Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Rhizome National Identity: "Scatlin's Psychic Defense' In Trainspotting, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Short Fiction By Women In The Victorian Literature Survey, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The first time I taught a Victorian Literature survey, fresh out of a curriculum integration workshop in graduate school, I taught ten authors: five male and five female. One student evaluation after the course was over complained that despite the promise of “great” Victorian writers, half of those on the syllabus were women. While this did take place in the dark ages of the early nineties, I still find myself, as I design my syllabi, caught in the familiar conundrum as to what to teach, what to cut, and why. In my case, it seems simple: The Victorian period is …

Reading As A Criminal In Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …

The Power Of The Passive Self In English Literature, 1640-1770 By Scott Gordon (Review), Rachel Carnell, Scott Gordon

English Faculty Publications

Reviews the book 'The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770,' by Scott Paul Gordon.

Donne, Doubt And The Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'There Shall Be No Discernible Traces Left': The Invisible Butler In Ishiguro's "The Remains Of The Day", Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper draws its title from an anecdote Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day (1989), recounts to illustrate the primary attribute for servants: the ability to perform duties without leaving any discernible traces. Mrs. D.C. Webster, an American married into British “old money,” expresses astonishment at the treatment of servants during an interview for the documentary, The Secret World of Fame and Fortune. Mrs. Webster “had a staff of twelve . . . They would do everything for you. If you took a sweater off, it would disappear. If they were too loud or if they were …

The White Bed Of Desire In A.S. Byatt's Possession, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

The British novelist A. S. Byatt frequently writes about art and color theory in her fiction. In Still Life (1985) Byatt intentionally saturates her text with musings on art and color; bordering on the didactic, she devotes long passages to Van Gogh's chromatics and individual characters' theories on art. With The Matisse Stories (1996) her discussion moves into the theory of complementary colors in the story “Art Work,” through the painter Robin Dennison. Painting for Robin is “a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and color, you know” (70). In the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance …

Book Review: Samuel Johnson And The Culture Of Property By Kevin Hart, Steven Scherwatzky

English Faculty Publications

Review of Kevin Hart's Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Great Expectations, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens’s later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and …

Negotiating Victorian Feminism: Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Short Fiction, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Best known for her autobiographical introductions to the collected works of her father, William Makepeace Thackeray, and for her biographical essays on several famous writers, Anne Thackeray Ritchie has repeatedly been considered most important as a source of inside information regarding her famous contemporaries. From Dickens to the Brownings, from Tennyson to James, she counted many of the canonical British nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century writers as her friends and often wrote to and about them.2 The scope of her work, however, is much wider and deserves closer scrutiny than it has so far received.

Book Review: Saying I No More: Subjectivity And Consciousness In The Prose Of Samuel Beckett, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Articulating The Questions, Searching For Answers: How To The Lighthouse Can Help, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) At Old Dominion University, English majors must take one of the following courses-Postcolonial Literature, Literature by Minorities, African-American Literature, or Women Writers. In each course, our majors encounter new materials and perspectives. I teach Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in Women Writers, a course in which students expect to explore feminist perspectives. Students range in age from nineteen lo sixty, but most are in their twenties or thirties. Frequently the first in their families to attend college, many come from conservative homes where feminist is a derogatory word. Therefore I find that the best way into a feminist …

Irresolute Ravishers And The Sexual Economy Of Chivalry In The Romantic Novel, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Near Confinement: Pregnant Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Cynthia N. Malone

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Pathology Of Rhetoric In Coriolanus, Yvonne Bruce

English Faculty Publications

Coriolanus seems to be a play of action, a dramatized world of mutinous citizens, plotting tribunes, famine, war, and banishment. Yet what really happens in this world? The citizens never realize their mutiny. Brutus and Sicinius never realize their illdefined plot, Coriolanus' consulship is rescinded, the mutual banishment of Coriolanus is undone by his resolve not to make "true wars" against Rome. and the defeat of Aufidius in act one becomes a meaningless victory when Coriolanus is in turn defeated in the final scene of the play. Perhaps it is more accurate to call Coriolanus a play of action, a …

Physical Evidence For John Coote’S Eighteenth-Century Periodical Proprietorships: The Examples Of Coote’S Royal Magazine (1759-71) And Smollett’S British Magazine (1760-67), Barbara L. Fitzpatrick

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wuthering Heights, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), one of three sisters who literary productions caused a minor sensation when they began appearing in the late 1840s. Born to Patrick Brontë, a Yorkshire clergyman, and his wife Maria, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë were precocious readers and writers. The three sisters spent years writing for their own pleasure and amusement, then published a volume of poetry in 1846. Fearing that the volume’s reception would be biased if the authors were known to be women, the sisters adopted the names Ellis (Emily), Acton (Anne), and Currer (Charlotte) Brontë. Their …

"Adjectives Of Mystery And Splendor": Byron And Romantic Religiousity, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

I will suggest that had the history of Christian metaphysics taken a different course than the one it did, it is likely that Byron's considerable objections to religion would have been diminished by at least one. About the particulars of Christian theology, he had little to say, his writings suggest a general discomfort with particular aspects of Christian metaphysics as they had developed by the nineteenth century.

An analysis of Byron's metaphysical/religious misgivings might serve to clarify the nature of his discontent, clearly showing that his particular "heresy" is radically distinct from others of the "Satanic school." It might also …

Revising Tragic Conventions: Aphra Behn's Turn To The Novel, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Gender And Friendship In Eliza Haywood's Political Periodicals, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

British writer Eliza Haywood's two periodicals, 'The Female Spectator' (1744-46) and 'The Parrot' (1746), protested against the gendered split between political and domestic literary genres, showing that British novels and periodicals written by or addressed to women did engage in political discourse. Through her periodicals, Haywood presented a model for female-female friendship that portrayed women engaging in rational and polite political debate. Furthermore, she argued that this same debate could occur between a woman and a man apart from an apolitical, romantic relationship. Finally, she gave opportunity for friendship to be expressed between those who had been excluded from the …

Androgyny Or Catastrophe: Doris Lessing's Vision In The Early 1970s, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Doris Lessing's novels of the early 1970s offer readers a rare kind of wisdom one which has been nourished by Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, which she admires. Unlike Lessing's earlier fiction which was simply influenced by the ideas of Sufism, three of her novels-Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)-are literally Sufi fables-that is, symbolic stories, each of which "illuminates truth" (qtd. in Shah, The Sufis 14). The Sufi truth illuminated by these novels is that "life is One," and that because we have …

Feminism And The Public Sphere In Anne Brontë'S The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the 18th-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an 18th-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a 20th-century-style challenge …

Clarissa's Treasonable Correspondence: Gender, Epistolary Politics, And The Public Sphere, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

Beryl Gilroy: A Bio-Literary Overview, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 1992 when I joined the faculty at the University of Richmond, I taught a class in black women's literature to a group of mainly white students who had previously read little or nothing in this body of literature. One young senior--a white male--did a paper comparing the sympathetic portrayal of the white male character in Beryl Gilroy's Stedman and Joanna and Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. His enthusiasm for the rich body of literature to which I had introduced him continued after he graduated, and he often wrote to me about books he was reading …

Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'Judith' And The Rhetoric Of Heroism In Anglo‐Saxon England, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The Old English Judith differs from the Liber Judith of the Vulgate at several crucial points, and in one particularly important way. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith is a heroine in every sense of the word: she is a tropological symbol of Chastity at battle with Licentiousness, an allegorical symbol of the Church in its constant and eventually triumphant battle with Satan, and an inspirational figure who infuses her warriors with much needed courage and confidence; but the Vulgate Judith is also, in a very real sense, the agent by which God's will is executed and the …

"Some Pieces In The British Magazine" And "A Small Part Of The Translation Of Voltaire’S Works": Smollett Attributions, Barbara L. Fitzpatrick

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation Of Its Critics In A Humorous Reading Of The Text, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

In traditional Beckett criticism, the most conventional interpretation of the narrator's activity in The Unnamable posits that the narrative is attempting to establish "his" own self-identity, but "[h]is search for self-knowledge has failed because it has produced only fiction" (Solomon 83). Another variety of this interpretation poses the Unnamable's dilemma in Existential language: "Existence affirms merely that something is; essence denotes what it is ... By the time we reach The Unnamable, the collapse of essence is virtually complete; the voice is a mere existence crying out that it exists" (Levy 104). As Dennis A. Foster argues in his Lacanian …