Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Murder She Sang: How Contemporary Country Murder Ballads Alleviate Blame, Alyssa Hubbard

Honors College Theses

Murder ballads, or narrative songs centered on a murder and/or its aftermath, were historically used as a tool to emphasize a criminal’s guilt, cruelty, and inhumanity. Ballads centered on women in particular underlined the idea that women are naturally inclined to sin and easily corrupted, and because they were often written by men in an imitation of the woman’s voice, any regret or repentance within them is falsified or exaggerated, intended to warn other women away from committing similar transgressions.

In contrast, contemporary murder ballads, such as those sung by country music artists like Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, and The …

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

How “Interested” Criticism Fueled The Formulation Of Nineteen Eighty-Four’S Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch

All Theses

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a “cultural afterlife” as a result of “interested” criticism, which has a set political/practical barometer or motive. While everyone agrees that the novel presents a frightening dystopia, many also consider it a prophetic piece that illuminates the possible corruption of executive power of a nation thanks to this cultural afterlife; the modern and popular term “Orwellian” resulted from these sorts of analyses and have only escalated in the years since its inception. As a result, within the past decade, multiple scholars, analysts, and journalists have referenced Orwell’s novel as a factual representation of this executive …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

A Seventeenth-Century Air History In Conversation With Antony And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

This article works to unpack the recurrences of air-related language utilized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout this play, the notions of breath, wind, air, and vapor are consistently referenced, demonstrating the way in which atmospheric intangibility was a key point of exploration for contemporary scientists and philosophers. Through this analysis, it is clear that Shakespeare employs breath in three ways: the breath of (public) life, a lack of breath, and, most importantly, breath as a symbol of power and autonomy, which at times overlaps with the breath of life in ways that demonstrate contemporary conceptualizations of living beings. The …

Stigma And The Social Function Of Fate In The Story Of Túrin Turambar, Clare Moore

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper applies Erving Goffman's theories of stigma to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin in order to explore the social function of Túrin's fate throughout the narrative. Interpreting fate as a stigma reveals the role society plays in the tragedy of Túrin's story through the lens of a social model of disability.

Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism And Communications Media In Violet Hunt's "Love's Last Leave.", Melissa Dinsman, Heather M. Robinson

Publications and Research

An overlooked figure of modernist circles, Violent Hunt was a suffragette, novelist, and author of ghost stories. In her second collection of haunted narratives, More Tales of The Uneasy (1925), Hunt explores the ghostliness of the Great War, both for those on the front and at home. In this essay, we focus on the third story in this volume, “Love’s Last Leave,” and argue that Hunt includes both ghost story tropes and communications media to articulate the real deadliness of the Great War. Communications technology and spiritualism share a similar historical evolution, and in “Love’s Last Leave” both types …

A Checklist And Index To Lembas Extra 1985 To 2019, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

A Checklist and Index to Lembas Extra 1985 to 2019

Index To Tolkien Studies Volume 1 (2004) Through Volume 18 (2021), Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review Volume 1 (2004) through Volume 18 (2021)

Index To The Journal Of Tolkien Research Volume 1 Through Volume 13 Issue 1, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 1 through Volume 13 issue 1

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

The Nature Of Middle-Earth (2021) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Carl F. Hostetter, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Carl F. Hostetter

Introduction: Literary Geographies: The Solway Firth, Gerard Lee Mckeever

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the symposium that follows by describing the Solway Firth, its shores and its significance in the late 18th and early 19th century, defining the perspective of the symposium as "critical regionalism," examining the theme through an 1821 magazine story-series about a steam-boat on the Solway and through Allan Cunningham's novel Lord Roldan (1836), and reviewing the other symposium papers to highlight their contributions to this theme.

From Skiddaw To Scruffell: Sightlines Over The Solway, Christopher Donaldson, Joanna Taylor

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the geography, and literary antecedents, of William Wordsworth's poems about Robert Burns from the visit he and his sister Dorothy made across the Solway Firth to Dumfries and Ellisland in 1803, and discusses the link they made between the two mountains of Skiddaw in Cumberland and Curfell or Criffel on the Scottish side of the Firth.

The Natural-Supernatural Solway, Fiona Stafford

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores, through discussion of Burns's letters from Annan Water on the Solway, and in his poems, Burns's treatment of the supernatural, specifically his references to treatment of Kelpies, the mythical Scottish waterhorses seen in the destructive force of Solway tides and storms, carrying this forward to the work of Allan Cunningham, including his story “Judith Macrone, the Prophetess” (1821) and his poem "The Mermaid of Galloway" (1810).

Thomas Mcgrugar’S ‘Letters Of Zeno’: Patriotic Print & Constitutional Improvement In The Caledonian Mercury, 1782-1783, Alex Benchimol

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses a series of five newspaper letters by Thomas McGrugar (1751-1810), published in an Edinburgh newspaper the Caledonian Mercury, which urged increased representation of the Scottish burghs in the U.K. parliament, and argues that in them McGrugar used print culture to create an alternative political forum to existing political structures.

Thomas Campbell, Joanna Baillie, And The New Monthly Magazine, Amy Wilcockson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reports and transcribes (with illustration) a previously-unpublished letter dated December 2, 1820, to the Scottish poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie from Thomas Campbell, writing as the incoming editor of Colburn's New Monthly Magazine; discusses his role as editor, noting that Baillie's poem "To a Child" appeared in the next issue (and was reciprocated by Campbell's "To a Rainbow" in an anthology Baillie edited in 1823); and places the letter in the context of Campbell's busy professional and fraught family life.

Boswell’S 'The Cub' And The Shadow Of Augustan Satire, Robert G. Walker

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reassesses James Boswell's satiric poem, and self-portrait, "The Cub" (1762), and Boswell's known affinity for the writings of Sterne, arguing for a wider satiric context in early Augustan satiric poetry, in Pope and especially Swift, and analysing the poem's multiple shifts of satiric viewpoint and allusion.

Thomas Campbell’S Epigram On The American Flag And Abolitionist Oratory: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, And William Lloyd Garrison, Patrick Scott, Michael C. Weisenburg

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the background to a brief epigram written in 1836 by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell about the American flag and American slavery, which circulated widely in contemporary newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, and discusses the use made of Campbell's epigram over the next decades by three leading American anti-slavery orators, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison. The contemporary impact of the epigram is illustrated by an early non-authorial transcript recently acquired for the G. Ross Roy Collection.

Serious Play On The Fringes Of Empire: Zoë Wicomb, Thomas Pringle, And The Transnational Author, Simon Lewis

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the novel Still Life (2020) by the Scottish/South African writer Zoë Wicomb, which portrays a contemporary novelist researching the life and significance of the Scottish/South African poet Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) through an imaginative collaboration with an early 20th century bellelettristic biographer (referencing Virginia Woolf's imaginative biography Orlando) and with the intervention of two African figures Pringle believed himself to have liberated, the West Indian ex-slave Mary Prince (c. 1788-1833) and Hinza, the Tswana boy memorialized in one of Pringle's best-known South African poems, suggesting that Wicomb's novel (and her oeuvre) present an important transnational version of authorial identity …

'This Prodigious Mass': The Eruption Of The Solway Moss In 1771, Alex Deans

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the sudden bursting of the peat surface of the Solway Moss, above and west of the Esk River, and the destruction that followed, through initial reports from the Scots Magazine, the account by John Walker in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and two accounts by Thomas Pennant, one before the disaster and a fuller one after, in his Tour in Scotland... in 1772 (1774).

'A Quivering Quick-Sand': Romantic Border Aesthetics, David Stewart

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines Romantic and later treatments of the Solway's distinctive quicksands and bore-tides, from Anne Radcliffe and Allan Cunningham to Edwin Morgan, with special focus on Walter Scott's Solway novels, Redgauntlet and Guy Mannering.

Preface To Ssl 47.1, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the issue contents, pays brief tribute to six long-time Scottish literature scholars who have recently died (Michael Timko, Priscilla Bawcutt, Greg Kratzmann, Robert Donaldson, Thorne Compton, and Dorothy McMillan), notes that the journal has now surpassed 400,000 article downloads, and describes plans for forthcoming issues.

The Sobieski Stuarts And The Royal Lady’S Magazine: Some Newly-Attributed Tales, Craig Buchanan

Studies in Scottish Literature

Identifies and describes19 previously unrecorded periodical tales, some in multiple parts, contributed to the Royal Lady's Magazine in 1831-34, by the prolific early Victorian Stuart pretenders John and Charles Sobieski Stuart, providing evidence for the attributions and the brothers' pen-names, and quadrupling their known literary output.

David Lindsay And The Shape Of Inner Being, Eric Wills

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the influence of German Idealist philosophy, specifically Nietzsche and Hegel, in the work of the 20th century Scottish writer David Lindsay (1876-1945), now best-known for his novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) with primary attention to the role and character of symbolic imagery in Lindsay's stories, focusing on his novels Sphinx (1923) and Devil’s Tor (1932), and countering the broadly gnostic worldview sometimes attributed to him.

'I'M In Full Control': Muriel Spark's The Finishing School, Robert E. Hosmer

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the special issues for reviewers treating an author's late work, analyzes Muriel's Spark's last novel, The Finishing School (2004) and its reception, and draws on correspondence in the Spark archives at the National Library of Scotland to document Spark's firm control over the text of her work.

Moulding A Persona: The Life And Letters Of William Sharp And Fiona Macleod, Michael Shaw

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses William F. Halloran's three-volume collected Life and Letters of the Scottish poet and critic William Sharp (1855-1905) and his literary alter ego “Fiona Macleod,” with primary attention to the third and most recent volume and to its significance for students of Scottish literature and the fin-de-siecle.

Contributors To Ssl 47.1

Studies in Scottish Literature

Brief biographical notes on contributors to the current issue of the journal.

The Dichotomy Of Nature And Culture In Riders To The Sea, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Jonathan Millington Synge spent his time on the Aran Islands wandering through the peasantry in the countryside, using his experiences and things he witnessed to inspire his writings. He wrote the play Riders to the Sea to portray the lives of the Aran peasants by showing the way in which they coped with the natural forces surrounding their island through believing in certain cultures. Synge constructs a dichotomy between the belief in the forces of nature and culture stemming from modern Christianity not only to portray the mixture of cultures present among the Aran peasants but also to challenge the …

Review Of "The Origins Of English Revenge Tragedy. George Oppitz-Trotman. Edinburgh Critical Studies In Renaissance Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Xiv + 258 Pp. £80.", Samantha Dressel

English Faculty Articles and Research

A book review of The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy by George Oppitz-Trotman.