem discourses, it comes as no surprise that both figure importantly in what is believed to be the first original English drama to be written by a woman. As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen 's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act.

A Happy Employee Is A Productive Employee, Erin Dini Davis

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Rules Of Misrule, Meghan Forgione

Honors Scholar Theses

The project seeks to offer an alternative interpretation of sport culture in Renaissance England with respect to theater and football. I seek to show how sport culture, although seemingly threatening to the state, actually reinforces the monarchy due to its ability to provide the people with a controlled social release. The prose explores the function of carnival in sport culture and the way in which the two are manifested in football and theater in the Renaissance.

Satire's Club: Reality, Reason, And Knowledge In Joseph Andrews, Heather Anne Law Davis

Theses Digitization Project

Satire has been credited with possessing the power to deconstruct the distinctions we make between opposing concepts and thus lead us to reevaluate established views. Structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure claimed that language relies on sets of opposites, or binary pairs, to create meaning. Building on this idea, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida explored the hierarchies he believed were inherent in all binary pairs, arguing that on concept in each pair occupies a superior position in our consciousness.

Gathering Leadership Momentum Across Great Distances: Creating An Online Community Of Practice, Erin Dini-Davis, Danielle Theiss-White

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

At the 2007 Mountain Plains Library Association Leadership (MPLA) Institute, held in New Mexico, USA, eight academic librarians formed an online multi-state, multigenerational community of practice. MPLA is a twelve-state library association within the United States. Using Google Groups™, the members formed an online environment called the MPLA Community of Practice for continuing development of the leadership skills presented at the Institute. These early-career librarians represent diverse educational backgrounds and work in libraries serving varied populations with differing disciplinary emphases. The group meets monthly with each member preparing and facilitating online discussions, complete with personal assessments, topical readings, and questions. …

Performing Masculinity In Paradise Lost, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"In Female Masculinities, Judith Halberstam objects that critical and theoretical approaches to sex/gender systems have paid too much attention to anatomy. In particular, she faults studies of masculinity for focusing almost exclusively on the white male body and its effects. By delimiting masculinity in this way, Halberstam argues, we counterproductively confine ourselves to those manifestations of masculinity with which we are already intimately familiar. Urging an ampler vision, Halberstam calls for the examination of alternative masculinities, particularly those performed by agents who are not male by birth or biology.

When we read Milton with Halberstam in mind, we realize something …

Alexander In The Himalayas: Competing Imperial Legacies In Medieval Islamic History And Literature, Anna Akasoy

Publications and Research

In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of stories in a volume with the title The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales. The collection includes the short story The Man Who Would be King, in which Kipling's alter ego, a British journalist in India, makes the acquaintance of a pair of adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who demand his help as a fellow Mason. The two shady characters have set out to take advantage of divisions among the natives and are determined to install themselves as kings in Kafiristan, a remote region inhabited by pagans in the north of the …

Mourning Eros: Hieroglyphic Love And Loss In H.D.'S Helen In Egypt, Shauna Karine Dorotich

Theses : Honours

H.D. and Lacan both articulate a philosophy of love that exists beyond the sexual relationship. This thesis highlights the concordance between their later writings on love, with a specific focus on Lacan's Book xx; On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972 - 1973 (Encore), and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. Initially, I address the paradox of erotic love to explicate the way fantasy results in the death of the woman within the sexual relationship. I then argue that a subject must experience a phase of mourning the fantasy of erotic love in order to progress to …