The Relegation of Bilbo: The Narrative Diminishment of Mr. Bilbo Baggins Across J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium

Despite the relative clarity with which Bilbo was conceptualized and written, Bilbo’s role within the Legendarium at large – and even his role within his own text, The Hobbit – has proved definitively lacking. With an entire novel devoted to Bilbo (he is The Hobbit, after all), and considering the extent to which he is centrally involved with the quest that progresses across The Lord of the Rings, the identification of Bilbo’s increasingly diminished role across the Legendarium comes not only as an unanticipated reality, but, for Bilbo Baggins fans especially, a distressing one. While he may be protagonist in name, even within his own book Bilbo is not given much action or agency in the conventional heroic sense. Indeed, in the gallant, daring, dragon-slaying sense of the fantasy-genre protagonist, Mr. Bilbo Baggins fails on nearly all accounts. What Tolkien instead provides is a hero of a different variety. The question, therefore, is whether The Hobbitultimately promotes Bilbo’s variety of heroism

Punishment and Praise: Grappling with Shyness in Children\u27s and Young Adult Literature

This thesis examines the treatment of childhood shyness in literature for children and young adults. With over thirty examples and reviews of children’s and young adult texts, it describes how shyness is often regarded as a problem in common social models and becomes stigmatized. It reproves the often cruel and disdainful treatment of shyness in such literature and calls for a new look at the common childhood “ailment.

A Revolution in Gothic Manners: The Rise of Sentiment from Walpole to Radcliffe

In this study, I assert that prior to the French Revolution, early eighteenth-century Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron attempt to understand the potential consequences revolution could have on British society and that both texts conclude that society can only be maintained by upholding behavioral expectations through proper manners. However, the French Revolution acted as an inflection point within the genre, and—through the analysis of the polemic texts Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—I argue that the French Revolution was domesticated in England, shifting the debate in England from a political argument to a moral argument. Therefore, I claim that the Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth-century—Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian­—investigates the fundamental stability of a society built on the morality of sentiment and sympathy rather than testing the merits of manners as a form of social control that was present in early Gothic fiction. By contextualizing the French Revolution as the catalyst for the thematic shift in Gothic fiction, I assert that through the investigation of manners, gender expectations, sentimentality, sympathy, and morality, the Gothic genre attempted to resolve the social and political anxieties that existed in England prior to and after the French Revolution

Abortion, Informed Consent, and Regulatory Spillover

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right. This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other decisions that have approved abortion-specific informed-consent requirements have failed to account for this interstate dynamic. In recent years, fourteen states, led by South Dakota, have enacted statutes that direct doctors to warn patients, as part of an informed-consent dialogue, that abor-tion might cause depression and even suicide ideation and actual suicide. Although there is broad medical consensus that such warnings are unnecessary, courts have nonetheless concluded that the Supreme Court’s Casey decision shields them from constitutional challenge. This may have implications not just in the states that man-date such warnings, but nationwide. Because doctors’ informed-consent obligations incorporate medical information and practices from other jurisdictions, a doctor’s failure to warn a patient about postabortion depression may expose her to liability for medical malpractice—even where her own state does not mandate such a warn-ing statutorily. Eliminating this risk by warning a patient that abortion might lead to depression costs the doctor much less than the penalties she might incur for with-holding that information. This dynamic—which we term the “South Dakota effect”—threatens to transform informed-consent practices across the country, with profound consequences for women’s willingness to elect abortion and for the experiences of women who choose to go forward with abortion procedures. More broadly, it highlights the need to re-think the abortion-federalism nexus

Network Interference Negatively Predicts Relationship Quality and Mental Health in Dating Couples

Although research shows that perceived social network approval of one’s romantic relationship is linked to higher levels of relationship quality and stability, whether an individual’s opinion of their partner’s network is associated with relationship quality and/or individual mental health remains underexplored. In the present study, we addressed this gap in the research by conducting an online survey of 202 participants between the ages of 18 and 29 who reported currently being in a nonmarital relationship of at least 6 months (81% female; 76% White). Four hierarchical linear regressions were performed to test the associations of reported interference from partner’s friends and family, as well as reported tension regarding partner’s friends and family, on relationship quality and depressive symptoms, controlling for a variety of background variables. Results revealed that reported interference from and tension about partner’s friends negatively predicted relationship quality, whereas interference from and tension about partner’s family did not. In contrast, neither interference from family nor friends predicted depressive symptoms, whereas tension about relationships with both family and friends positively predicted depressive symptoms. Furthermore, trust in the romantic relationship only reduced the associations between interference from and tension about partner’s friends and relationship quality. Our findings indicate the importance of considering the role of the wider social network in couples’ relationships

Guest Editorial

Intellectual disability in South Africa: Addressing a crisis in mental health service

Can a Multi-Student Research Project Deliver a High Quality Learning Experience at Masters Level?

No abstract available

Integral points on elliptic curves and explicit valuations of division polynomials

Assuming Lang's conjectured lower bound on the heights of non-torsion points on an elliptic curve, we show that there exists an absolute constant C such that for any elliptic curve E/Q and non-torsion point P in E(Q), there is at most one integral multiple [n]P such that n > C. The proof is a modification of a proof of Ingram giving an unconditional but not uniform bound. The new ingredient is a collection of explicit formulae for the sequence of valuations of the division polynomials. For P of non-singular reduction, such sequences are already well described in most cases, but for P of singular reduction, we are led to define a new class of sequences called elliptic troublemaker sequences, which measure the failure of the Neron local height to be quadratic. As a corollary in the spirit of a conjecture of Lang and Hall, we obtain a uniform upper bound on h(P)/h(E) for integer points having two large integral multiples.Comment: 41 pages; minor corrections and improvements to expositio