Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

The Unlimited Absorbs The Limits: Analyzing The Religious And Mystical Aspects Of Virginia Woolf's Work Through The Lens Of William James, Zachary J. Beck

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Commentators on the work of modernist author Virginia Woolf have frequently remarked upon the “religious” and “mystical” aspects that appear throughout Woolf’s oeuvre, but have found it difficult to reconcile these aspects of Woolf’s work with her self-expressed atheistic beliefs. For those who have sought to resolve the tension between the “religious” and “mystical” features of Woolf’s work and Woolf’s (lack of) personal religious beliefs, the work of American psychologist and philosopher William James has proven to be a starting point for investigations into selections of Woolf’s oeuvre that seem to exhibit “religious” and “mystical” characteristics. There continues to exist, …

Review Of Women’S Periodicals And Print Culture In Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, Lisa Maruca

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

Review of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

Living Words; Dying Flesh: The Truth And Testimonies Of Desdemona In Othello And Pompilia In The Ring And The Book, Martha Clare Brinkman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603/4) and Pompilia in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) exemplify female characters whose testimonies highlight their souls’ salvation and demonstrate that they ultimately transcend their domestic roles. This thesis engages historical scholars who discuss the tensions between the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and the state in early modern and Victorian England, and literary scholars who focus on Desdemona and Pompilia as either submissive or possessing agency. This thesis includes the work of developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan, to show how Desdemona and Pompilia emphasize care …

Syncretic Immersion: Tolkien’S Languages As History, Artifacts, And Meta-Narratives, Stewart Raymond Zdrojowy

Online Theses and Dissertations

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth has been dissected and researched by philologists, medievalists, and literary theorists for decades. Though his work with languages (both historical and invented) has garnered attention over the past few decades, few scholars have looked at his languages in terms of their rhetorical functions within the narrative (as history), with the narrative (as artifacts), and without (as cultural participation). Mark Wolf’s theories on immersion is applied to Tolkien’s legendarium and illuminates his works as uniquely fixated in several modes of immersion at once. Narrative immersion is utilized to understand Tolkien’s works as a furthering of cultural values, languages, …

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.

Cultivating A New Educator: Teacher And Students Sharing Growth, Megan Campbell

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is Megan Campell-Looney's final portfolio for her M.A. in English (with a specialization in teaching). It includes a reflective narrative and four revised pieces: "A Murderous Moral Tale: Depictions of the Ideal Victorian in Wilkie Collins' Jezebel's Daughter," "Critical Thinking and Counseling Through the Power of Literature," Developing an American Identity: Syllabus and Assignment Plan," and "Evolving and Adapting Rhetoric and Theory: Indigenous Theory Writing Back." The portfolio focuses on research and study that developed Looney's classroom pedagogy and philosophy. Students and educators both must write back to gain the agency needed for growth.

You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason

ETD Archive

Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England’s aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh’s critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who …

The Contribution Of P. G. Wodehouse To The Field Of Gastronomy Through His Character, The French Chef, Anatole, Elizabeth Wilson

Dissertations

In her paper ‘A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century France’, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that the field of gastronomy came into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century in France. This field of gastronomy was constructed from two elements, the significance that gastronomy, defined at the time as a structured set of culinary practices, had attained in France by the nineteenth century, but also, the contribution of writers of culinary discourse who wrote about this gastronomy. These writers came from different disciplines and included the realist fiction writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), whose work Ferguson describes …

"The More They’Re Beaten The Better They Be": Gendered Violence And Abuse In Victorian Laws And Literature, Danielle T. Dominguez

CMC Senior Theses

During the Victorian age, the law and society were in conversation with each other, and the law reflected Victorian gender norms. Nineteenth-century gender attitudes intersected with the law, medical discourse, and social customs in a multitude of ways. Abuse and gender violence occurred beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability. The models of nineteenth-century social conduct were highly gendered and placed men and women in separate social spheres. As this research indicates, the lived practices of Victorians, across social and economic strata, deviated from these accepted models of behavior. This thesis explores the ways that accepted and unaccepted standards of female …

Ann Yearsley, "Earl Goodwin", And The Politics Of Romantic Discontent, Chris Foss

English & Linguistics Articles

There is a dearth of more substantial critical studies on Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin in general, and while the few out there have helpfully illuminated the play’s representation of the historical plight of women and the poor during Anglo-Saxon times, as well as its application to their current predicaments in Romantic-era England and France, they have tended to leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first …

Where Literature And Philosophy Meet And Diverge, Clare C. Hagan

Undergraduate Theses

Many writers and philosophers have asked “What is art?” or “What is philosophy?” but it is difficult to encounter a text where these questions are set beside each other. Many works of philosophy appear very literary in form and content, just as there are many literary works that are very philosophical in nature. This essay examines the intersection of literature and philosophy, using Kant’s Critique of Judgement as a way into analyzing Plato’s Phaedo, as an example of literary philosophy; and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as an example of philosophical literature. The first section deals with literature and philosophy as texts, looking …

Practical Christianity: Religion In Jane Austen's Novels, Erin R. Toal

Senior Honors Theses

A beloved English novelist of the late eighteenth century, Jane Austen captures the attention and emotion of readers through timeless insights into the inner workings of the human heart as characters navigate society, family life, and love. Her novels’ attention to practical morality but reticence toward explicitly religious subject matter raises conjecture concerning the religion behind her values; however, Austen’s Christian upbringing, Anglican practice, and Christian values suggest a foundation of faith from which the morality in her novels emanates. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, Austen demonstrates her eighteenth-century Anglican worldview in …

The Absent Father In Jane Eyre, Lauren Megan Epperson

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

The novel Jane Eyre was originally published as an autobiography by Charlotte Brontë, under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The heroine of this novel is widely celebrated as a proponent of feminist ideals, and as such, this paper is designed to examine the role of the patriarchy in Victorian English through the novel. The focus of this inquiry is the importance of the “father figure,” for young women, as means of protection, developing social identities, and securing, financially, a future. This paper, then, is an examination of the ramifications, i.e. the physical and verbal abuse, gross negligence, and poverty, Jane faced …

The Still Uproar Of Conrad's Press: A Breakdown Of "High" Literature In The Modern Metropolis, Alexandra Mulry

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although scholarly commentary of the last decade has engaged more intensively than ever with the content of George Eliot's ideas concerning nineteenth-century British culture, the devices and techniques Eliot employs in the transmission of those ideas remain less explored. Consequently, room exists for a study as attentive to the formal characteristics of Eliot's messages as recent scholars have been to the content of those messages. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the ways in which specific formal techniques that characterize Eliot's fictional work evince her engagement with the thinking of social theorists, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. The project contends that Eliot internalizes …

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect And Animals In Nineteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Keridiana Chez

Publications and Research

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez is the first monograph located at the intersection of animal and affect studies to examine how gender is produced via the regulation of interspecies relationships. Looking specifically at the development of the human-dog relationship, Chez argues that the bourgeoisie fostered connections with canine companions in order to mediate and regulate gender dynamics in the family. As Chez shows, the aim of these new practices was not to use animals as surrogates to fill emotional vacancies but rather to incorporate them as “emotional prostheses.”

Chez …

I Hate It, But I Can't Stop: The Romanticization Of Intimate Partner Abuse In Young Adult Retellings Of Wuthering Heights, Brianna R. Zgodinski

ETD Archive

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte’s novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine’s rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Blind But Seeing: Post-Clinical Medicine In Jose Saramago's Blindness, Matthew J. Ftacek

All NMU Master's Theses

This project examines José Saramago’s Blindness (1996) in the context of two other narratives focused on plagues and epidemics – Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) – each written at different points in time during the development of clinical medicine as chronicled by Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. The paper draws heavily upon Foucault’s work on clinical medicine, as well as a number of different theories of medical history, government policy, and cultural attitudes towards health and illness. The goal of the project is twofold: first, to examine how …

“I Must Tell The Whole World”: Septimus Smith As Virginia Woolf’S Legal Messenger, Riley H. Floyd

Indiana Law Journal

This Note explores the disjunctive moral gap between a civilian ethic of mutual responsibility and the laws of war that eschew that ethic. To illustrate that gap, this Note conducts a case study of Virginia Woolf’s rendering of shell shock in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The war put mass, mechanized killing at center stage, and international law permitted killing in war. But Woolf’s character study of Septimus Smith reveals that whether war-associated killing is “criminal” requires more than legal analysis. An extralegal approach is especially meaningful because it demonstrates the difficulty of processing and rationalizing global conflict that plays …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, And The Art Of Mingling Races In Henry V And Cymbeline, Jean Feerick

English

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that …

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwardian travel writing between roughly 1905 and 1914 serves as a bridge between the closing of the long Victorian period, the beginnings of modernism, and the changes to come in the twentieth century. The search for authentic experience characterizes travel writing in the Edwardian era. Significant cultural, technological, and social changes caused Edwardians to examine their perceptions about possibilities for authentic engagement with other places and people in their travels. As a result, Edwardian travel writers explore various methods by which to engage authentically with other cultures. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines a number …

The Peace Of The Waste Land And Understanding Eliot’S Two Readings, Luke J. Chambers

The Hilltop Review

There are two recordings of T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land in existence today, one made in 1946 for the Library of Congress, and another from 1935, recorded at Columbia University. The later 1946 recording, being the only one published, is by far the more well known. The 1935 recording is of much inferior sound quality and is difficult to find. The younger Eliot recites at times with greater energy, a quicker tempo, and with markedly different phrasing and intonation. However, quite often Eliot’s recitation is nearly indistinguishable between the two recordings. The specific moments of difference reveal a great …

Intersectionality In Jane Eyre And Its Adaptations, Laurel Loh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the almost 170 years since Jane Eyre was published, there have been numerous adaptations in many different mediums and genres, such as plays, films, musicals, graphic novels, spin-off novels, and parodies. The novel has been read in many different critical traditions: liberal humanist, historicist, feminist, and postcolonial approaches dealing with topics such as the problem of female authorship and consciousness. In addition, it has been read in terms of an ideological struggle based on race, class, and gender; xenophobia and imperialism; female labor politics; and genre issues, to just name a few. As literary critics have explored numerous themes …