Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Sexual And Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ronny F. Ford

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked …

"The Flat Earth Made Round And Tolkien’S Failure To Finish The Silmarillion", John D. Rateliff

Journal of Tolkien Research

Towards the end of his career, J. R. R. Tolkien faced many obstacles both internal and external that stood in the way of his finishing and publishing The Silmarillion. This paper explores the various elements that contributed to his dilemma and concludes that the key factors were twofold.

First came the traumatic breakdown of his efforts to publish the book through Collins, leading to a catastrophic interruption of his work on the book.

In addition, by this time Tolkien had concluded that many of the most iconic elements in his mythology could no longer command evoke secondary belief in …

The Rise Of Totalitarianism, Colonial Mimicry, And Gender And Sexuality In The Twentieth Century English Literature, Shahin Hossain

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Shahin Hossain provides an alternative reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Toxic Masculinity In Henry V, Abigail King

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Toxic masculinity motivates the characters and plot of Henry V by William Shakespeare. The play revolves around King Henry V and how he is a model leader of England during the Hundred Years War. Henry uses what a “true” man should be to inspire his soldiers when morale is low. Further, manlihood is seen in the characters or lack thereof. Characters that fail to follow the high expectations of masculinity are killed. Audience members recognize the importance of masculinity throughout the play, although the outcomes of those stereotypes are dangerous seen in the superficial friendships and suppression of authentic self.

How Not To Read Literature: The Nazis’ Appropriation Of The Merchant Of Venice, William W. White

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In his essay “Reading Law, Reading Literature: Law as Language,” legal scholar James Boyd White extols the interpretive flexibility of literary and legal texts and warns against viewing literature as having “objective and determinate meanings.” White’s warning raises the question of whether a literary work's meaning can be used to promote a morally corrupt agenda. This paper seeks to explore the danger of reducing a work of literature's meaning to a determinate claim by focusing on how Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was utilized by the Nazis as anti-Semitic political propaganda. Shakespeare’s play experienced a massive surge in popularity during …

“This Is A True Story”: Paratextual Prefaces And Their Fictive Truths Across Literature, Rebecca Stokem

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Scholar Gérard Genette defines the term “paratext” as accompanying components of a text like titles, forwards, illustrations, footnotes, etc. Genette claims these “productions” affect the “reception” and function as a liminal space between the “inside and outside” of a written work (1-2). Many texts and other works of fiction, across years and genres, use their paratexts to create fictitious histories that surround their main stories. The success of this rhetorical strategy, a convention that I call “fictive truth,” depends heavily on the paratexts’ reception from its audience. These genre conventions are traceable through canonical Western literature, from texts like Walter …

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

Articles

Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …

Too Soon Forgot: The Ethics Of Remembering In Richard Iii, Now, And House Of Cards, L Monique Pittman

Faculty Publications

Three interconnected performances of Shakespeare's Richard III display the extreme hermeneutical volatility of representation when remediated through a celebrity's personal history. The film NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage (dir. Jeremy Whelehan, 2014) documents the Bridge Project Company's Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey (2011-12), a production launched at London's Old Vic and transferred to twelve cities across the globe. Just prior to the distribution of NOW, Netflix released its first season of House of Cards (2013) with Spacey as the politician, Francis Underwood, at the center of its seamy landscape. Spacey insists …

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration Of The Voiceless Women In Victorian England Through Three Plays Of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo

English (MA) Theses

This essay establishes the Christian myth within Wilde’s three plays, calling attention to the gender politics that he fought against in the Victorian era. Through Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband I will prove the Christological myth that each play adopts and establish Wilde’s ability to make the religion “transformational.” Wilde’s productions of characters like Salomé, Mrs. Allonby, Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Hester are examples of the “fallen woman” of Victorian England. The treatment of women by women will illuminate the passiveness of the Victorian Woman and their compliance with the patriarchal norm. This norm continues through …

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

Byron And Don Juan: A Case Study And Queer Reading Of The Closeted Libertine, Caitlin Stanfield

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the major theme of homosexuality throughout the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron, ultimately focusing on his 1819 iteration of Don Juan. It presents historically relevant information regarding the sodomy laws, religious sermons, anti-sodomite publications, and other obstacles that, I argue, prevented Byron from expressing his sexuality openly. The queer Byron, of course, exists elsewhere. Through close readings of Byron’s correspondence and of his verse, my thesis argues that we can read Byron’s highly coded, homoerotic jargon for what it is, shedding new light on the active but concealed homosexual community of nineteenth-century England.

The Psychological Effects Of Patriarchy And Courtship: Eighteenth Century Women’S Mentalities In Pamela And Clarissa, Peter J. Laporta

English Theses

I plan to analyze the effects of a patriarchal courtship system on female mentalities during the English eighteenth-century. Samuel Richardson's first two novels, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), will be used toward this end based on their epistolary format. The usage of these letters and journals will be pivotal to the evidence based on the characters creating a written nexus of their minds and bodies through their writing. I plan to lay out the ways in which the reader can emotionally feel and understand both Pamela and Clarissa's breakdown …

The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Much of scholarship regarding the presence of war in literary modernism has foregrounded psychic trauma endured by veterans of World War I. The returning soldier is often figured as representative of the war’s infiltration of the homefront. The common argument claims that the erosion of the distinction between war and peace (as well as private and public) is a mirror image of the veteran’s wounded psyche. This thesis, however, argues that peace and war in the West have always been indistinct. The body politic is, in actuality, constituted by a perpetual civil war. Furthermore, the novels of William Faulkner, because …

The Roadmap: Exploring T.S. Eliot’S The Waste Land With World War One Literature, Matthew Bennett

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.

Arthur Clennam’S Navigation Of Social And Physical Setting In Little Dorrit, Danielle Jochums

Anthós

While Charles Dickens is most often noted for his portrayal of squalid urban conditions, he is also able to design and describe a wide variety of settings related to every echelon of the social hierarchy. This literary inquiry delves into Dickens’ world of Little Dorrit. In particular, it investigates how Dickens implements the reciprocal development between setting and character. Focusing on the character of Arthur Clennam, the protagonist of the story and the reader’s guide through the world of Little Dorrit, this query evaluates how Dickens introduces and teaches the reader about the classed and value-laden settings featured …

Necropolitical Resistance In Early Modern Drama: Violence And Death As Agentive Acts In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Madison Jansen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy has been widely-read by the academic community, but not always for its own sake. Its influence on the Revenge Tragedy genre, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, have been common topics, sometimes at the expense of readings that engage with the play itself. This thesis continues a tradition of applying the ideas of Michel Foucault to the Early Modern era in order to interrogate the role of power, knowledge, and sovereignty. This thesis explores the way that Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, and the related concepts of necropolitics and necroresistance, create significant new ways of understanding the …

The Aesthetics Of Storytelling And Literary Criticism As Mythological Ritual: The Myth Of The Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between The Heroes And Monsters Of Beowulf And The Anglo-Saxon Exodus, Daniel Stoll

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, …

Oh, My Stars: A New Map Of The Universe In Paradise Lost, Michael R. Coats

Master's Theses

Milton’s geographical descriptions in Paradise Lost are heavily influenced by his fascination with maps. Furthermore, his design of the universe in Paradise Lost follows a cartographic style that has led to several attempts at mapping it. These attempts, however, have followed the erroneous assumption that Earth centers the universe. As a result, cosmographical maps of Paradise Lost are inaccurate. I argue that Milton’s universe is Deocentric and provide a new map with a pyramid design that places God at the center of Milton’s universe.

Govoreeting With Lewdies: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of A Clockwork Orange And Its Translations Across Media And Language, Willie Wallace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Much linguistic research has been done on the fictional argot of A Clockwork Orange, known as Nadsat, but few efforts have been made to expand beyond the classification and analysis of Nadsat. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks at the overarching discourse of A Clockwork Orange and aims to answer three questions: What exigencies and discourses inform the creation of these works? What techniques and power structures are employed in the construction of these works? How do these works shape or attempt to shape the discourse? To answer these questions, I look at three instances of the discourse: …

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, …

Get Out And The Remediation Of Othello's Sunken Place: Beholding White Supremacy's Coagula, Vanessa I. Corredera

Faculty Publications

As a result of director and writer Jordan Peele's remediation of the horror genre to create a racially polemic film, breakout horror-thriller Get Out (2017) has achieved critical and commercial success while substantially affecting how Americans think about and approach race. As stories about a black man amidst an all-white community who ultimately strangles his white female lover, Get Out and Shakespeare's Othello share obvious narrative overlaps. Othello, however, maintains a more tenuous status regarding race and its function within the storyline than does Get Out. Othello remains a play mired in questions about how or even whether …

Anti-Normative Women And Queer Space In Early Modern Drama, Chelsea Brooks

Theses

The most interesting oddity about the Early Modern English stage is the overwhelming presence of the female form despite the obvious lack of female performers. Male actors performed female characters and sometimes those female characters were subversive and tested the boundaries of their constructed heteronormative society. A common comedic trope followed the crossdressed crossgendered heroine, or the boy actor dressed as women dressed as a man. This trope appears in the plays discussed in this thesis: Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 and John Lyly’s Gallathea. By adapting Michel de Certeau’s concept of space, wherein space …

A Review Of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of The Mind, 1770–1830, Kandice Sharren

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

A Review of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of the Mind, 1770–1830, by Kandice Sharren

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

Review Of Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe The Philosophy Of Margaret Cavendish, Dustin D. Stewart

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

A review of Deborah Boyle's book The Well-Ordered Universe (2018), by Dustin D. Stewart.

Entering The Lady’S Dressing Room: Using Feminist Game Design To Look At And Beyond The Male Gaze In Swift’S The Lady’S Dressing Room., Melanie D. Holm

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

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and …

Cutting Edge Courtship In Eighteenth-Century London, Margaret E. France

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

In 1759, an anonymous twenty-two year-old woman placed an advertisement for a husband in the London Daily Advertiser that inspired an unusual sequel: a pamphlet purporting to collect her responses. Exploring the context of this woman's actions and the letters themselves reveals attitudes regarding matrimony and the dangers of virtual social networks that feel surprisingly contemporary.

“A Lover’S Complaint”: Bad Shakespeare, Or Not Even That?, Madeline C. Duvall

Global Tides

In this essay, author Madeline Duvall argues in favor of attributing "A Lover's Complaint" to William Shakespeare. She observes the publication history and historical context of "A Lover's Complaint," as well as its metaphorical, prosodic, and thematic similarities to other works of Shakespeare, most prominently his sonnets and "The Rape of Lucrece." To make her argument, the author cites other statistical and historical studies of "A Lover's Complaint," and provides her own line-by-line analysis of the work in order to find matching words.

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 …