Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Counterfeit Letters And Fictional Trials: Thomas More’S Utopia As Cultural Brand, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Utilizing marketing theory on iconic brands, this article provides a focused study of surviving English editions of Thomas More's Utopia (1551) and the different ways in which the publication was adapted by its print agents, who eventually turned it into an iconic, English brand-name. By drawing a connection between the popularity and versatility of More’s text and the rapidly developing genre of utopian fiction, this article sheds light on the speed with which the press both reacted to and played a role in creating popular taste.

Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

Mediated Technologies: Locating Non-Authorial Agency In Printed And Digital Texts, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Early modern printers, publishers and booksellers not only influenced readers to purchase particular books but continue to shape our reception of printed books today. Through title-page advertisements, prefaces and indexes, these ‘print agents’ forged unique relationships with new and returning readers. Paying attention to paratextual structures can uncover strategies for marketing new books, corralling readers and outlining new genres. A consideration of framing devices can also further our understanding of digital resources: much as print agents mediated printed books, digital humanists help reinforce the value of new technologies for the study of early modern texts, guiding users to apply new …

The Queen's Feud: Women And Kinship In Malory's Morte Darthur, Elsa K. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of blood feud on the knights of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur is clear and has been well studied. Likewise documented is the shift to an institutionalized political system focused on individual chivalry after the founding of the Round Table. This study focuses on the feuds and political changes, which also swept up the women in and around the Round Table including Nynyve, Lyonesse, Guenivere, and Morgawse. Individual chivalry gives women significant independence in action and changes the values they are celebrated for, but their family connections are always considered as primary motivations. The women of …

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

Jonson's Old Age: The Force Of Disgust, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning And Reputation In Othello, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This article offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside arithmetic textbooks for merchants and soldiers. It argues that Othello dramatizes a problem that also haunts the pages of these math books: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth grounded in status, military prowess and sexual purity. Othello’s loss of faith in his wife and the disintegration of his sense of self both depend on Iago’s manipulation of two competing models of reputation: one based on martial valor and sexual purity (reputation as honor) and …

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

Touching Brains, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dress Rehearsal: Word Play And Narrative Construction In The Assembly Of Ladies, Nicola Blake

Publications and Research

In the erotics of theater, words are (theoretically) corporeal. They are up there for public scrutiny. The mind's eye echoes the mind's ear. Words act. They are elements of the: scenic investiture affecting, synesthetically, light space rhythm pattern sound, but they also resound at the deepest level of the: mise-en-scene, through self time memory consciousness as well. Mere words, true. Problematic to the last breath of being. The: material elements of theater - like the: body itself - situate us.

Safety And Silence In A Shakespearean Space, Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This article describes a homophobic incident in a Shakespeare community college class and explains how the teacher then tried to create a safe space for all students.

Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism, Anne Donlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism considers the work of several intersecting figures in transnational modernism, in order to reassess the contours of race and gender in anglophone literature of the interwar period in the U.S. and Europe. Writers and organizers experimented with literary form and print culture to build and maintain networks of internationalism. This dissertation begins to suggest some of these maps of connection, paying particular attention to people who played key roles as hubs within networks. British radical Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920s publications, which have not been much considered in terms of literary contribution, …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

The Advance Of The Mobile Woman: Representations Of British Women's Physical Mobility, 1660-1820, Amanda Booth Springs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Britain's long eighteenth century (1660-1820) underwent an infrastructure and transportation revolution. Over the same period of time, scholars argue, the ideology of "the domestic woman" grew increasingly prevalent. This dissertation explores the improvements to roadways and representations of the various ways in which British women of the period increasingly utilized transportation, equestrianism, and pedestrianism to traverse the nation, which was also reflected in the development of traveling clothing for women. It argues that these literary and pictorial representations depict the tensions around women's increasing capacity for physical movement, contending that the ideology of the domestic woman was largely reactionary rhetoric …

‘A River Is Not A Woman’: Re-Visioning Finnegans Wake In Eavan Boland’S ‘Anna Liffey.’, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

"This essay argues that Eavan Boland's 1994 poem “Anna Liffey” is, in part, a re-visioning of James Joyce's famous river-woman and mother, ALP. Although Joyce's deconstructive tendencies provide an added challenge for any author looking to engage with Finnegans Wake, Boland manages to reclaim ALP, both channelling and challenging Joyce's portrayal of the Liffey as “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”--From the Journal.

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

Frankly Speaking, "The Men That Is Now Is Only All Pallaver And What They Can Get Our Of You": Migration And White Slavery In Argentina In Joyce's "Eveline", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes James Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904), looking at the moral panic about “white slavery” in Europe and South America. The article especially focuses on Argentina, the foremost recipient of trafficked women between 1880 and 1930 (and, of course, Joyce’s destination choice for Eveline). By looking at Frank, the sailor who intends to take Eveline to Buenos Aires, this article explores the possible links between Joyce’s story and the sex trafficking industry thriving in Buenos Aires through the Jewish criminal association Zwi Migdal. Frank’s representation allows us to draw this connection because his behavior with Eveline coincides with the seduction …

An Author And A Bookshop: Publishing Marlowe’S Remains At The Black Bear, Andras Kisery

Publications and Research

Bookshops and the spaces occupied by the early modern book trade have received attention as social environments. This study of the early publication history of Christopher Marlowe's poems -- Hero and Leander, his translation of Lucan, as well as the lyric now known as "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" -- shows that, the bookshops may also turn out to be agents shaping the fate of books, authors, and literary afterlives. Shifting our emphasis from the individual bookseller to the networks of a plurality of human agents and environments allows us to consider the intersections of various commercial and …

The Search For Pan: Difference And Morality In D. H. Lawrence’S St. Mawr And The Woman Who Rode Away, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

Both St. Mawr (1925) and The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) were written at the height of Lawrence’s fascination with New Mexico and demonstrate a continuum of thought about the position of the European and the Indian, but what is most interesting about these stories when read in conjunction is their attitude towards difference. Lou Carrington, the protagonist of St. Mawr, holds herself separate from other women of her class, from other men, from her mother and her Indian groom, finally finding a temporary peace in seeking affinity in a landscape; the woman who rides away from home and …

Stella’S Voice: Echo And Collaboration In Astrophil And Stella 57 And 58, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

`The Only Beguiled Person?': Accessing Fantomina In The Feminist Classroom., Kate Levin

Publications and Research

This article explores how Eliza Haywood's 18th-century novella Fantomina serves as an allegory for the challenges of maintaining a feminist classroom.

Fearless Children And Fabulous Monsters: Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, And Beastly Girls, Veronica L. Schanoes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction And Lyric Poetry, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This piece explores connections between science fiction and lyric poetry.

Parallel Lives And Literary Legacies: Crusoe's Elder Brother And Defoe's Cavalier, Andrea Walkden

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

No Reason Without Rhyme: Rhetorical Negotiation In Shakespeare, Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This article explores how Shakespeare uses slant rhyme and perfect rhyme as significant rhetorical plot devices in The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet.