This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how Elizabeth Gaskell uses her textual creation, “Cranford,” to insert a male “bomb” into specifically delineated memories of her pre-adult life, thereby effecting displaced matricide.

Analysis of how Jo creates her own femininity, apart from her mother’s, through effectively earning the trust and interest of increasingly impressive paternal imagos.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

‘Dirt’ and ‘Trash’ in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_:
Update on the rhetoric of social stratification in R&J…

Gloria McMillan June 21, 2018

Shakespeare in early modern period of English culture demonstrates how modern exogamy (voluntarily marrying outside your group) rattles the social stratification structure in modern western societi…[Read more]

This article revisits the under-appreciated connection between John Dunton and Daniel Defoe in the context of their epistolary periodicals, the Athenian Mercury and the Review. While the wide-scale use of reader letters in early periodicals has been acknowledged if not fully appreciated in contemporary scholarship, each author devoted copious…[Read more]

This article argues that the humanities and medicine fields have paid insufficient attention to race, which is reflected in and enabled by the apolitical nature of their cornerstone principles, their practices of literary interpretation, and their paucity of scholarship on writers of color. I examine the fields’ interpretation of Audre Lorde’s ill…[Read more]

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]

This essay investigates Walter Scott’s writing, across several genres, as a contribution to an environmental historiography of Scotland. One of the main research questions is whether that writing provides any evidence for an early land ethic that anticipates Aldo Leopold’s twentieth-century use of that term. Scott’s response to aesthetic…[Read more]