In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]

Within Gothic Literature the identity of the mother causes women to lose their own identity. For the mothers in Beloved, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and “Greenleaf” their identity of themselves is lost as they identity as being the mother of their children rather than their own individual person. Some gothic mothers are absent mothers…[Read more]

Sentimental fiction and domestic novels elevated the female voice, giving authority to the womanly experience as wives, mothers, and women. Novels such as Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter and Sara Payson Willis’s Ruth Hall adopted the ideology of feminine behavior and womanliness while, implying tones of dissatisfaction with the role and…[Read more]

Steering committee’s opening roundtable for conference on the present and future of digital humanities at UVA: the career path of a feminist who embraced “A Cyborg Manifesto,” learned to love bibliography, libraries, and technology, and urges cross-pollination: “thrilling tedium of growing things together,” getting our hands dirty in humanist…[Read more]

This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

The presentation is a Powerpoint slide show that covers the new MLA 8 documentation for classroom use. The presentation covers the nine core elements, with brief explanations and examples of how to properly use them in writing citations.

This infographic represents an in-progress attempt by the #Humetrics team at TriangleSCI to pin down values that, if encouraged and incentivized in the academy, would enrich and improve humanities scholarship. It is meant to start a conversation. What are we missing? See more about the process and thinking behind this approach at…[Read more]

This presentation is a slide-show introduction to MLA 8 documentation for classroom use. Reasons for citing, core elements of MLA8 format, and examples are included in the Powerpoint.

“Carbon and Conferences (Again)” offers one person’s experience of trying to get to the Austin MLA conference by a means other than airplanes. It asks fellow MLA members for more collective, mindful attention to the carbon footprint of the conference generally. While acknowledging the intellectual and personal joy in face to face encounters, it…[Read more]

This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

Technology is transforming twenty-first century education. Central to the study of English Literature is critical thinking and writing, and with the advent of digital texts (along with the precursor – digitized writing) the space of the discipline continues to expand. One way to get at what is being done in the study of literature is to explore…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]