Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Edward Irving: Coleridge, Sign, And Symbol, Peter J. Manning

Department of English Faculty Publications

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Masks Of The Dark Goddess In Arthurian Literature: Origin And Evolution Of Morgan Le Fay, John Christopher Shearer

Online Theses and Dissertations

The world of Arthurian legend is one steeped in mythology and magic, reflecting ancient Celtic traditions and tales that long preceded it. Such tales often feature perplexing and seemingly contradictory characters who drive complex plotlines and frequently challenge primary figures, greatly impacting how the overall story unfolds. A primary example of such a character is Morgan le Fay, who, by the time Sir Thomas Malory writes Le Morte d'Arthur in the fifteenth century, has assumed a range of roles from sister to King Arthur, Queen in her own right, wicked sorceress, and healer. Using both Post-Colonial and Feminist lenses, this …

Snoop-Women With Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, And The Gender Of Domestic Intelligence, Megan Faragher

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation's qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO's methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women's experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison's novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents …

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Supernatural And Unnatural In Macbeth, Mary Spencer

Undergraduate Research Journal

Fate is an omnipresent force woven through much ancient literature, and in English literature it is named from the earliest recorded writings as wyrd. By tracing this influence from its first appearances in Anglo-Saxon writing to the Early Modern period, we can see how Shakespeare uses his cultural inheritance to create the supernatural world of Macbeth, specifically through representations of wyrd. In the play, he examines the question “Does fate make the characters, or do the characters create their fates?” Juhász Tamás, a Shakespeare scholar, makes the point, “Of all Shakespearean dramas, the concept of fate and destiny seems most …

Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes

Theses and Dissertations

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …

The Rewards Of Impertinence: Happy And Unhappy Endings In Jane Austen's Novels, Elizabeth Bolger

English Honors Papers

In this thesis, I use a wide range of period sources—the law governing marriage in the United Kingdom, sermons, and treatises on women’s education—to argue that Jane Austen uses irony and satire to defend “impertinent” women by exposing the villainy of a patriarchal order that attempts to restrain female desire. Her literary strategies of indirection, including irony and satire, have an ethical purpose that is neglected by the many critics who read her works as endorsing conservative values. Her novels function within a traditional narrative framework in order to expose and ultimately undermine the oppressive morals inherent within the patriarchal …

Fight For Equality, Edgar A. Ruiz-Guaderrama

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The great author Jane Austen lived during a time period in which there was a patriarchal society installed which made it quite difficult for women rights similar to the Victorian Era. Both in Jane Austen’s society and the Victorian Era, there were huge gaps in gender equality. The society at the time made it easy for men to run everything that happened in society which in turn lead to women being at a huge disadvantage.Jane Austen showed people many examples of this inequality in her book Pride and Prejudice It is crucial as a society to improve from and correct …

Behind The Shadows, Selena Ramirez Ahilon

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The nineteenth century is classified as the Victorian era, a period in which the middle class rose in power as a result of industrialization. As the middle classes living standards rose the middle class became reliant on utilitarianism values. This ideal appeared to offer a more comfortable life for both men and women, however, by classifying the position of women as the “heart” and men as the “head” of the house, women were hindered to a society in shadows. Women were restricted in every aspect of life because men were in power, and the ideal Victorian woman became the one …

Jonathan Swift: Ideology And Influences, Ricky Romero

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

This project will analyze the ideology and influences Irish author and satirist, Jonathan Swift had in cultivating theories on society/economy and thoughts especially relevant in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. The information is worth noting because of the bigger than life themes he suggests in liberal thoughts and social interactions between people. Ultimately, remorseful thoughts on monotheistic governments, European influences, and pro-world-peace examples were found as prominent ideas conveyed by Jonathan Swift.

Overall, it is morally correct to agree with Jonathan Swift’s ideology of a world based upon freedom and liberty. It is fairly simple to sympathize with Swift’s thoughts on …

The Magic Of Yeats' "The Lake Isle Of Innisfree": Kabbalism, Numerology, And Tarot Cards, Genevieve Pettijohn

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” contains occult symbols derived from Kabbalism, numerology, and tarot cards. Although the poem was published near the beginning of Yeats’ induction into Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, “Innisfree” demonstrates the magical prowess requisite to advance in the Society and thus further Yeats' ability to practice magic, for which he had an alleged natural ability. I assert that an understanding of Kabbalism, numerology, and tarot cards is essential not only in decoding the meanings behind “Innisfree” but in gauging Yeats’ own understanding of the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, which he was …

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The "Great Background" In Hardy And Lawrence, Rochelle H. Kim

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the “great background” in the context of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and how it reappears in a transformed way in Lawrence’s novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Through examining the perverse effects of modernism on these novels’ characters, this thesis argues that the “great background” is something that gradually moves inward––from the old, traditional “State” to an internal, inscrutable yet attainable reality.

Violence And Edification In 19th Century Fiction: An Analysis Of The Novels Of Charles Dickens And Leo Tolstoy, Caroline Fassett

Honors Theses

This Thesis argues that violence is essential to the structures and plots of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities and of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is particularly essential to the edification, or the moral and intellectual improvement, of principal characters in these four novels. Additionally, this Thesis contends that this edification is both anticipated and reinforced by the novelists’ incorporation of counterparts whose demeanor and/or narrative overtly mirror that of the principal characters.

To support this argument, I bring the theory of Thomas Carlyle into conversation with the novels of Dickens …

The Social Network Of Early English Drama: A Digital Humanities Lesson Plan, Adam Rzepka, Pierce Williams, Jennifer Royston

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

The Folger Shakespeare Library's recently launched Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED) provides searchable, TEI-encoded, digital editions of 403 English plays first staged in London between1576 and 1642. A central task for participants at the Folger's 2016 summer workshop "Beyond Access: Early Modern Digital Texts in the Classroom" was to devise pedagogical uses for the Digital Anthology. Our team focused on the metadata that the editors of the anthology attached to each play—its chronology, author, printer, publisher, and the theater company that initially staged it—in order to foreground an aspect of these dramas that is crucial yet very …

Charles Dickens In Cinema And The Loss Of His Message, Elliot Staatz

All Master's Theses

The collected works of Charles Dickens have garnered countless critiques, not the least of which involve their social and political meaning, but what about the films based on these works? There are few nineteenth century authors who have been adapted to film more than Dickens. However, these cinematic works are often left under-analyzed; there is much to be said about Dickensian adaptations. Adaptations can be critically compared with the original, possibly showing changing societal values. So, by focusing on Dickens and his adaptations, we can expose societal values which have changed. Specifically, I will focus on the increased societal acceptance …

Queen Alice And The Monstrous Child: Alice Through The Looking Glass, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …

Archive Fever, Archive Failure: Exploring The ‘It’ In Beckett’S Theatre, Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

Using Jacques Derrida's 1995 study, Archive Fever, Weiss examines how Samuel Beckett's Come and Go and Footfalls stage the failed acts of archiving. In both plays, memories are either unknown or not named. Either way, without being named they cannot be collected, catalogued or made public. Despite this, the women haunting his plays seem struck by archive fever. Ultimately, Beckett stages the tension between the desire to remain silent with the desire to archive.

Enclosed From All Sides: Reading Contact And Ambivalence In The Imaginary Al-Andalus Of Hrotsvit's The Passion Of Pelagius And The Song Of Roland, Briana J. Wipf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s The Passion of Pelagius and The Song of Roland have never been read together in terms of their shared engagement with the Muslim other in the Iberian Peninsula, known during the Middle Ages as Al-Andalus. This project is a comparative reading of the texts’ approach to the presentation of an imaginary Al-Andalus as a space of alterity. The texts’ emphasis on imaginative as opposed to accurate portrayals of Andalusian history and Islamic culture suggests their engagement with a process of Christian identity-building, where the “Christian,” as portrayed in each text, is defined against and in comparison to …

“The Heighe Worthynesse Of Love”: Visions Of Perception, Convention, And Contradiction In Chaucer’S Troilus And Criseyde, John J. Hertz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three images associated with the manuscripts and early printed editions of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which I have dubbed “Prostrate Troilus,” “Pandarus as Messenger,” and “Criseyde in the Garden.” These images are artifacts of contemporary textual interpretation that “read” Chaucer’s text and the tale of Troilus. They each illustrate the way in which Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde “read” images, gestures, symbols, and speeches within the narrative, and they show how these characters are constrained and influenced by their individual primary modes of perception. Troilus reads but does not analyze. Pandarus actively reads his own meanings into messages. …

The Odcombian Climber: How Thomas Coryate Employed Media For Social Advantage, Julian T. Neuhauser

Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), the writer, traveler and social climber, embraced various media in order to achieve social gains. This thesis surveys the content and materiality of writings by and about Coryate to investigate the nature of his sociability. The study begins by drawing on John Hoskyns’ (1566–1638) poem, “Convivium philosophicum,” to explore how Coryate used oral and social performance to create a unique form of sociability through which mockery is transmuted into praise. This thesis then addresses how Coryate’s sociability factored into the conflation of aspects of manuscript and print media in the production of the “Panegyricke Verses” that were …

Shakespeare's "Honest And Vertuous" Ensigns: Transgressing The Military/Domestic Divide In The Henriad And Othello, Matthew R. Wentz

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores how the military service of the ensign disrupts and ultimately obliterates domestic life in Shakespeare’s Henriad and Othello. The rank of the ensign held expectations of honesty and honor, yet Shakespeare portrays his only two ensign characters, Ancient Pistol and Iago, as ironically failing to adhere to these standards. The received view of Pistol that results from his portrayal in 2 Henry IV as a stock braggadocio is challenged by a sympathetic reading of his character, especially in Henry V. Although Pistol occasionally behaves with honor in Henry V, his military service results in …

Engl 487: English Capstone Experience—A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Stage

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio documents the teaching objectives, strategies, and assessments for a capstone course in the English major at UNL. As the English Studies Capstone and as an ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) 10 course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, English 487 must help students meet key outcomes for the department and the University, but it also allows flexibility and creativity in the methods chosen to meet these requirements and structure the course. This portfolio thereby reflects on the intellectual labor of designing a particular version of these requirements and on guiding students through the design. The assessments included here are measuring traditional …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …