Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Narrative Forms Of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, And The Holocaust In 20th-Century British Fiction, David Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Narrative Forms of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, and The Holocaust in 20^th-Century British Fiction examines how British authors explore fascist and Nazi violence through narrative. The texts in this project challenge the popular perception of Nazis and fascists and help to enrich the understanding of these character types in artistic representations of fascism and the Holocaust. I seek to reveal how each author in the three central texts examined presents fascist violence’s march toward the mainstream and the ways ordinary people deal with political violence. Each author critically depicts growing fascist regimes in World War II-era Europe and contemplates …

Germanic Heroes, Courage, And Fate: Northern Narratives Of J.R.R. Tolkien’S Legendarium (2024) By Richard Z. Gallant, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium (2024) by Richard Z. Gallant

From Ghitterns To Harps: How Tolkien’S Music Became Generic, Alexander Retakh

Journal of Tolkien Research

When music is discussed in Tolkien studies, the primary focus is the songs and, typically, their non-musical content. However, appearances of instrumental music and its performance are often critical to the narrative. This talk focuses on Tolkien’s construction and use of music. Its descriptions were growing more economical as he developed as a writer and his musical references became simpler.

Tolkien has often been accused of being almost illiterate musically, yet a more careful reading of his letters shows that he merely saw himself as a musical amateur. In Oxford he could not avoid learning about the Early Music movement, …

Tolkien: Voyage En Terre Du Milieu (2019), Ed. By Vincent Ferré And Frédéric Manfrin, Deidre A. Dawson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Deidre A. Dawson, of Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu (2019) ed. by Vincent Ferré and Frédéric Manfrin

“[T]He Observance Of Trifles": Mapping Imperial Assemblages In Nineteenth-Century British Serialized Crime Fiction, Dana Joy Gavin

English Theses & Dissertations

This project investigates representations of the ecological and Imperialist relationships in a selection of serialized crime fiction texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (appearing in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly beginning in 1891). I examine serialized crime fiction published in the nineteenth century as a map of the ecological and Imperialist relationships established through the nineteenth-century British publishing industry. Serialized crime fiction was both popular and profitable, representing not only commercial success but one that tapped into the reading populace’s imagination. Readers craved serialized stories …

The Literary Role Of History In The Fiction Of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), By Nicholas Birns, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Thomas Honegger, of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024) by Nicholas Birns

From Imagination To Faërie: Tolkien’S Thomist Fantasy (2022) By Yannick Imbert, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of From Imagination to Faërie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (2022) by Yannick Imbert

Reimagining The Single-Author Seminar: Teaching Wheatley Peters, Milton, And The Master’S Discourse, Kate Ozment

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article discusses a senior-level literature course that puts into dialogue Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Milton. Wheatley Peters’ poetry on tyranny and freedom during the American Revolution, especially “America,” is compared to Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost, which explore the same themes during the English Civil War. Students trace how Milton’s transformative but narrowed ideas of freedom for enfranchised subjects in England are powerfully reimagined by Wheatley Peters in double meanings of freedom for the colonies and enslaved subjects. Secondary sources allow students to engage in the canon-building of Milton as …

A Review Of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance Of The Forest, Edited By Shelley King And John B. Pierce, Annette Hulbert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The Romance of the Forest has long been one of the most teachable of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, given its relatively shorter length and popularity at the time of its publication. Now, Shelley King and John B. Pierce have prepared with great thoroughness an updated version of the text for Broadview that proves a worthy successor to Chloe Chard’s Oxford World Classics edition, published in 1986. The edition builds on Chard’s notes and includes extensive historical appendices that would benefit both teachers and scholars of Radcliffe’s work.

The Untold Love Story Of Aphra Behn's The History Of The Nun, Anaclara Castro-Santana

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1688) is a complex narrative that challenges gender norms and moral conventions, while providing multifaceted illustrations of how restrictions of freedom engender rebellion. Erstwhile a critically neglected piece, this short novel has recently attracted renovated attention on account of its sophisticated narrative perspective, ambivalent moral, and general exploration of unconventional themes, including sexual nonconformity. Taking its cue from this critical landscape, this article explores the text’s queer dimensions, focusing on a crucial yet often overlooked scene depicting sapphic eroticism. Unpacking the internal dynamics and external implications of this passage, the essay argues for …

The Maternal Icon In Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan Of The Rhine, Esmeralda Orndorff, Joanne E. Myers

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through …

Introduction: Concise Collection On Teaching The Works Of Phillis Wheatley Peters, Mona Narain, Sarah Ruffing Robbins

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This short essay introduces a two-part Concise Collections special issue on teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters. It discusses how the life and works of the poet can be taught in various educational settings.

Methodological Revolutions For Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters, Sam Plasencia

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article describes a senior seminar I designed titled 'Phillis Wheatley Peters and Her Literary Afterlives,' which sought to (re)introduce Wheatley Peters to mostly white students as a literary foremother, and to do so by way of Black feminist writing that considers method. While nearly all of my students had encountered Wheatley Peters before my class, none had been asked to consider the methods by which we read her, and what different ones will allow and negate, make visible or foreclose. I thus organized this class around the methods that have emerged in the last twenty years, in order to …

A Review Of Debates In The Digital Humanities, Edited By Matthew K. Gold And Lauren F. Klein, Ashley Bender

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A Review of Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein

A Review Of Mary Beth Harris's A Genealogy Of The Gentleman: Women Writers And Masculinity In The Eighteenth Century, Megan A. Woodworth

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A Review of Mary Beth Harris's A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century

Phillis Wheatley Peters’S British Publicity Campaign, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Scholarship has tended to place its focus on Phillis Wheatley Peters’ unsuccessful efforts in America, followed by an account of one British figure, the Countess of Huntingdon, who patronized the publication of Poems on Various Subjects in London in 1773. However, the chronology of the British campaign, the modes of print publication, and the locations in which Phillis Wheatley Peters’ words were published deserve closer attention. This essay highlights previously unknown or unremarked upon British publications outside London, the Drewry Derby Mercury, the Ipswich Journal, the Hibernian, and John Gillies’s Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, …

Indigenous Language Guidelines And Resources, Shelby Johnson, Katarina O'Briain, Willow White

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

These collaboratively written guidelines offer suggestions and resources for writing about Indigenous Peoples, knowledge, and histories ethically and respectfully. With an awareness that this work is ongoing, that terms and language are subject to change, and that no set of guidelines or essays can fully account for diverse Native histories, these guidelines and resources offer suggestions for best practices for eighteenth-century scholars who are considering engaging in this work. The authors and contributors of this document understand that language is always evolving and that these guidelines may not be relevant indefinitely and in all circumstances. At some point, we imagine …

Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Leigh Bardugo’S Six Of Crows, Jordyn Fortuna

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

The main characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows reveal the potential within everyone for Monstrosity. This disregard for humanity can stem from many things, but it can also be prevented through community and sympathy. Monstrosity is often misconstrued due to a false perception guided by a sighted bias. In reality, however, characters’ humanity can be shown to the reader through a greater insight into their traumas and intentions. This paper highlights the idea that reputation cannot be trusted, but instead must be further examined to reveal the Monster within.

Theology And Tolkien: Practical Theology (2023), Edited By Douglas Estes, Lisa Coutras

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Lisa Coutras, of Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology (2023), edited by Douglas Estes

Queer Impersonality: Compulsory Visibility And The Politics Of Form In Modernist Women's Life Writing, Margot Kotler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modernist impersonality is an aesthetic practice typically associated with Anglo-European formalism and the doctrine of artistic autonomy. Although central to the modernist canon, impersonality has not been taken up by queer and feminist studies because critics have considered its implied evacuation of emotion and personal identity to be apolitical, and even dangerous. At its worst, impersonality reproduces an unmarked, white, and masculine subjectivity, yet it also questions the parameters of selfhood, posing a radical challenge to liberal-humanist conceptions of identity. Queer Impersonality moves beyond this critical impasse by tracing impersonality’s queer and feminist histories among modernist women writers whose engagement …

The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …

When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18^th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19^th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

Gifted Amateurs And Other Essays On Tolkien, The Inklings, And Fantasy Literature (2023), By David Bratman, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays on Tolkien, the Inklings, and Fantasy Literature (2023), by David Bratman

Space For The Savant: An Update On Henry Higgins’S Autism, Abby Zwart

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Henry Higgins, one of the leads of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, has been retrospectively diagnosed as an autistic character by lay readers and two scholars (Rodelle Weintraub, 2006; Sonya Loftis Freeman, 2014). Weintraub’s work is accurate but outdated, and Loftis presents several valid concerns about labelling Higgins an autistic savant, but Henry Higgins should be embraced as a neurodivergent character because today, a decade after the last publication addressing his neurostatus, society has a much more nuanced understanding of autism that can easily make space for his inclusion in the retrospective canon of neurodivergent characters.

A Panoptic System And Social Control’S Influence On The Children In Henry James’S 'The Turn Of The Screw', Taylor Whittington

The Corinthian

This paper’s purpose is to offer a new reading of the children in Henry James’s novella The Turn of The Screw (1898). The paper argues that the characters are subjects of Foucault’s panopticon and social control, which results in Flora’s loss of social status and Miles’s death due to their lack of adherence to the social control. I also argue that the social control and the panoptic system integrate themselves into the Bly household and work alongside one another to reinforce the hierarchy. A panoptic system represents a type of surveillance based on Bentham’s architectural design that subject prisoners to …

Translating And Illustrating Tolkien (2023) Ed. By Will Sherwood, Arden R. Smith

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Arden R. Smith, of Translating and Illustrating Tolkien (2023), ed. by Will Sherwood

A Romantic Austen: The Discordant Feminist Discourse Of Adapting Sense And Sensibility, Evan Teigland

Honors Projects

This undergraduate thesis explores the intertextual and critical conversations around Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and the 1995 screen adaptation of the same name, with a focus on how each text understands the interplay between feminine romance and feminine agency. A non-essentialist theory of adaptation is applied to construct an interpretive model that esteems Emma Thompson’s version of the story and considers its consequence to different communities of Austen readership, which is measured by the distinctly feminist themes detectable in the sexuality of Sense and Sensibility fanfiction. This investigation uncovers the importance of expanding the interpretive power and possibilities of …

The Artful Voyeur: Seamus Heaney As Parrhesiastes, Olivia Ransbottom

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Critics Edna Longley and Ciaran Carson have examined the complicated relationship between Seamus Heaney's poetry and the Northern Irish conflict, arguing that, in general, he refrained from clear political commentary. Despite this, Seamus Heaney was a revolutionary poet celebrated for his vivid imagery and commentary on ordinary life in Northern Ireland. While these critics say he held back on stating his political opinion or mystified the violence, this paper argues that he was a parrhesiastes (one who speaks truth to the rest of society for the sake of truth itself) of his time, choosing to practice the ancient Greek idea …

The Lady’S Museum Project, A Digital Critical And Teaching Edition Of Charlotte Lennox’S Lady’S Museum (1760-61), Completes Phase Two Of Its Three-Phase Development Schedule, Karenza Sutton-Bennett

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The Lady’s Museum (1760–61) was among the most important early periodicals largely written by one of the most important eighteenth-century authors, Charlotte Lennox, whose multigenre, proto-feminist writing is beginning to receive the critical and pedagogical attention it deserves. Yet no modern edition of the text has existed—until now. Launched in 2021, the Lady’s Museum Project is presenting the first critical edition of—and learning community around—Lennox’s Museum in three open-access formats to encourage the widest possible readership: a non-specialist digital, interactive edition of the text and LibriVox audiobook intended for public and undergraduate-student audiences, and a specialist digital edition intended for …