English Language and Literature Publications (UMKC)
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Items in this collection are the scholarly output of the Department of English faculty, staff, and students, either alone or as co-authors, and which may or may not have been published in an alternate format.
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Item The Weckerlin Family’s Commitment to a Monastic Vow: Medieval Bookmaking in Nineteenth-Century Alsace(Benedictine Sisters - Mount St. Scholastica, 2016) Blanton, Virginia; Morris, MelissaThis article examines the 1887 Weckerlin illuminated manuscript housed at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine convent in Atchinson Kansas.Item Leon Mercer Jordan, the Founder of Freedom, Inc. : Following in the Footsteps of His Father and Grandfather(2012-10-08) Farnsworth, Robert M.Item Penitence, Punishment, and Pain: Negotiating Personal Authority in Francis Lathom's The Midnight Bell(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2008) Condit, Lorna Anne; Religious StudiesFrancis Lathom's novel, The Midnight Bell (1798), uses conventional gothic themes of crime, guilt, and punishment to interrogate gender roles and to explore how individuals may conform to, reject, or subvert mechanisms of social control in order to preserve their autonomy and sense of self. This paper examines the treatment of two characters, Countess Anna and Count Byroff, who each commit murder and come under the auspices of the Catholic penitential system and French judicial system, respectively. For Anna, voluntary self-flagellation provides an alternative form of self-authorization and subjectivity based on the special status of Catholic female religiosity, while Byroff's state-controlled subjugation results in his being objectified and feminized. While the subversive vision of male and female power dynamics is ultimately reversed, I argue that the novel's radical potential is never entirely contained, the high cost of the “happy ending” interrogating the social values on which such an ending depends.Item Critical Realism and the Biographical Film Project(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2008) Childress, Stephen E.This paper explores aspects of a critical realist approach that have practical application to biographical documentary filmmaking as an ontological and methodological guide in the planning, production, and editing processes. An interdisciplinary approach from social science philosophy, critical realism is a tool with the potential for gaining a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying events because of its focused ontology, view of society as multi-layered with emergent properties, and the use of abduction and methodological pluralism. This approach results in a circular historical perception that connects backward and forward in a continually recursive fashion to reveal contemporary events not as predestined points along a 'linear' continuum, but as interrelated elements of a contextualized whole that brackets any temporal point of investigation. The biographical subject is shown connected outside as well as inside their time, and in relation to different levels of agency in the context of their culture.Item “I Cannot Rule Myself” The Pitfalls of Sensibility in Mary Shelley's The Last Man(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2007) Sager, Diane A.