English Literature

When it comes to the ambivalence of Woolf’s androgyny—is it or is not a ‘feminist’ vision?—the crux of the problem generally lies in definitional problems. What discourse does it hold with respects to the relation between what is called ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’? While some critics have argued that Woolfian androgyny engulfs the woman’s perspective within a pretence of universality/ neutrality/ objectivity which only hardly hides a hegemonic masculine vision, others side for a productive undecidability which acknowledges the generative aspect of Woolf’s oxymoronic writing. Psychoanalytic critics tend to view Woolf’s androgyny not as a simultaneous combination of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’, but as a dialectic, a constant play between roles that are themselves highly contextual and never immanent. The irreducibility of Woolf’s writing reads as protective against master discourses. Woolf’s writing displays a form of Lacanianism avant la lettre, her practise of the not-all disrupting all systematic frameworks.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, objects in the British Museum were largely unlabeled, uncatalogued, and unexplained. Nevertheless, the idea that the object could evoke a ‘larger world’ was current in discussions of the pedagogical use of the museum. The popular understanding of the museum as a place of education foregrounded the idea that engagement with the thing itself, rather than any wider context or paratext, was enough to allow access to an object’s ‘realm of significance’ (Bennett, 1994), which was figured as Absolute Truth in Kantian terms embedded within each museum object. The fantasy of knowledge that could be gained from a mere glimpse reached its heights in the feats of identification and reconstruction performed by naturalists of the period like Georges Cuvier or Richard Owen. It encouraged the conception of the museum encounter as an act of instantaneous imaginative reconstruction, in which the fragmentary or uncontextualized part could be reassembled in...

Scenes of mesmerism and hypnotism in Gothic novels are commonly read as symbolic of sexual assault that reinforce traditional hierarchies of gendered power. In contrast, Bram Stoker rejects the trope of the helpless woman controlled by the all-powerful mesmerist in his depiction of Mina Harker’s psychic connection to Dracula. Rather, he presents this connection as a means by which Mina can regain power after a traumatic assault, and does so by employing nineteenth-century feminist rhetoric which presented telepathy as a powerful extension of women’s natural faculty for sympathy. The word ‘sympathy’ appears an unusual number of times in Dracula, compared to other Gothic or invasion fiction of the period. In his use of this word, Stoker engages with a number of nineteenth-century discourses, including moral philosophy, feminism, and mesmerism. Each of these branches of thought viewed sympathy as an inherently female virtue. In the novel, feminine sympathy is presented as the means by ...

The existing canon of scholarship on Dracula asserts that the sexually aggressive female vampires are representative of the New Woman, and thus are evidence of Stoker's conservative reaction to changing gender roles. In contrast, this article offers a reinterpretation Dracula in the light of key writings of the New Woman movement which sought to demonize the Victorian marriage market because of its creation of a class of female parasites: idle middle-class woman entirely dependent on fathers and husbands. A close reading of key sections of the novel demonstrates that the female vampires are characterized as traditionally subordinate Victorian housewives, in contrast to the positive presentation of Mina Harker as a New Woman. This reading reveals a text that argues that work for women is the only antidote to the degeneration inherent in traditional womanhood, through which women are reduced to nothing more than their biological functions.

Philip Bourke Marston was, in a sense, raised into Pre-Raphaelitism. Born in the year The Germ launched, Marston grew up alongside the movement. At the age of twenty-one, Marston had the support of both Swinburne and Rossetti in the publication and promotion of his first volume of poetry, Song-Tide and other poems (1871). In this article I will look specifically at the “Prelude” to Song-Tide to argue that Marston attempted early on to demarcate his work from that of the major figures of Pre-Raphaelitism by staking claim to the aural/oral, rather than the visual. In fact, his participation in Pre-Raphaelitism, far from being imitative, helped to steer the movement towards the formalism that would come to dominate the poetry of the later Aesthetic movement.

These lines begin an “Ode” which has permeated culture throughout the last hundred years. In 1912, Edward Elgar set it to music, as did Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály in 1964, to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Merton College, Oxford. In 1971, Gene Wilder spoke the opening lines as Willy Wonka in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The words appear as epigraphs in an eclectic range of novels, including science fiction (Raymond E. Feist's Rage of a Demon King), fantasy (Elizabeth Haydon's The Assassin King), and historical fiction (E. V. Thompson's The Music Makers). They are quoted in an even more varied selection of books, including travelogues (Warren Rovetch's The Creaky Traveler in Ireland), textbooks (Arnold O. Allen's Probability, Statistics and Queueing Theory and R. S. Vassan and Sudha Seshadri's Textbook of Medicine), New Age self-help books (Raven Kaldera's Moon Phase Astrology: The Lunar Key to Your Destiny), autobiographies (H...

In this article I consider the concepts of "work" and "production" in the life and poetry of Arthur O'Shaughnessy, viewed in terms of the conflicting aesthetic theories of Socialist art-for-society and Aesthetic art-for-art. In order to express his discontent with his "day job" as a naturalist at the British Museum, O'Shaughnessy embraced the revolution of non-work offered by the Aesthetes, as they affected an aloof aristocracy of art, removed from the bourgeois concerns of the consumerist public. Adopting this self-aggrandising language, O'Shaughnessy undermined the importance of the ordinary world, and with it the significance of his own failures in his work at the museum. However, his most famous poem, which begins 'we are the music makers', evinces a commitment to socially engaged literature, a desire rebuked by the Aesthete's emphasis on "useless" art. In his support of "art for humanity" O'Shaughness...

Screencasts and other video content offer an innovative means of improving communication between tutors and students and addressing student concerns about limited contact hours, which can be particularly pressing in English Literature. Our students' comments make it clear they require further guidance and support, despite extensive feedback provided on written work and guidance provided in module handbooks. This likely results from the nature of the subject which foregrounds self-reflective learning and has fewer contact hours than science subjects. In the most recent NSS, 76% of Keele English students felt that 'the criteria used in marking have been clear in advance' and 81% felt they had 'received sufficient advice and guidance' (unistats.ac.uk). These percentages are much lower than other areas on the NSS (such as the 90% of Keele's English students who said 'staff have made the subject interesting', or the 100% who felt 'my course has provide...

Walter Pater’s engagement with nineteenth-century science has long been acknowledged, but critics have often characterized it in negative terms. This essay demonstrates that while Pater viewed Darwinian evolutionary theory negatively, insisting that it ‘stealthily withdraws the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one’s feet’ (Plato and Platonism, 1893), he embraced non-Darwinian theories of development. Peter J. Bowler has argued that an ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ or ‘non-Darwinian revolution’ took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in which there was widespread public acceptance of the transmutation of species but not of the mechanism of adaptation and natural selection proposed by Darwin. Instead, as Bowler demonstrates, the prevailing understanding of evolution was of a non-Darwinian variety that emphasized form over function and design over random chance. I suggest that within these theories, such as the transcendental morphology propounded by Richard Owen, P...

In this paper, I analyse nine objects that form part of the extensive wax model collections that are part of the Medical School Collection at the University of Birmingham's Research and Cultural Collections. The nine objects are related to one another: they form a series of wax models on wood, representing the different stages of the biological sex development of a human foetus, and were produced in the 1880s by the German modeller Friedrich Ziegler (1860-1936). 1 These models were originally made for medical study, but by analysing them as sculptural objects, I show how they helped to shape cultural standards of gender normality within their own historical context. In this sense, I build on medical historian Nick Hopwood's research into the legacy of Ziegler's models, and reflect on their contribution to the development of modern bioscience. 2 The nine Ziegler models in the University's collection depict the different stages of human biological sex development in the womb. They were used at the University to teach medical students about the development of two different (and therefore binary) kinds of biological sex development. These models, in their sequential order, depict a seemingly standard process or 'typical' process of sexual differentiation in the womb. On the one hand, they mark a revolution in medical imaging, but on the other and despite their intended scientific purpose, they became embroiled in contemporary debates about social constructions of gender in the late nineteenth century. 3 Knowing this, I came to the models to investigate how such objects, primarily used in anatomical pedagogy, could impact wider socio-political discourses. In this article, I argue that it was their existence as three-dimensional sculptures, and the narrative view of development they depicted, that entangled them within socio-political debate. These models were the closest visual replica of human development in the womb produced during the period. 4 The visual representation of sex difference in a naturalistic manner sharpens their significance for contemporary socio-political debate about gender norms: because the models presented sex organs as discrete and reducible parts of a whole being, they became easy objects to focus on and utilise within ongoing political discourse about women's social and biological purpose. The presentation of these scientific models of sex development in the womb served to foster a form of biological determinism as an explanation for the social construction of gender identities. 5 My approach in this article draws on the methodology of Gender and Sexuality Studies, analysing the

This paper examines Greg Bear’s depiction of a pandemic crisis response scenario in his text, Darwin’s Radio (1999). It analyses his portrayal of the biopolitical and necropolitical impacts of this response under neoliberal capitalism. We seek to explore how Bear represents such biopolitical and necropolitical pressures of a pandemic and the effects of this on characters who embody intersectional struggle. We do this by examining Bear’s use of what we term Network Oriented Sociological Storytelling (NOSS). NOSS is an identification of the networked connections of an existing social order and its resulting social phenomena. Borrowing concepts from posthumanism and feminist new materialism (Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad), we examine Bear’s ontology of networked agency and emergence that produces these phenomena. This is then considered alongside Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe’s analysis of institutional networks of oppression (Biopolitics and Necropolitics). By bringing these met...

Philip Kitcher, by considering ethics to be a human invention, situate the objectivity and universality of ethical norms on humans (as subject), not on some extraneous factors to man (a divine being or some moral authorities).In his book,The Ethical Project, Kitcher systematical present 'ethics' as a social technology that liberates us from the difficulties of human predicaments.He gave a naturalistic account of how we came to have ethical project.In this article, we shall give a critical exposition of his discourse in ethics, and examine various suggestions made by scholars like Connor, towards the possibility of situating the origin, truth and progress of ethical claims on human activities over the ages.

Discourse in philosophy about how human being could attain knowledge, right from the medieval period to the modern period has witnessed scholars making references to the ‘intellect’, the ‘mind’ or the ‘soul’. A radical change in this linguistic reference was challenged by Gilbert Ryle with his analysis of ‘ghost in the machine’. It appear to be a primitive way of thinking, especially in our age, to still hold on to the view that there is an invisible and immaterial substance, other than the brain, that influence human or regulate human feelings, decisions and means of knowing. Meanwhile, within the tradition of philosophy, idealists and rationalists (along with religiously inclined scholars) will prefer to be consistent with their metaphysical heritage and postulations by challenging any materialistic reduction of a human person to just a material being whose movements, actions, and phenomena surrounding him could be explain simply in empirical terms. This essay therefore focuses on Patricia Churchland's contribution to this interdisciplinary approach towards gaining a holistic understanding of our human nature and realities surrounding us, with specific reference to the perceived framework needed for the development of a unified theory of the mind-brain.

This research addresses the issues surrounding the low level of Digital Humanities (DH) technological consciousness among students and academics in the humanities discipline in Africa (Nigeria). The study, using online questionnaires, shows that despite the wide acceptance of DH Technological tools among some African scholars in the humanities, there are still challenges experienced by these Scholars in the course of using some of these DH tools to capture African realities. These difficulties include low level of training for users of DH technologies in Africa, as well as the designers' failure to optimize those tools for use in the analysis of data, texts, and images extracted in Africa. To address these constraints, this research enjoins African scholars to come up with epistemological and ontological frameworks that would aid software developers in creating tools which capture the unique aspects of African history, techne, culture, philosophy and tradition.

This essay focuses on Patricia Churchland contribution to this interdisciplinary approach towards gaining a holistic understanding of our human nature and realities surrounding us, with specific reference to the perceived framework needed for the development of a unified theory of the mind-brain. A critical engagement with Churchland's ideas seems to shows that a serious progress could be attained by contemporary philosophers in their engagement with longstanding questions concerning the mind, will, soul or consciousness, and intellect – ideas upon which discourse in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics built their postulations and theories.