Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Class Consciousness And The Culture Of Dissent In World War Ii British Literature, Kristin Schall

Honors College Theses

Discusses class consciousness and dissent in World War II British literature using the works of George Orwell and J.B. Priestly.

The Concentration Of Carnivalesque Themes In The Shared Fabliaux Of The Decameron And The Canterbury Tales, Timothy R. Jordan

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geoffrey Chaucer's interest in social interactions in The Canterbury Tales is easy to see through his pilgrims' estate-based conflicts with each other. In addition to the frame narrative, the interest in social interaction is also apparent in the characters of the individual tales and as a reflection of the conflict between the individual pilgrims. Most of these social interactions embody what is called the camivalesque: free, open, contact between people due to the suspension of social hierarchies. Mikhail Bakhtin has described the camivalesque as characteristic of medieval thought. In medieval literature, the genre of the fabliau, short bawdy stories that …

Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism And Virginia Woolf's Critique Of Philosophy, Michael Lackey

English Publications

Woolf was one of many modernists who led an assault on philosophy. Given her anti-philosophical orientation, those scholars who use philosophy to interpret Woolf, I argue, are implicitly at odds with her aesthetic. Crucial to my argument is Woolf's conception of what I refer to as the semiotic unconscious, which predetermines the conceptual systems we use to systematize our experiences of the world. Based on my findings, I suggest an alternative frame for understanding Woolf's treatment of philosophy and, more generally, modernist anti-philosophicalism. Instead of assuming that philosophy signifies intellectual depth, as many scholars do, I suggest approaching Woolf, as …

Mary Stuart And The English Sonnet Tradition: A Reassessment, Megan K. Mize

English Theses & Dissertations

Queen of Scotland practically from birth, Mary Stuart occupied a unique position of authority for a woman in the early modem moment. As Stuart struggled to solidify her power in Scotland, she represented the threat of female agency within a patriarchal culture. Stuart's political opponents used her personal correspondence, including a sonnet sequence known as the Casket Sonnets, as a means of illustrating Stuart's supposed abuse of power. In the Sonnets, Stuart reversed Petrarchan gender roles, placing a female in the masculine role of the aggressive lover. As monarch, Stuart could not escape the political implications of her personal desire, …

The Progression Of Literary Representation Of Female Friendships In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Debby Bangert

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Noms Et Identités Dans La Migration Des Coeurs : Vers Une Affirmation De L’Identité Caribéenne, Hanétha Vété-Congolo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights, the female characters bear the same first and last names, and act in the same way as, their counterparts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It would seem relevant, therefore, to ask about the dialectics of naming and identity set out in Windward Heights, and what this might mean for Caribbean identity. Is naming the only thing that gives Condé’s characters their identity? Or are they mirror-image projections of Brontë’s characters. Answering these questions, we may be able to determine how Condé’s work, as a new creation, establishes its own identity and whether its meaning is …

Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, The Camera, And The Octoroon, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

English Calvinism And The Crowd: Coriolanus And The History Of Religious Reform, Peter Iver Kaufman

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

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars …

Double The Novels, Half The Recognition: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Contribution To The Evolution Of The Victorian Novel., Lori Elizabeth Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Why do we read what we read? Janice Radway examines works that were not popular in an author's time period, but now are affecting the construction of the canon. In her own words, Radway seeks to "establish [popular literature] as something other than a watered-down version of a more authentic high culture [and] to present the middlebrow positively as a culture with its own particular substance and intellectual coherence" (208). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels were considered "middlebrow" and were very popular in Victorian England. Along with this facet, her heroines were considered controversial because they were not portrayed as what …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge And Opium., Donald John Marotta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coleridge's usual use of opium was through laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. This thesis presents the history of and criticism regarding the poet's use of laudanum and the physical and emotional consequences the drug held for him and his writing career.

I Am Elizabeth Gaskell: The Literary Evolution Of Elizabeth Gaskell Throughout Mary Barton, North And South, And Wives And Daughters, Jessica Leigh Watkins

Theses & Honors Papers

An overview of the literary evolution of Elizabeth Gaskell throughout Mary Barton, North and South, and Wives and Daughters is reviewed in this thesis. Gaskell’s novels contain a plethora of themes and concerns, ranging from the plight of the Industrial working class, to the developing romance of young lovers, and even to the social implications of the developments of rural life. Throughout the three novels, Gaskell’s personal evolution and her struggle to develop a complete female consciousness within her writing can be tracked. As the female characters in her books grow into an understanding of working class life or learn …

From Court To Collar: Post-Elizabethan Poetics And The Submissive Stance, Timothy J. Duffy

Fenwick Scholar Program

This project was created out of one key observation about the English Renaissance: that the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries had to deal with social pressures, influences, and expectations far more directly than their eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth-century, or contemporary counterparts. The struggle to establish an individual and innovative identity was as much a motivation for these poets as for any artists, yet the unique political circumstances that surrounded them called for a clever strategy, one inspired by continental models, the taking on of the submissive stance.

I Am: Identity, Maturation, And The Ideal Woman In Bronte’S Villette, Malissa Brennan

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Although many individuals may be familiar with Charlotte Brontë’s works—Jane Eyre has become somewhat of a literary staple—many others may not be as familiar with Villette, Brontë’s last and most autobiographical novel. Regardless of mixed reviews, Villette’s themes, characters, and underlying premises create a literary work that is exponentially more valuable in the Brontë literary canon than any work of any Brontë sister. The literary merit of Brontë’s novel, which documents one woman’s journey towards self-discovery and maturation, is infinitely invaluable; its passion, intensity, and discovery far surpasses the literary fame of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Villette showcases a woman’s …

"The Play's The Thing": Considering The Morality Play In Morality Play, Heather Kennedy Mcdonald

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The paucity of details about secular theater in the fourteenth century allows Barry Unsworth to imagine what a troupe of players would look like if we could examine them right at the time when "a totally new form of drama was being born" (Unsworth, "Barry Unsworth on Fourteenth Century Life and Theatre"). In his novel Morality Play, he imagines poor, itinerant players competing with the large guilds that put on an entire cycle of plays with the backing of unlimited funds. He conjectures that these players would be an amalgamation of different types of troupes that endeavored …

Orts 69, 2006, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The MacDonalds moved to Manchester in 1853 and later moved into 3, Camp terrace, Lower Broughton, 'a nice house, large, and in some respects handsome' for £35 a year. Greville was born during this period, and MacDonald attended the inaugural lecture of the Working Men's College given by his friend F.D. Maurice. MacDonald's first book Within and Without was published during his Manchester years.

‘That Really Too Anxious Protestation’: Crisis And Autobiography In Milton’S Prose, Brooke Conti

English Student Publications

No abstract provided.

“Since Merlin Paid His Demon All The Monstrous Debt”: The Celtic In Keats, Brandy Bagar Fraley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis argues that the Keatsian critical canon refuses to acknowledge the influence of Celticism in the works of John Keats and that such a gap displaces his poems from their cultural context and also prevents re-readings that might add depth and distinction to his place in the Romantic canon. After discussing the Celticism inherent in the literature, art, and social phenomenon of Keats’s day and briefly reviewing the scarce criticism that exists on the topic, the author reveals the prevalence of Celtic philosophies, figures, myths, and settings in Keats’s poetry. Then, she further argues that Keats through the feminized …

D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love: A Tale Of The Modernist Psyche, The Continental "Concept," And The Aesthetic Experience, Michael Lackey

English Publications

No abstract provided.

Charms, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

German Race Laws, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Quest Narrative, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Letters Within Jane Austen's Novels: A Bridge Towards Romantic Communication, Mary Butler

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

The Initial Formation Of Independent Cultural Consciousness In British Colonials In The Caribbean During The Eighteenth Century Through Poetry Written By Colonials In The Caribbean, Adam Stilgoe

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Incest And Empire In The Faerie Queene, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"When considered in the context of Elizabeth's effort to silence all discussion of incest, Edmund Spenser's courtly epic aiming to cultivate favor with the monarch looks like a disastrous miscalculation, for incest appears throughout The Faerie Queene. Indeed, incest sits at the center (both literally and figuratively) of the Book of Chastity, the very book wherein Spenser encourages Elizabeth 'in mirrours more then one her selfe to see.' In the present essay, I investigate the apparently illogical and impolitic prominence afforded to incest in book three of The Faerie Queene, ultimately arguing that the imperialist logic underpinning the epic is …

Pieces Of Virginia: Post-Impressionaism And Cubism In The Works Of Virginia Woolf, Corie Dias

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

We Don't Need No Water: Joyce And O'Brien Burning The Roof Of High Art, Robert J. Cannata

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

The Promiscuity Of Print: John Clare’S ‘Don Juan’ And The Culture Of Romantic Celebrity, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This essay offers a new reading of John Clare's "Don Juan," a hard-hitting and deliberately vulgar denunciation of English society and letters. In his extended Byronic performance, Clare harnesses Byron's famed sexual appetite and strong Romantic irony to dramatic effect, defiantly redeploying the machinery of literary celebrity that had produced him as "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet." Tracing Clare's imaginative and textual investments in prostitutes and boxers, figures located at the margins of London's criminal underworld, I show how the compulsive misogyny of "Don Juan" and its obscene sexual punning form part of a concerted, if not entirely coherent, response to …

Chariman's Address At The Annual General Meeting Of The Fellowship, 11 March 2006, Bill Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My Address at the AGM is usually concerned with our plans and hopes for the future but perhaps on this rather special day I may be allowed a glance at the past.

Last week I chaired a Council meeting for the last time; my first one was on 6 March 1971 - 35 years ago. When I succeeded Stan Dickens as Chairman in 1971 it was just two years after the remarkable success of the Fellowship's efforts to Commemorate the 150th anniversary of George Eliot's birth in 1969. That event became the foundation for our optimistic growth in the 1970s …

Laughing With George Eliot, R.J. Jenkins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The tradition of admiring George Eliot for her genius is as old as the author herself. Alexander Main, one of her more sycophantic devotees, laid the foundations of this tradition during her lifetime with the publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, a work dedicated 'to George Eliot in recognition of a genius as original as it is profound and a morality as pure as it is impassioned'. Though Main confesses that the preface to his book is 'not the place in which to attempt to give an exposition of George Eliot's genius', he cannot resist using it to remind …

Costanza, Constance, Custance And Emare: Romola's Medieval Ancestry, Katherine Inglis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Arguably the most problematic episode of Romola for the novel's reviewers and critics is Romola's imitation of Boccaccio's heroine Costanza (or Gostanza) in the two chapters 'Drifting Away' and 'Romola's Waking'; even Romola's most favourable early reviews censured the episode's structural and stylistic interruption. However, as Mark Turner and Caroline Levine have observed, the critical consensus has evolved from censure of 'an unseemly breach in the narrative' to reappraisal of a 'crucial site of interest'.' If an unwritten orthodoxy remains then it is a less value-laden sense that the chapters depart from the novel's overarching historical project. However, it is …