Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Delarivier Manley's Possible Children By John Tilly, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Comedy Of Scholarship: Review Of Hugh Kenner’S Flaubert, Joyce And Beckett: The Stoic Comedians, Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. by Hugh Kenner

"What Man As Made Of Man": From British Romanticism To Neo-Romanticism, Melissa A. Pelletier

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis analyzes the history of English literature as it evolves due to the changing thoughts and ways of poets. Discussing conventions of this literature such as innocence, escapism, and hope, it also analyzes the works of various different poets from these time periods and how they shaped literature into what it has become.

Another "Scandalous Woman": Edna O’Brien, Irish Feminism And Her Gébler Men, Jeffrey P. Griffin

Honors Scholar Theses

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien suffered a tumultuous early reception; her first six novels were banned in Ireland, and critics complained that her writing was sensational and gratuitous. Yet by the time Ireland’s economic boom arrived on the island, many contemporary critics suddenly applaud the novelist’s writing. Is this significant change in critical reception based on O’Brien’s development as an author? Or was O’Brien writing stories that were ahead of her time and are only now accepted by contemporary critics? My paper considers the writing and critical reception of Edna O’Brien by placing her life and career alongside three waves of …

Editing Shakespeare Violence, Text And Commodity In The Taming Of The Shrew, Kathryn E. Vomero

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Editing Shakespeare: Violence, Text, and Commodity in The Taming of the Shrew is an edition of one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most controversial comedies aimed at an undergraduate audience. Textually, The Taming of the Shrew is a complex and controversial play because two radically different versions of it have survived. My edition is written in the context of two other controversies, namely the function of scholarship in the humanities given Syracuse University’s commitment to scholarship in action and the abiding problem of domestic abuse. Though the printing industry is a driving force behind the production of new editions of Shakespearean …

Secrets And Hiding Places: The Worth Of Women In Nicholas Nickleby, Elizabeth Redmond

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In early Victorian England, married women were denied the legal right to own property, and social convention remanded them to ostracism if they chose to remain single. Likewise, jobs that were available to women failed to pay a living wage, so women were placed under tremendous economic and social pressure to marry. In Charles Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby, he depicts how marriage becomes manipulated within the working and middle classes as a means to acquire wealth. Dickens also compares the repression of women to the abuse suffered by school children in the Yorkshire schools, which had a reputation for neglecting …

The Byronic Heroine, Jessica M. Laffoon

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis examines the well-used character persona in Western literature, the Byronic hero which can be prominently seen in both George Gordon and Lord Byron’s poetry, as well as the juxtaposition to this hero, the Byronic heroine. Both hero and heroine are characterized by being sensitive, passionate, strong, and having self-destructing tendencies. These romantic heroes can be seen throughout many works of literature.

The Individual Resisting The Collective Through Faith, Hope, And Love, Jessica Hodgson

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Kipling's Poems, Michael Lackey

English Publications

In this 1909 lecture, E.M. Forster develops a critique of Kipling, alternately praising and criticizing the Nobel Laureate's political agenda as well as his aesthetic vision. This lecture is extremely valuable in that it gives us insight into an early critique of Kipling thepoet and Kipling the man, but it is also valuable insofar as it sheds light on Forster's method and approach to interpreting poetry as a literary andpolitical critic.

E.M. Forster's Lecture "Kipling's Poems": Negotiating The Modernist Shift From "The Authoritarian Stock-In Trade" To An Aristocratic Democracy, Michael Lackey

English Publications

In 1909, Forster delivered a scathing lecture about Rudyard Kipling, which outlines the political dangers implicit in Kipling's aesthetic. This introduction to the lecture briefly examines Forster's critique of Kipling's politics and aesthetic found in both the lecture and subsequent reviews of Kipling's work. Central to Forster's critique is his conviction that contemporary culture is and should be moving from authoritarian to democratic political systems. While Forster acknowledges Kipling's power and skill as a writer, he suggests that Kipling's aesthetic genius belongs to an earlier stage in the world's development, when authoritarian political models dominated. Within Forster's aristocratic democracy, Kipling's …

Understanding Macbeth: A Returning Soldier, Christy Clothier

Inquiry Journal 2007

No abstract provided.

Lies Breathed Through Silver: Mythological Constructs In Tolkien’S Works, Joshua Mccrowell

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

It’s not hard to imagine the English air being warm the night John Ronald Reuel Tolkien brought Clive Staples Lewis hard won into Christianity. The image of their lengthy midnight talk has since become almost mythic to those who study those two authors because of the impact that Christianity (and the other) had on each other’s lives. Lewis’ most famous works - everything from Narnia to his Space Trilogy to his apologetics - all are based on and inspired by his faith. Similarly, Tolkien once said that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic …

Orts 70, 2007, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

In the summer of 2005, just as we were commemorating the centenary of George MacDonald's death, I received a surprise telephone call from Kate Davies. She was helping two aunts to move out of their large house in Sanderstead, Surrey and into sheltered accommodation and had discovered a large collection of George MacDonald books, many of them first editions and many signed by the author, that had belonged to her aunts' grandfather, William Carey Davies, a Croydon man (south of London) who had been George's private secretary in his later years. Her aunts' father, George MacDonald Davies, had had a …

Review Of Milton In Popular Culture By Laura Lunger Knoppers And Gregory M Colón, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Devotions: Popular And Critical Reception, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Wisdom Of Forgiveness: Singing Like Birds In The Cage With Old King Lear, Janet L. Ramsey, Alan G. Padgett

Faculty Publications

Learning to forgive and to be forgiven is a lifelong curriculum from which we never really graduate. Shakespeare’s King Lear can be one guide in this educational process.

A Vision Of Human Solitude: Rhetoric Of Isolation And Ephemerality In Two Novels By Virginia Woolf, Marsha Lee Schuh

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis investigates the interrelationship between the two dominant themes, isolation and human ephemerality found in two of Virginia Woolf's books, To the lighthouse and The Waves.

Scatology And The Sacred In Milton's Paradise Lost, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

In his classic study, "The Dialectics of Creation," Michael Lieb foregrounds the myriad ways in which Milton uses scatology throughout "Paradise Lost" to describe the depravity of the devil. But Satan is not the only character in the epic to be associated with excretion. Milton's angels and Milton's God are also implicated in the operations of the lower bodily stratum. In these instances, however, allusions to the evacuative functions attest to an exalted divinity rather than a disgusting diabolism. Evacuation in "Paradise Lost" is thus a highly complex signifier. Not simply a pejorative pointing inevitably at a damnable degradation, scatology …

Landscapes Of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound And Grendel's Mere As Expressions Of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building, Paul Siewers

Faculty Contributions to Books

An examination of the Old English poem Beowulf as a landscape-text, expressing the Anglo-Saxon project of political hegemony over native peoples and environments.

Racial Impersonation On The Elizabethan Stage: The Case Of Shakespeare Playing Aaron, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article focuses on the implications of playwright William Shakespeare performing racial roles himself, such as Aaron in "Titus Andronicus." Several plays are discussed, including "Titus Andronicus," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Othello." The SHAXICON database, which compiles the text of Shakespeare's plays, is the primary source of evidence to suggest Shakespeare acted in his plays. Information about race relations in Great Britain's society during Shakespeare's time is also given.

Awakening The 'Mere Pulsation Of Desire' In Silas Marner, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, the narrator reflects on those crucial events which shape pathways in our lives. For Tertius Lydgate, this occurs with the chance opening of a book to a particular page:

[T]he first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame.'

For Lydgate, this seminal instant is the one which inspires him to …

Review Of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Oxford's publication of 'Bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures' brings to mind Pascal's famous apology for the length of his letter: 'I have not had time to make it shorter'. Would Rosemary Ashton, who has written both long and short biographies, agree that it is more taxing to produce a 'bite-sized' account that a long one? Brevity demands clear aims, selection of salient points, stringent compression. These tests Rosemary Ashton passes with enviable ease, combining compression with elegance. She begins by summarizing her aims: 'In this study, originally written for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I …

Review Of George Eliot And Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring The Unmapped Country, Michael Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Michael Davis packs a dense yet deft discussion of George Eliot's relationship with the scientific theories of mind of her contemporaries into this short book. Revisiting the novels and essays, and to a lesser extent the letters, he adds to our understanding of her place as a thinking novelist by his careful negotiation of intellectual positions, his weaving of the discussion among such Eliot contemporaries as Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Huxley, Alexander Bain, W. B. Carpenter, and E. S. Dallas, and his engagement with recent studies in the field by Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, K. K. Collins, Tess Cosslett, David Carroll, …

Review Of 142 Strand: A Radical Address In Victorian London & George Eliot In Germany,1854-55: 'Cherished Memories', Rosemary Ashton, Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The outlines of Marian Evans's life in the years immediately preceding her emergence as George Eliot are well-known-her work for the Westminster Review, her relationships with Chapman, Spencer and Lewes, and then her departure with the latter to Germany in July 1854. What these two studies do in their different ways is fill in the picture with fascinating detail. In focusing on the house that John Chapman rented from 1847 to 1854 and from which he ran the Westminster Review and his publishing business, Rosemary Ashton recreates the circle of radical intellectuals that the future novelist came into contact with …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 11 June 2006, Tim Over

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

May I begin by thanking the Fellowship for the invitation to be the principal guest at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. My association with today's event goes back over a number of years bringing students to lay a floral tribute at the obelisk. Indeed, when I first came more schools were involved. It is fitting that the secondary school named after many would say the greatest Victorian woman novelist, still comes along faithfully to the Memorial Garden. Kathleen and Bill Adams have visited the school, talked to groups of students and presented the school with a portrait of George Eliot and …

Review Of George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy has been thinking and writing about George Eliot for about fifty years, always in ways that push against reigning orthodoxies, and that immerse us in particular patterns of imagery, affect, or narrative organization that make the substance and texture of George Eliot's work come alive. Her new book is no exception. This 'anti-biography', as she calls it, is an attempt 'to redress the balance' of conventional biography by focusing on the effect of George Eliot's life on her writing, rather than on retelling the story of her life (xi). In fact, it redresses more balances than that. Hardy …

Review Of Identifying The Remains: George Eliot's Death In The London Religious Press, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a detailed examination of the various religious-based obituaries which followed George Eliot's death in December 1880. It exposes misinformation, largely biographical, examines bias, confusion, open and concealed concerns, direct, responsible and weighted theological arguments, dubious and inconclusive conclusions, the forms and themes of the debate about the beliefs of a major writer. Collins's dissertation-like topic is informed with foreground and background research: his footnotes read as tellingly as his text and provide wide-ranging and perceptive quotation.

He considers the idea, derived from Richard Simpson, that the appearance of George Eliot's name on the title-pages of Scenes of Clerical …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2006- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Adrian Litvinoff

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I was surprised, honoured and delighted by the invitation to join you today and propose the toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot. I am no George Eliot expert, or indeed scholar, although I am an enthusiast. She is, after all, Warwickshire's other world-class writer, and it is tempting to think how much better known she might have been in her home county had Shakespeare been born in Stoke-on-Trent, say, rather than Stratford-upon-Avon.

My first encounter with George Eliot was while taking' A' level English at school. I still recall my dawning surprise and admiration as I, an inexperienced …

The George Eliot Centenary Of 1919, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The centenary of George Eliot's birth in 1919 was recognized as an opportunity to commemorate her connection with the parts of Warwickshire where she was born and spent her early life. While her association with Coventry and Nuneaton had been noted during her lifetime and in obituaries, and emphasized again when George Eliot's Life as related in her letters and journals, arranged and edited by her husband J. W. Cross was published in 1885, there were some inhibitions about too enthusiastically claiming an agnostic libertine as a local celebrity. Both Nuneaton and Coventry chose to celebrate the centenary, and reconstruction …

Review Of Middlemarch In The Twenty-First Century, Karen Chase

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This set of eight original essays engages afresh with a novel that many readers might claim to know well, in such a way as to make 'the lights and shadows ... fall with a certain difference' (chap. xxi). Karen Chase is well-known for her own studies of George Eliot, not least George Eliot: 'Middlemarch' (1991). Here, she confines herself to an introductory essay, which cogently states the brief given to her contributors, to reflect on how Middlemarch can be read in the twenty-first century. 'Who besides Eliot has been better aware of the alteration of objects given a change in …