Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes

Large digital collections offer new avenues of exploration for literary scholars. But their potential has not yet been fully realized, because we don’t have the metadata we would need to make literary arguments at scale. Subject classifications don’t reveal, for instance, whether a given volume is poetry, drama, fiction, or criticism. Working with a hand-classified collection of 4,275 English-language works, we have discovered new perspectives on the history of genre. But to flesh out those leads (and permit others to undertake similar projects) we need to move to a scale where manual classification would be impractical. We propose to develop software that can classify volumes by genre while allowing definitions of genre to change over time, and allowing works to belong to multiple genres. We will classify a million-volume collection (1800- 1949), make our data, metadata, and software freely available through HathiTrust Research Center, and publish substantive literary findings

Computer Vision and Architectural History at Eye Level:Mixed Methods for Linking Research in the Humanities and in Information Technology

Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuableinsights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable forresearch.<br/

Beyond All Worlds: George MacDonald, the Pre-Tolkienians, and the Forgotten Possibilities of Fantasy

The history of modern fantasy has been powerfully shaped by the worldbuilding paradigm so successfully executed in J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s 1954-55 trilogy The Lord of the Rings. However, there were nearly a hundred and fifty years of creative work between the birth of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien’s publication of The Lord of the Rings. By examining the pre-Tolkienian fantasists, we find that Tolkien\u27s way of exhaustive consistency was not, and is not, the only way to write fantasy. Phantastes (1858), the first novel by the influential Victorian fantasist George MacDonald, defies contemporary worldbuilding standards almost constantly in its use of references to real world phenomena within Fairy Land and its inclusion of elements that have no precedent or rules of explanation elsewhere in the book. Yet these are not failures of worldbuilding, but instead instances of a consistent alternative paradigm to worldbuilding that I call ‘aesthetic cohesion.’ This method draws upon the forms of German Romanticism to bind the elements of the novel together, using implicit principles of mood and evocation. In this thesis, I argue that Worldbuilding is a legitimate mode for writing fantasy, but its hegemony has forced into one narrow path the genre that, perhaps more than any other, has the potential for unlimited diversity

Book Reviews

The Dialectic of Selfhood in Montaigne (Frederick Rider) (Reviewed by Glyn P. Norton, The Pennsylvania State University)Psyche & Symbol in Shakespeare (Alex Aronson) (Reviewed by Michael McCanles, Marquette University)Shakespeare\u27s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Rolf Soellner) (Reviewed by Michael McCanles, Marquette University)Cardinal Newman in His Age: His Place in English Theology and Literature (Harold L. Weatherby) (Reviewed by Nina King, )Rhetorical Form of Carlyle\u27s Sartor Resartus (Gerry H. Brookes) (Reviewed by Edward Sharples, Wayne State University)Puritan Temper and Transcendental Faith: Carlyle\u27s Literary Vision (A. Abbott Ikeler) (Reviewed by Edward Sharples, Wayne State University)Carlyle and Dickens (Michael Goldberg) (Reviewed by Edward Sharples, Wayne State University)Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (William Oddie) (Reviewed by Edward Sharples, Wayne State University)William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems (Jerome Mazzara) (Reviewed by William Stafford, Lewis and Clark College)Lyric and Polemic. The Literary Personality of Roy Campbell (Rowland Smith) (Reviewed by Allan E. Anstin, University of Guelph)Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, A Norton Critical Edition (Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett) (Reviewed by Stephen A. Black, Simon Fraser University

Women’s recovery journeys from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome towards wellbeing: A creative exploration using poetic representation

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a poorly understood condition, with an unclear aetiology. Due to diagnostic difficulty, CFS has frequently been dismissed by medical professionals as an untreatable “psychological issue” leading to patients not receiving adequate care for extended periods of time. This situation has led to patients feeling isolated, neglected, and misunderstood. CFS is more common in women than men, in an approximate ratio of 4:1; accordingly, we explore seven (7) women’s experiences of CFS and by adopting an idiographic approach seek to amplify the voices of a group of patients who have long been marginalized, and often dismissed. Findings are presented using a narrative research technique called poetic representation, wherein participants’ interview transcripts are cast into poetic forms. The condensed encapsulation of participants’ experiences through carefully crafted poetry adds an intensity that focuses readers’ attention more tightly than merely telling their stories. A small sample size commensurate with the study’s aim, enabled an in-depth exploration of each individual’s experiences. In the context of CFS, themes surrounding illness, diagnosis, treatment, wellbeing, and recovery were explored, focusing particularly on the potential for the recovery of a new life achieved through participants’ self-agentic psychosocial endeavors. The emerging poetic representations were clustered together in themes using a temporal framework, as follows: 1) Downhill to diagnosis; 2) From diagnosis to despair; 3) From despair to hope; 4) Looking back to move forward; 5) And, now. This research not only sheds light on the experiences of a puzzling illness, but also seeks to drive improvements in patient care through a more authentic understanding of the CFS lived experience

Composing the Postmodern Self in Three Works of 1980s British Literature

This thesis utilizes Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to examine three texts from 1980s British literature for the ways that postmodern writers compose the self. The first chapter “Liminality and the Art of Self-Composition” explores the ways in which liminal space and time contributes to the self-composition in J.L. Carr’s hybrid Victorian/postmodern novel A Month in the Country (1980). The chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) titled “Intertextuality and the Art of Self-Composition” argues that Winterson’s intertextual play enables her protagonist Jeanette to resist the dominance of religious discipline and discourse and compose a more autonomous, artistically oriented self. The third chapter, titled “Spatial Experimentation and the Art of Self-Composition,” examines R.S. Thomas’s collection The Echoes Return Slow (1988), a hybrid text of prose and poetry, arguing that Thomas explores spatial gaps in the text as generative spaces for self-composition