Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Idealization And Desire In The Hundred Acre Wood: A.A. Milne And Christopher (Robin), Laura Bright

Laura E Bright

Argues that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner represent the conscious rejection, unconscious reproduction, and re-imaging of the author's traumatic Victorian childhood.

On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Handwas not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.

A 'Foundation In Nature': New Economic Criticism And The Problem Of Money In 1690s England, Courtney Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

This essay reconsiders new economic criticism’s assumptions about the role of nature in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economic thought. I take the debates surrounding the English recoinage crisis as a test case. As I read economic tracts by John Locke, William Lowndes, Nicholas Barbon, and James Hodges alongside an array of anonymous polemical policy pamphlets, I demonstrate that many writers addressed the recoinage problem by turning with urgency to the created natural world. They believed that close attention to the material properties of silver bullion, for example, could access encoded clues about God’s will for human economic institutions. I …

Political Individuals And Providential Nature In Locke And Pope, Courtney Weiss Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man. Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the …

The Feminine Experience In The Margins Of The British Empire, Francoise Le Jeune Pr

Francoise LE JEUNE