Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

What Does It Mean To Talk About Tolkien And Diversity? A Look Within And Without The Legendarium, Yvette Kisor

Journal of Tolkien Research

“What Does It Mean to Talk about Tolkien and Diversity? A Look within and without the Legendarium” considers racial diversity by focusing on the structure of Tolkien’s universe, both how it is modelled on ancient and medieval concepts like the Great Chain of Being and the Declining Ages of Man, but also remakes those models. In addition, it considers responses to racial structures perceived in Tolkien’s work.

“Fruit Of The Poison Vine”: Defining And Delimiting Tolkien’S Orcs, Sara Brown

Journal of Tolkien Research

Fantasy author NK Jemisin has commented that “Orcs are fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other’.” Indeed, we would have every reason to fear Tolkien’s Orcs and their difference. Every way in which they are presented, including the etymology of their species name, the fear and horror they evoke, even the food that they consume, denotes their alterity. Their skin colour, their language, and their behaviour all encourage a reading that is rooted in racialism and essentialism; embedded stereotypes invite a conclusion that this species possesses a definable set of attributes essential to its identity, …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

“She Never Yet Was Foolish That Was Fair”: Whiteness As Erasure In William Shakespeare’S Othello, Kathryn Croft

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Unmasking Polly: Race And Disguise In Eighteenth-Century Plantation Space, Kristen Hanley Cardozo

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

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera has influenced popular culture since its debut. Its 1729 sequel, Polly, has been understudied by literary critics, perhaps because of its suppression in Gay’s lifetime. However, Polly offers scholars new views on British imperialism before an active abolition movement in Britain. Gay confronts the evils of colonialism through his theatrical use of disguise. While other Caribbean plays of the period allow white characters to reinvent themselves abroad, in Polly disguise only intensifies the self, while the higher stakes of plantation space are where the characters meet the fates originally designated for them in The …

Visions: The Dance Most Of All: Envisioning An Embodied Eighteenth-Century Studies, Susannah Sanford, Sofia Prado Huggins

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

The editors introduce this special issue of ABO, highlighting the work of the authors included in the issue. The introduction draws on recent scholarship re-visioning the work of the long, “undisciplined” eighteenth century, arguing for an eighteenth-century studies that embodies our intersectional identities and honors the experiences of bodyminds surrounding texts and authors, as well as the bodyminds that interact with those texts in the present. Throughout the years, scholars have demonstrated that there is no single vision of what eighteenth-century scholarship is or should be, but rather multiple visions. This introduction urges scholars to consider how an eighteenth-century studies …

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …

Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, And Fantasies Of National Identity In Early Modern England, Sydnee Wagner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the arrival of Romani people in England in the 16th century, the figure of the Gypsy has been a staple of English literature and culture. My dissertation, Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, and Fantasies of National Identity in Early Modern England, argues that representations of Gypsies, from Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra to Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, served as a foil for English writers to create a distinctly white early modern English subject. By investigating the racialization of the Gypsy, this project considers technologies of race that lie within the parameters of England itself. Though the English …

Iago The Moor Killer: The Geo-Political Context Behind Shakespeare's Othello, Elisha A. Hamlin

Honors Projects

Shakespeare’s Othello is often viewed as an example of seventeenth century Renaissance binaries. Critics make distinctions when reading the play between hero and villain, Moors and Europeans, and between civilization and barbarity. These definitions are all complicated by Iago’s presence in the play. Iago, whose name implies he is actually a Spaniard, frames the play in a geo-political context. Because of Iago’s presence, Othello provides a picture of England’s position in the seventeenth century geo-political climate. Shakespeare is giving his English audience a particular political message.

Tracking The Evolution Of The Companionate Marriage Ideal In Early Modern Comedies, Madison L. Pierce

Honors Theses and Capstones

This thesis examines the socially constructed ideal of companionate marriage in Elizabethan and Jacobean England through four dramas by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. It probes the question of how these theatrical productions of early modern England fit within or defy the emerging social trends regarding companionate marriage. It uses socioeconomic statuses, religious affiliations, and emerging notions of race as lenses through which to analyze the romantic couples depicted in these plays. The results of this study indicate that, while exact authorial intentions remain unknown, these plays served as proponents of the companionate marriage …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth

Departmental Honors Projects

First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …

Diversifying Shakespeare, Ruben Espinosa

Ruben Espinosa

History Of Zoa [Supplemental Materials], Emily Workman

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.

Henrietta De Bellgrave [Supplemental Material], Emily Workman

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.

Intersectionality Of Race, Gender, And Class In The ‘Hard Times: Women Scholars And The Dynamics Of Economic Recession', Christine Clark-Evans

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

No abstract provided.

Miscegenation In The Marvelous: Race And Hybridity In The Fantasy Novels Of Neil Gaiman And China Miéville, Nikolai Rodrigues

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries uses the construction of new races as a mirror through which to see the human race more clearly. Categorizations of fantasy have tended to avoid discussions of race, in part because it is an uncomfortable gray area since fantasy literature does not yet have a clear taxonomy. Nevertheless, race is often an unavoidable component of fantasy literature. This thesis considers J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a taproot text for fantasy literature before moving on to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, both newer fantasy …

The Monkey In The Looking Glass: Fairies, Folklore And Evolutionary Theory In The Search For Britain's Imperial Self, Tessa Katherine Jacobs

Scripps Senior Theses

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a …

Sway Of The Ottoman Empire On English Identity In The Long Eighteenth Century, Emily Kugler

Department of English Faculty Publications

Within popular culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the intermingling of Islamic and English Protestant identity was a recurring topic of debate and anxiety in the English cultural imagination. Examining the shifting representations from Early Modern Era to nineteenth-century concepts of race, nation and empire, Sway presents the eighteenth century as a turning point in public perceptions, the moments when English subjects began to believe British imperial power was a reality rather than an aspiration.

“Everything She Knew": Race, Nation, Language, And Identity In Philip Pullman’S The Broken Bridge, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

A decade before his international acclaim for the His Dark Materials fantasy series, Pullman authored The Broken Bridge, a coming-of-age tale featuring Ginny, an Afro-British teenaged girl living in postmodern coastal Wales. The Broken Bridge delves into dilemmas of racial identity, ideologies of language and location, and aspects of non-Western religion that are not often touched upon in young adult literature. Pullman’s deft characterization prevents Ginny from becoming a caricature; instead, he presents the story of a very real sixteen-year-old girl with resentments, fears, and doubts. Ultimately, The Broken Bridge serves as a metaphor for the irreconcilability between an …

The History Of Zoa, The Beautiful Indian, Daughter Of Henrietta De Bellgrave; And Of Rodomond, Whom Zoa Releases From Confinement, And With Him Makes Her Escape From Her Father, Who Was The Occasion Of Rodomond's Imprisonment And Dreadful Sufferings. To Which Is Added The Memoirs Of Lucy Harris, A Foundling, Who, At Sixteen Years Of Age Was Discovered To Be Daughter To The Countess Of B- A True Story, Unknown

Gothic Archive Chapbooks

This story is told by an unnamed narrator to a woman he calls “Madam.” The narrator begins by explaining that Rodomond is the child of his longtime friend, whose untimely death left his three children, including Rodomond, penniless. Consequently, the narrator took the boys under his care, and Rodomond grew into a successful interpreter for the East India Company in Bombay. While there, Rodomond eventually became an enemy of the natives because he demanded fair business practices. One day, Rodomond was kidnapped by five mercenaries for “the banyan,” a powerful local. Luckily, the Banyan’s daughter, Zoa, heard of her father’s …

The True And Affecting History Of Henrietta De Bellgrave; A Woman Born Only For Calamities. Being An Unhappy Daughter, Wretched Wife, And Unfortunate Mother; Containing A Series Of The Most Uncommon Adventures That Ever Befel One Person By Sea And Land, Unknown

Gothic Archive Chapbooks

This narrative is comprised of a letter from Henrietta de Bellgrave to her daughter, Zoa. As Henrietta relates, she was born in France to the daughter of a Baron and the son of a Count. The two married in secret because Henrietta’s mother was bound for a convent, which angered the Baron, who made their early marriage so uncomfortable that Henrietta’s father was compelled to accept a position as the governor of Iranadad, a colony in the East Indies. On the voyage there, their boat is attacked by pirates, only nearly saved by an English ship bound for Bombay. After …