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Full-Text Articles in Reading and Language
Review: Shakespeare’S Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing And Competition In Renaissance Theatre. Janet Clare., Kelly Stage
Review: Shakespeare’S Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing And Competition In Renaissance Theatre. Janet Clare., Kelly Stage
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic is a fit title for Janet Clare’s investigation of Shakespeare and his theatrical environment. While her subtitle outlines the key practices that underpin her readings of Shakespeare’s plays, their co-texts, and their competition, the idea of traffic best encapsulates the complexity of the relationships that Clare charts. As she writes, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic may enable “a more conjoined critical study of the plays of the early modern stage — one that will take into account the networks of influence, exchange, and competition of stage traffic that make up the matrix essential for talent to flourish” (267). Her …
Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett, Melissa J. Homestead
Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
“In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett,” Willa Cather wrote in her preface to the Mayflower Edition of The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), “I find this observation: ‘The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.” Cather’s private letters and her public statements in the form of essays, interviews, and speeches testify abundantly that Jewett had teased Cather’s mind over and over in the years following her friend and mentor’s death in 1909. Furthermore, as …
Nebraska's Wedding Crasher, Jennine Capó Crucet
Nebraska's Wedding Crasher, Jennine Capó Crucet
Department of English: Faculty Publications
My building thinks of itself as Lincoln's premier wedding venue. I was not told this when I signed the lease. A glitch of duct work sends the sounds of every single party straight through the exhaust fan of my apartment's bathroom, so loud and clear that I can hear the names of everyone in the wedding party as they are announced -- not just in the bathroom, but from the living room. I can hear when people are clapping, can hear the claps as individual sonic events: I can almost always make out the crisp echo of the last person …
Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler
Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Recent pedagogical scholarship has engaged strenuously with the use of YouTube and other online platforms in the literature classroom. Stephen O’Neill, for one, champions video-sharing and similar media “in the interests of fostering various experiential, collaborative and peer-learning scenarios,” especially in tandem with the “array of Shakespeare content, which can potentially illuminate and deepen [learners’] understanding of the text and its diverse contexts” (190). In this essay, I discuss the advantages of sharing for this purpose online materials that have been developed by artists, instructors, students, and others—specifically, materials with a musical orientation. Along the way, I shall explain my …
George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett
George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems …
Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead
Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the …
The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead
The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).1 As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …
Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck
Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …
Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland Vegso, Marco Abel
Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland Vegso, Marco Abel
Department of English: Faculty Publications
The article examines the relationship of biopower and cinema through the analysis of a specific film, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004). It argues that in the age of biopower, resistance to power cannot be conceived of in terms of a radical outside to power. Rather, biopolitical resistance must take place on the terrain of this power itself, that is, within the field of life. Therefore, what we call the “viral” politics of The Edukators must be interpreted precisely in this context. The film argues that the exhaustion of political paradigms inherited from the past century forces us to take the …
Networking With Middleton And Jonson: Theater, Law, And Social Documents, Kelly Stage
Networking With Middleton And Jonson: Theater, Law, And Social Documents, Kelly Stage
Department of English: Faculty Publications
In the lines above, the lawyer Tangle seems to be listing the tools of his trade, various legal documents he uses regularly. However, the list names more than just documents; it also labels the stream of blood trickling out of Tangle’s arm as he is forced into a purgative healing. Quieto, a lawyer-cum-healer, prescribes a bloodletting because Tangle’s long association with ink has infected him and the only way to cure him of poisonous legal practice is to drain him. Quieto confirms his diagnosis with the protagonist, Phoenix, who looks into the basin catching the blood and exclaims “This, why …
Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin
Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …