Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

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 …

Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay unfolds the complex intertextual relationship between the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of Edgar Allan Poe. References to and extended borrowings from Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical texts mark Poe’s œuvre throughout, but – as is only fitting for borrowings from the great borrower Coleridge – they are never anything as simple as plagiarisms or acts of intellectual theft. As this piece demonstrates through readings of Poe’s early poetological text “Letter to B–,” the Dupin story “The Purloined Letter,” and the late tour-de-force prose-poem Eureka, tracing the recurrence of Coleridgean poetry and prose in the work …

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …

The Missing Child In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

The Indian boy over whom the king and queen of fairies quarrel is the most important of several characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who do not appear on stage: his parents, who form with him a missing nuclear family; a child god, Cupid; and a female authority figure, the dowager to whose property the lovers Lysander and Hermia flee. In its narrative structure the play presents a healing regression to the early mother and the primary process. However, the regressive movement has disturbing, as well as adaptive, elements; in addition, while the characters are still in the forest, the …

Review Of Macbeth, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Review of Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth: http://www.media-party.com/discland/2007/12/macbeth-2006.html

"More Than Ever Can Be Spoken": Unconscious Fantasy In Shelley's Jane Williams Poems, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Unshap'd Monsters: Political Farce On The London Stage, 1717-1737, Melissa Ann Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reexamines the role of John Gay's and Henry Fielding's anti-government satirical farces during the politically contentious 1720s and 1730s in London. Although their plays were and still are considered, variously, burlesques, entertainments, farces, and satires, I call them satirical farce for two reasons. First, contemporaries used the term farce as much to signify political and social stances as dramatic type or function. Those political and social stances are the central focus of this dissertation. Second, I see in this collection of plays—Gay's Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and The Beggar's Opera (1728), Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730), The …

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

The Pitchman In Print: Oral Performance Art In Text And Context, Joseph Ugoretz

Publications and Research

Oral performance art, patterned performative speech for an audience, is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous human art form. Specific instances of this art include the performances of griots and guslars, troubadors and shamans, as well as rappers and riddlers, preachers and politicians. While this art form is by definition oral, it is also the case that, frequently, literary art has represented oral performance art. There is written art which depicts oral art, which describes it, appropriates it, criticizes and co‑opts it.

In this dissertation, I define oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique artistic genre, one which …

Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Raymond Williams in The Country and the City dismisses Jane Austen's depiction of the land around her as simply "weather or a place for a walk." In Emma's ideology, however, there is a tension between an ostensibly apolitical stance, which is de facto conservative in working to maintain the status quo, and the extent to which a more progressive agenda can be seen through the social mobility of certain principle characters, albeit by "conservative means." For all the leisure, picnics, and parties that constitute the greater part of Emma, labor is evident and valued. The country may be largely …