Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Cardinal Vices In Middle-Earth (2025), By Martina Juričková, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of Cardinal Vices in Middle-earth (2025), by Martina Juričková.

Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber

Journal of Tolkien Research

Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-earth is a remarkable achievement, yet Christopher repeatedly acknowledged how difficult the material was to present in print form and that “that there was no really satisfactory solution”.  This paper contends that a printed book is not scholarship but just one way of presenting its results. It explores how digital philology can overcome some of the limitations of print, giving examples from the Digital Tolkien Project. It shows how structural markup, version alignment, parallel reading environments, and other approaches can make relationships between drafts and published texts clearer. Importantly, these methods do not replace Christopher’s …

Eschatological Echoes: Reading The Bible And The Harry Potter Series, Athira Mohan Dr

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Death has been a major topic in children’s and adolescent literature , which has invited scholarly discourse over different ages. While death was very commonly featured in the puritanical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also deemed to be a subject too sensitive for the genre of children’s literature in the early twentieth century(Aries 1975), due to a combination of factors such as lowered child mortality rate and heightened concern for childhood as a special social category. However, contemporary children’s and adolescent literature focuses on death as an important part of human life, and invites discussions on …

The Music Of The Spheres In The Western Imagination (2022), By David J. Kendall, Brad Eden

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Bradford Lee Eden, of The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination (2022), by David J. Kendall

Arda Notebooks: The Best Of I Quaderni Di Arda (2026), Ed. By Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi And Wu Ming 4., Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Arda Notebooks: The Best of I Quaderni di Arda (2026), ed. by Roberto Arduini, Claudio A. Testi and Wu Ming 4.

"Then Daddy Began A Story": Storytelling In Tolkien’S Home And Our Own, Josh Renaud

Journal of Tolkien Research

"Then Daddy began a story, and this is what he said." That's how J.R.R. Tolkien began the first manuscript version of "Farmer Giles of Ham," one of a few moments of fatherly storytelling to be found in his fiction. Tolkien is remembered today as a great author and artist, but in his home he was a loving parent who regaled his children with tales — a "story-telling presence," as his daughter Priscilla Tolkien put. In this presentation, I reflect on Tolkien as a "daddy" and oral storyteller, drawing on examples from Tolkien's life and writing. I also consider what storytelling …

Tolkien, Modernism, And Mass Art, Matthew Thompson-Handell

Journal of Tolkien Research

A good deal has been written in the last 30 years on the extent to which Tolkien's work can be aligned or associated with literary modernism. Arguments have been made both for and against, though in spite of the range of perspectives that have been considered, what has been missed is the question of difficulty. A central characteristic of modernism is its difficulty, its inaccessibility to a non-specialized reader. The Lord of the Rings is not difficult, nor inaccessible - indeed it can readily be characterised as mass art by virtue of its accessibility.

Fifteen Years Of Open-Access, Feminist Editing And Beyond: Laura L. Runge Transitions From Editor-In-Chief To Co-Director Of Abo Editorial Board As Of Abo Vol. 16, No. 1, Kelly Plante

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

This is an editor's note thanking Laura L. Runge for her more than 15 years service as the founding editor of ABO. The current editors thank Laura for her foundational work and we commit to carry on her editorial vision.

Retrospective: The Burney Centre, Mcgill University, 1945-2024, Peter Sabor

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

The origins of McGill University’s Burney Centre go back to 1945, when Joyce Hemlow was appointed to McGill’s Department of English. After publishing a major biography of Frances Burney in 1958, Hemlow initiated what she termed the Burney Project: a research centre devoted to producing scholarly editions of the journals and letters of Burney and her father, the music historian Charles Burney. The Frances Burney edition was completed, in 25 volumes, in 2019; five volumes of the Charles Burney edition have appeared to date, with a sixth and final volume to follow. Joyce Hemlow was succeeded as Director of the …

A Review Of The South Central Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies (Scsecs) Annual Conference (Pinehurst, Nc 19-21 February 2026), Laura Runge-Gordon

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

A conference review for the South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference held in Pinehurst, North Carolina February 19-21, 2026.  The conference was organized by SCECS President Catherine Parisian and featured the keynote speaker Peter Radford.

A Review Of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights Of London (University Of Delaware Press, 2024), Mattie Burkert

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

A review of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London by Mattie Burkert.

A Review Of Karen Bloom Gevirtz 'S The Apothecary's Wife (University Of California Press, 2024), Annika Mann

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

A review of Karen Bloom Gevirtz's The Apothecary's Wife by Annika Mann.

Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens

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

Digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that applies digital methodologies and technologies to the humanities, is an excellent lens through which to approach the eighteenth century.  I integrate digital humanities tools and workshops alongside primary source readings in all of my eighteenth-century British literature classes to help students better understand those texts and the world in which they were created.  In my upper-level undergraduate class on late eighteenth-century literature, I teach four digital humanities tools to students, two of them (StoryMapJS and Voyant) in connection with Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). These tools train students how to uncover historical and geographic contexts …

Teaching Frances Burney's Evelina With Netflix’S Bridgerton, Willow White

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

This pedagogical essay explores strategies for teaching Frances Burney's first novel Evelina (1778) through comparison with Netflix's popular series Bridgerton. The essay demonstrates how Bridgerton's widespread popularity has renewed interest in Georgian literature and provides an engaging and accessible entry point for undergraduate students to explore Evelina's themes of social anxiety, gender, and coming of age.

Teaching A Stand-Alone Course On Burney, Lorna J. Clark

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

This essay outlines a stand-alone course on Frances Burney, suggesting that she offers a good entry point into eighteenth-century studies. Given that she wrote in so many genres—novels, plays, journals, and letters—such a course avoids the narrowness which often marks a single author course. In twelve weeks, the course studied ten works: four novels, five plays (three comedies and two tragedies) and a selection of journals and letters. The latter describes well-known figures in Burney’s social and literary networks in eighteenth-century London and leads to discussion of techniques of the epistolary, of diary-writing and of women’s life-writing. Burney’s novels are …

Reading Burney’S Mastectomy Letter: Presentist Thinking And Personal Responses In The Classroom, Heather Meek

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

Frances Burney’s mastectomy letter, in its graphic and detailed depiction of the operation she underwent without anesthetic in 1811, does not always lend itself immediately to standard, scholarly classroom discussion. It tends, rather, to incite unusually intimate responses, as well as conversations about medicine and health today. In my teaching of the letter in literature courses at Université de Montréal over the course of the past 13 years, I have found that students are inclined to seize upon the subject of breast cancer as especially contemporary in its relevance and to share their own anecdotal knowledge of the disease. I …

Lifelong Learning: Approaches To Teaching Frances Burney’S The Wanderer To Adults, Miriam Al Jamil

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

The construction of a course for adult learners who are not studying for a qualification or credits but rather for enjoyment and engagement with learning for its own sake, requires an approach centered on needs which may not be entirely academic. Drawing on students’ individual life experiences while avoiding assumptions based on familiarity with the material shapes the course and offers many benefits. The essay is based on teaching Workers Education Association (WEA) courses and proposes the structure of a literature course on Frances Burney’s 1814 novel The Wanderer. It selects thematic content which resonates with older learners, such …

The Wanderers: Teaching The Literature Of Migration And Exile, Linda Zionkowski

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

In our current global landscape, exile—or forced, often permanent migration—appears a central rather than tangential experience, being driven by armed conflict, environmental destruction, economic collapse, and political repression. The climate on many university campuses reflects students’ awareness of and concern for the situation of displaced populations, and this awareness has influenced political discourse and political action inside and outside the classroom. My course titled “The Wanderers: Teaching the Literature of Migration and Exile” begins with  Frances Burney’s narration of exilic experiences in her life writings and The Wanderer. Burney’s texts offer a conceptual foundation for exploring instances of physical …

Introduction: Concise Collection On Teaching The Works Of Frances Burney, Dana Gliserman Kopans

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

This short essay introduces a Concise Collection special issue on teaching Frances Burney. The collection brings together a range of texts and approaches to them and demonstrates that Burney can be successfully taught to students outside of the graduate context.

Irish Identity: Symbols Of Nationalism In W.B. Yeats's Cathleen Plays, Emma Mady

University Honors Theses

William Butler Yeats was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Two of his plays, The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) portrayed themes of nationalism and revivalism in strikingly different ways. Each play uses figures from folklore and mythology to establish a sense of national identity: the tale of "The Countess Kathleen O'Shea" inspired The Countess Kathleen, and the Irish Sovereignty goddess inspired the figure of legendary Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Countess Kathleen was met with harsh criticism and accusations of blasphemy, while Cathleen ni Houlihan is still widely regarded as Yeats's …

The Good Knight, Elektra Koozer

University Honors Theses

The Good Knight is a comics adaptation of Sir Galahad's story through the lens of a queer retelling. This story focuses on queer relationships, struggling with depression and isolation, and death. It begins at the end of Galahad's life, where he is forced to question his legacy and who he is after completing the quest that has dictated his whole life. The story weaves through time, reflecting upon his past, thinking about his mother's expectations of him, being chosen for the grail quest, confronting his estranged father, and trying to cope with the world on his shoulders. He has to …

Seeing From Women’S Points Of View: The Female Sight And Body In Lilith, Ayumi Kumabe

North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies

No abstract provided.

An Asexual Autist’S Feminist Musings On The Lord Of The Rings, Robin A. Reid

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract: This reader response is about how a seventy-year-old asexual autist began to discover her feminist queer politics by reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at the age of ten. Countering the negative stereotype of feminists (and/or women) disliking Tolkien, Reid describes how her autistic obsession with Tolkien’s world and her love for Éowyn led her first into online Tolkien fandom and then into aca-fandom. She chronicles a journey from feeling isolated and weird in her childhood and adolescence (in small-town Idaho during the 1960s) to finding communities in which her weirdnesses (autism, asexuality, and feminism) were not only …

“As Bachelors Very Exceptional”: An Asexual Reading Of Frodo Baggins, Danna Petersen-Deeprose

Journal of Tolkien Research

Queer Tolkien scholarship has seen a number of homosexual readings of Frodo Baggins. While there are indeed many elements within the text that support a queer reading, it is a mistake to insist that queer elements necessarily point to homosexuality. This article advances an alternative queer reading of Frodo: an asexual reading. Drawing queer and asexual scholarship, including Ela Przybylo, Danielle Cooper, Audre Lorde, and Jack Halberstam, this article examines Frodo’s actions, journey, and characteristics through an asexual lens, focusing on his solitary life in the Shire, the way he is perceived by the other Hobbits, his lack of any …

“A Natural Human Activity”: The Split Attraction Model As A Tool For Reading Tolkien’S Legendarium, Sarah Courtis

Journal of Tolkien Research

The works of J.R.R. Tolkien have long been a refuge for readers seeking escape; a world of eucatastrophe where difference is celebrated, and friendship lauded. Despite his egalitarian themes, gatekeepers attempt to bar those living at the margins and intersections from reading themselves into the texts, denying that applicability which Tolkien called for in his own works. One such applicable interpretation of the legendarium is through the lens of asexuality and aromanticism. As there are no graphic sex scenes (though contrary to GRR Martin’s claims sex does exist in the world and is expanded upon in The Nature of Middle …

A Twilight World Of Unspeakable Horror: Lesbian Camp And The Vampire Lovers (1970), Mirielle Lemay

University Honors Theses

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, a wave of lesbian vampire themed exploitation films proliferated through UK, US, and Western European cinemas. In critical literature on this subgenre, camp reading is often dismissed, unacknowledged, or understood as circumscribed by authorial intent and/or intended audience. With this alternating lack of attention to and dismissal of camp, the interpretive agency of the queer spectator is constrained, their spectatorship implicitly subordinated to that of the "conventional" horror audience—the voyeuristic-sadistic male spectator. Through a reading of The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 British production from Hammer Studios, I seek to explore how …

The Desire Of Strict Souls: The Poetry, Criticism, And Letters Of Paul Valéry And Wallace Stevens, Michael Healy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares the poetic, critical, and epistolary oeuvres of Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens and the influence of the former on the latter. Valéry famously advocated for the pursuit of “poésie pure” (“pure poetry”) and influenced Stevens especially in this way, though both of them concluded it was not achievable. I establish an approximation of a critical framework based on the work of the following critics and scholars: Wendy Lesser, Wendy Steiner, Anthony Cuda, Michael Clune, Paul Bové, and Liesl Olson. Harold Bloom’s passionate advocacy and deep, sustained engagement with Stevens and his work strongly influenced my choice to …

Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists In Tolkien Scholarship, Robin A. Reid

Journal of Tolkien Research

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction has been identified with the medieval world, and with medieval studies, from the beginning. In this presentation, I acknowledge the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is indebted to the medievalists who established the cornerstone upon which we have all built. Current publications in queer approaches to Tolkien and feminist approaches are growing, but queer scholarship tends to focus on male characters and feminist scholarship on (straight) female characters. What is currently missing in Tolkien scholarship, based on the bibliographic scholarship I have done in the past ten years, is work by feminist queer medievalist scholars and scholarship. …

Satire And Sentiment: Dickensian Characterization In Hard Times, Helen R. Ball

The Confluence

Readers of Charles Dickens both celebrate and criticize his characters, who are paramount among the quintessential aspects of his writing. His industrial novel Hard Times bears particularly the weight of such criticism in its portrayal of Stephen Blackpool, one of the Coketown factory Hands. Scholars have complained that Blackpool exemplifies, in too boring or didactic a manner, the typical virtues of the Victorian era, such as saintliness, humility, and long-suffering (Spector 365), and that his character lacks the necessary traits to compel and inspire readers.

Such a critique has prompted the following research and analysis. Using formalist observation of diction …

Nineteenth-Century Literary Magazines As Short Story Anthologies, Kelsey J. Brazil

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

This project undertakes an inter-generic study of nineteenth-century literary magazines and classroom anthologies. Based on the workings of genre theory by Julia Kristeva, this inter-generic study argues that the form, ideologemic function, and intertextuality of the literary magazine and anthology are generically similar. This notion has the potential to greatly change the reading of periodical literature from a simple reflection of Victorian times or as a mere container of collected (but isolated) literary pieces into one of cohesive, multi-genre significance. The resulting argument is that a nineteenth-century literary magazine can be a reasonable substitute for a textbook anthology in the …