Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Title: Questioning Attebery’S ‘Bullseye’: Interviews With Young Readers Of Fantasy May De-Center The Lord Of The Rings, Luke Shelton

Journal of Tolkien Research

In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed young readers about their opinions of The Lord of the Rings (LotR) as a part of my PhD thesis. Their ideas concerning the genre of the text destabilize Attebery's use of it as a central point for the genre. Since these readers do not demonstrate a consensus that LotR is a work of fantasy, one is left to wonder if the idea of the fuzzy set proposed by Attebery is accurate when considering the lived experiences of readers. This leads to several questions about why these young readers have categorized the story …

Skilled Smiths And Princes Of Elves: The Wayland-Legend And The First Age Of Middle-Earth, Lillian Hammen

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines the influence of the legend of Wayland the Smith, a literary figure common to medieval Germanic literature, upon the fantasy writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Although Tolkien did not publish on Wayland specifically, his scholarly interests included the figure, who frequently appeared in the Old English and Old Norse texts Tolkien studied and taught. Despite clear evidence of Tolkien’s interest in Wayland, and the frequency with which scholarly and creative discourse discussed Wayland in Tolkien’s lifetime, few scholars have engaged the connection between Tolkien’s writings and the medieval figure. This article attempts to address this lacuna in the …

“And Each Day After They Did Likewise.” Looking At Life Together As The Fulcrum Of Éowyn’S And Faramir’S Love Story, Christian S. Trenk

Journal of Tolkien Research

The love story between Éowyn and Faramir in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is sometimes misunderstood as a patriarchal submission of the Rohirric shieldmaiden. This paper contradicts such interpretations, exploring instead how Tolkien subtly constructs their love as a liberating experience for Éowyn. In the looks they cast separately, at each other, as well as together, Éowyn's inner healing is expressed, enabling the love to Faramir, and both their eventual wholeness.

Bodies That Traverse: Colonial Fantasies Of Oriental Incorporations In Late Medieval England, Soojung Choe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Bodies that Traverse: Colonial Fantasies of Oriental Incorporations in Late Medieval England” shows how a picture of a proto-colonialist England arises from popular romances of the period, particularly those featuring the Crusades and the “Orient,” or the fictional Near East, as its central narrative locus. While the historical Crusades to the Holy Land mainly took place between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, English fictional writing on the Crusades flourished in the “post-crusade” period of 1200–1450. My project argues that the Orient in these writings, especially popular vernacular romances, serves as a colonial ‘contact zone,’ a fetishized site for England to …

Maternal Subjectivities In The 18th And 19th Century British Novel, Anastasia Vahaviolos Valassis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How is the maternal subjectivity narrated in the pages of the 18th and 19th century British novel? This dissertation examines this question. The novel’s close connection to the child’s subjectivity and perspective is something woven into its very fabric, and so the mother is often a side character, an object in the story. She is an obstacle to be overcome, a distant idea, an absent figure, or even someone too perfect to be represented on the page. The novel often reflects or mirrors this culturally and psychologically accepted way of viewing the mother. The tracing of the narratives in which …

A Mute Pleasure: Novelistic Poetics In The Nineteenth-Century, Ryan Everitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through special attention to the non-narrative, descriptive, lyrical, or even boring passages that interrupt the story, this dissertation explores what happens when the nineteenth-century British novel envelops experiences that were traditionally (or since Romanticism) in the domain of poetry: longings for escape, exhilarating affects of freedom, opaque moments of revelation. In most cases, I characterize the novel discourse as representing a prosaic consciousness that wrestles with its more visceral yet vital “other,” poetic consciousness. To articulate how poetry survives within novelistic discourse, this dissertation is organized around sets of opposing terms, whose unresolved tension becomes the basis of my analysis …

Reading Tolkien In Chinese: Religion, Fantasy, And Translation (2024) By Eric Reinders, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Giovanni Carmine Constabile, of Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy, and Translation (2024) by Eric Reinders

Mapping Middle-Earth: Environmental And Political Narratives In J. R. R. Tolkien’S Cartographies (2024) By Anahit Behrooz, Stefan Ekman

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Stefan Ekman, of Mapping Middle-earth (2024) by Anahit Behrooz

Milton: Politics Of Desire And Dispossession, Sawyer K. Kemp

Open Educational Resources

In this course we will study John Milton’s most famous poem, Paradise Lost, alongside a selection of his major verse and prose works. Milton’s literary projects were inextricably political, and we will wade into the discourse of his legacy as either—or both—state propagandist or public scholar. We will discuss and explore Milton’s role in the charged political climate of the British Revolution of the 17^th century, as well as his work on gender, marriage, divorce, the free press, sin, and heroism.

How do we read Milton’s work in our own political climates of unrest? How has deconstruction of …

Do Androids Dream Of Bad Tv?: Un/Originality In Neil Burger’S Voyagers, Tom Ue, Callum M. Mcnutt

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Critics did not take kindly to Neil Burger’s Voyager (2021). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a dismal 25%, and the consensus is that it’s a trip best not taken: “It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.” This article seeks neither to reclaim the film as an unjustly neglected cinematic masterpiece nor to assert its importance in the canon of dystopian works. Rather, it treats Voyagers as a test case for exploring our own critical investment in the genre. Our aims are …

Peeking Into Closets: A Review Of Danielle Bobker's The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture Of Intimacy, Karenza Sutton-Bennett

Criticism

A Review of Danielle Bobker's The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy

Narrative Forms Of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, And The Holocaust In 20th-Century British Fiction, David Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Narrative Forms of Violence: Fascism, Nazism, and The Holocaust in 20^th-Century British Fiction examines how British authors explore fascist and Nazi violence through narrative. The texts in this project challenge the popular perception of Nazis and fascists and help to enrich the understanding of these character types in artistic representations of fascism and the Holocaust. I seek to reveal how each author in the three central texts examined presents fascist violence’s march toward the mainstream and the ways ordinary people deal with political violence. Each author critically depicts growing fascist regimes in World War II-era Europe and contemplates …

Vengeance As Piety: The Heroic And Elegiac Devil Of Genesis B, Alisa Heskin

Masters Theses

In Christian theology, the fall of Lucifer and his fellow rebel angels details the origins of angelic sin and prefigures the fall of humanity. The narrative had a strong literary tradition in early medieval England, appearing frequently in both poetry and prose. The Junius manuscript, one of four codices preserving the majority of Old English poetry, contains three accounts of the fall of the angels, with the most extensive versions being found in the poems known by scholars as Genesis B and Christ and Satan. Much of the scholarly attention Genesis B receives pertains to its interpolation into the longer …

Germanic Heroes, Courage, And Fate: Northern Narratives Of J.R.R. Tolkien’S Legendarium (2024) By Richard Z. Gallant, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Germanic Heroes, Courage, and Fate: Northern Narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium (2024) by Richard Z. Gallant

From Ghitterns To Harps: How Tolkien’S Music Became Generic, Alexander Retakh

Journal of Tolkien Research

When music is discussed in Tolkien studies, the primary focus is the songs and, typically, their non-musical content. However, appearances of instrumental music and its performance are often critical to the narrative. This talk focuses on Tolkien’s construction and use of music. Its descriptions were growing more economical as he developed as a writer and his musical references became simpler.

Tolkien has often been accused of being almost illiterate musically, yet a more careful reading of his letters shows that he merely saw himself as a musical amateur. In Oxford he could not avoid learning about the Early Music movement, …

Tolkien: Voyage En Terre Du Milieu (2019), Ed. By Vincent Ferré And Frédéric Manfrin, Deidre A. Dawson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Deidre A. Dawson, of Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu (2019) ed. by Vincent Ferré and Frédéric Manfrin

“[T]He Observance Of Trifles": Mapping Imperial Assemblages In Nineteenth-Century British Serialized Crime Fiction, Dana Joy Gavin

English Theses & Dissertations

This project investigates representations of the ecological and Imperialist relationships in a selection of serialized crime fiction texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (appearing in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly beginning in 1891). I examine serialized crime fiction published in the nineteenth century as a map of the ecological and Imperialist relationships established through the nineteenth-century British publishing industry. Serialized crime fiction was both popular and profitable, representing not only commercial success but one that tapped into the reading populace’s imagination. Readers craved serialized stories …

The Literary Role Of History In The Fiction Of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), By Nicholas Birns, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Thomas Honegger, of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024) by Nicholas Birns

From Imagination To Faërie: Tolkien’S Thomist Fantasy (2022) By Yannick Imbert, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of From Imagination to Faërie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy (2022) by Yannick Imbert

Reimagining The Single-Author Seminar: Teaching Wheatley Peters, Milton, And The Master’S Discourse, Kate Ozment

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

This article discusses a senior-level literature course that puts into dialogue Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Milton. Wheatley Peters’ poetry on tyranny and freedom during the American Revolution, especially “America,” is compared to Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost, which explore the same themes during the English Civil War. Students trace how Milton’s transformative but narrowed ideas of freedom for enfranchised subjects in England are powerfully reimagined by Wheatley Peters in double meanings of freedom for the colonies and enslaved subjects. Secondary sources allow students to engage in the canon-building of Milton as …

A Review Of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance Of The Forest, Edited By Shelley King And John B. Pierce, Annette Hulbert

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

The Romance of the Forest has long been one of the most teachable of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, given its relatively shorter length and popularity at the time of its publication. Now, Shelley King and John B. Pierce have prepared with great thoroughness an updated version of the text for Broadview that proves a worthy successor to Chloe Chard’s Oxford World Classics edition, published in 1986. The edition builds on Chard’s notes and includes extensive historical appendices that would benefit both teachers and scholars of Radcliffe’s work.

The Untold Love Story Of Aphra Behn's The History Of The Nun, Anaclara Castro-Santana

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

Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1688) is a complex narrative that challenges gender norms and moral conventions, while providing multifaceted illustrations of how restrictions of freedom engender rebellion. Erstwhile a critically neglected piece, this short novel has recently attracted renovated attention on account of its sophisticated narrative perspective, ambivalent moral, and general exploration of unconventional themes, including sexual nonconformity. Taking its cue from this critical landscape, this article explores the text’s queer dimensions, focusing on a crucial yet often overlooked scene depicting sapphic eroticism. Unpacking the internal dynamics and external implications of this passage, the essay argues for …

The Maternal Icon In Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan Of The Rhine, Esmeralda Orndorff, Joanne E. Myers

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

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through …

Introduction: Concise Collection On Teaching The Works Of Phillis Wheatley Peters, Mona Narain, Sarah Ruffing Robbins

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

This short essay introduces a two-part Concise Collections special issue on teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters. It discusses how the life and works of the poet can be taught in various educational settings.

Methodological Revolutions For Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters, Sam Plasencia

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

This article describes a senior seminar I designed titled 'Phillis Wheatley Peters and Her Literary Afterlives,' which sought to (re)introduce Wheatley Peters to mostly white students as a literary foremother, and to do so by way of Black feminist writing that considers method. While nearly all of my students had encountered Wheatley Peters before my class, none had been asked to consider the methods by which we read her, and what different ones will allow and negate, make visible or foreclose. I thus organized this class around the methods that have emerged in the last twenty years, in order to …

A Review Of Debates In The Digital Humanities, Edited By Matthew K. Gold And Lauren F. Klein, Ashley Bender

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

A Review of Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein

A Review Of Mary Beth Harris's A Genealogy Of The Gentleman: Women Writers And Masculinity In The Eighteenth Century, Megan A. Woodworth

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

A Review of Mary Beth Harris's A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century

Phillis Wheatley Peters’S British Publicity Campaign, Susan Carlile

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

Scholarship has tended to place its focus on Phillis Wheatley Peters’ unsuccessful efforts in America, followed by an account of one British figure, the Countess of Huntingdon, who patronized the publication of Poems on Various Subjects in London in 1773. However, the chronology of the British campaign, the modes of print publication, and the locations in which Phillis Wheatley Peters’ words were published deserve closer attention. This essay highlights previously unknown or unremarked upon British publications outside London, the Drewry Derby Mercury, the Ipswich Journal, the Hibernian, and John Gillies’s Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, …

Indigenous Language Guidelines And Resources, Shelby Johnson, Katarina O'Briain, Willow White

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

These collaboratively written guidelines offer suggestions and resources for writing about Indigenous Peoples, knowledge, and histories ethically and respectfully. With an awareness that this work is ongoing, that terms and language are subject to change, and that no set of guidelines or essays can fully account for diverse Native histories, these guidelines and resources offer suggestions for best practices for eighteenth-century scholars who are considering engaging in this work. The authors and contributors of this document understand that language is always evolving and that these guidelines may not be relevant indefinitely and in all circumstances. At some point, we imagine …

Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Leigh Bardugo’S Six Of Crows, Jordyn Fortuna

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

The main characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows reveal the potential within everyone for Monstrosity. This disregard for humanity can stem from many things, but it can also be prevented through community and sympathy. Monstrosity is often misconstrued due to a false perception guided by a sighted bias. In reality, however, characters’ humanity can be shown to the reader through a greater insight into their traumas and intentions. This paper highlights the idea that reputation cannot be trusted, but instead must be further examined to reveal the Monster within.