VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Radcliffe, David H."

Browsing by Author "Radcliffe, David H."

Now showing 1 - 20 of 22

The Catherine Byron Letters
Wimbish, Andrew Hunter (Virginia Tech, 2016-06-28)
The Catherine Byron Letters is an edited and annotated collection of letters mostly exchanged between Catherine Byron, the mother of the poet, and her solicitor John Hanson. The importance of this correspondence was first established by Doris Langley-Moore in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974), which documents the poet's finances from the time of his birth. Since then the letters have been used extensively by Megan Boyes in My Amiable Mamma: A Biography of Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron (1991) and by J. V. Beckett and Sheila Aley in Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (2001). For this project I have transcribed and edited the portion of Catherine Byron's correspondence now in the John Murray Archives at the National Library of Scotland, amounting to 92 letters which are here reproduced in their entirety. While some are familiar letters, most of the correspondence is concerned with the business of providing for the young poet's education at Harrow and at Cambridge, paying off his mounting debts, managing the Newstead Abbey estate, and pursuing the lawsuits which entangled the family finances. I have edited the transcribed letters using the TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) markup language, adding optional punctuation where necessary to clarify the sense as well as headnotes and additional annotations for personal names, places, and technical terms where they require elucidation. The resulting machine-readable XML documents have been made into a website on which I have collaborated with Professor Radcliffe.
The Digital John D. Wagg Papers
Woods, Zachary John-Robert (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-01)
John D. Wagg was a native of Ashe County, North Carolina and a Southern Methodist circuit minister active immediately before and during the Civil War. His surviving journal, sermons, and received letters allow us to employ him as a window into a particular time, place, and set of conditions. To facilitate this, selections from the Wagg documents have been transcribed, edited, and presented as a Web-based digital edition, the Digital John D. Wagg Papers. This edition is designed to work with many other editions of similarly narrow historical and geographical scope as one historical witness in a network of witnesses. We must draw from several varieties of documents in the John Wagg collection and from contextualizing historical scholarship to construct a history of Wagg as a product of and participant in his times. Born 8 July 1835, Wagg began keeping a journal in 1854 as he worked toward a degree in medicine at Jefferson, North Carolina, the Wagg family hometown. As a diarist he often explored the place of humanity in a God-made world, a theme that foreshadows his turn from medicine and entry into the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in October 1858. Wagg spent the Civil War years preaching throughout western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, generally striving to keep his heavily Confederate-leaning politics from the pulpit. This lifestyle allows the Wagg Papers to bring an alternate point of view to any archive of Civil War documents consisting primarily of the letters of combatants.
Effective Visual Design for Proposal Writing
Johnston, Allegra Christine (Virginia Tech, 2003-03-26)
The field of document design has gained considerable attention over the past couple of decades. New technology has drastically increased the design possibilities for writers, and researchers are gaining greater insight into the way that readers interact with the visual elements of their texts. This has led to an explosion in the availability of guidance on document design, but there are still areas where the research is incomplete. One of these areas concerns a common but important type of document: the proposal. There are numerous guides on proposal writing, but most of them are concerned with content and give little attention to document design. Since successful proposals are crucial to both the business and non-profit arenas, it is important that the documents are accessible and make a good impression on reviewers. Good document design can help. In this study I took the existing research on document design and developed a set of questions meant to address the different elements of document design. I tested a sampling of both grant proposals and contract proposals using those questions with a system of scoring based on Likert scaling. I combined the quantitative results with qualitative responses from interviews in order to gain insight regarding the overall effect of visual design elements in proposals. The results of this study showed that there are certain elements of document design (such as layout or contrast) that are important to proposals, but that non-design factors (such as cost or experience) usually outweigh the design for evaluation purpose.
Fear and Fortune: Robbery in London in the Late Eighteenth Century
Paxton, William R. (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-17)
Public representation of highwaymen and footpads in the press spawned a climate of fear in London. Descriptions of the violence that highwaymen and footpads employed in the course of their crimes generated this fear. Violence set them apart from other non- or less-violent thefts that occurred in much greater numbers in the capital, but received less coverage in the public discussion of crime at the time. Victims of robbery came from all different social classes and demographic groups, and this too contributed to the fear by creating an image of robbers who could attack anyone at any time. This ardent fear appeared to have overshadowed some of the new social and economic explanations of criminals' motives and emerging humanitarian approaches to crime prevention. The court records suggest that highwaymen and footpads were often young men who operated in organized gangs and used violence to create fear and ensure success in their attack -- and this paralleled the public perceptions. However, the trials show that women did in fact account for a small -- but noticeable -- percentage of robbers, and robbers also acted individually as well as in groups. The court proceedings also
From a Record of Death to a Memory of Life: The Rise of the Biographical Obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine
Norman, Nathaniel Don (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-14)
The need for an examination of the rise of various journalistic and print forms in The Gentleman's Magazine is evident from the absence of scholarship in this area. One of the most important forms born in The Gentleman's Magazine is the obituary. Beginning as a sparse list of deaths appended to the back of each issue of the magazine, it came to occupy a larger role in the publication within a hundred years of its inception. My study proposes to examine the reasons for this shift, focusing on the rise of the biographical form as it is treated in the works of Samuel Johnson, a prominent contributor to The Gentleman's Magazine, and practiced at the hands of John Nichols, one of the magazine's most prominent editors. My study also seeks to characterize the content of the obituaries by historicizing them in the context of the period and within the confines of the editorial policies of the magazine itself. The magazine's editorial persona, Sylvanus Urbanus, provides general terms whereby the dead may be characterized. Ultimately, my study is interested in examining the representations of the deceased in the obituary form as social markers, that are necessary for understanding how groups and individuals represented society.
Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: Criseydan Conversations 1986-2002 A Narrative Bibliography
Taylor, William Joseph (Virginia Tech, 2004-03-24)
Conversations among scholars in the study of Chaucer have been essential in constructing the foundations on which we now stand. However, in light of recent pressures in the very competitive and practical aspects of academic life, the scholarly conversation is often lost amidst the desire to find any obscure point on which to publish simply for the reason that no one has yet said anything about it. There is certainly a usefulness to exploring all facets of Chaucer's work, but there is also a need to slough off the cumbersome coat of 'publish-or-perish' scholarship in favor of carrying on a more meaningful conversation which may contribute to new readings or interpretations, epiphanies, or canon-altering revelations. This bibliography was begun for two purposes. First, as a bibliography, it was made to serve its users in a convenient and comprehensive manner. Second, it was made to illustrate the conversations of recent years, or lack thereof, among scholars concerned with the character and actions of Criseyde in the Troilus. Criseyde is arguably the quintessential character in Chaucer's works. She is wonderfully enigmatic, and her role in the Troilus spawned six hundred years of debate. The chapters which follow testify to the complexity of Criseyde. As she caught the eye of multiple authors from classical antiquity to the Elizabethan age, she continues to entice scholars to read and re-read her in various articles, chapters, and books. This is supported by the fact that nearly one quarter of all scholarship published (over four hundred works) on Troilus and Criseyde since 1986 deals expressly with Criseyde, herself. This bibliography is constructed as it is in the hope of providing a more convenient tool for scholars. The Riverside Chaucer serves as an adequate starting point because of its comprehensive compilation of notes and studies on Chaucer's works, including the Troilus. Since nothing of similar stature has appeared since, this bibliography will begin in 1986, the year in which the Riverside's compilation came to an end. Chapter 1 of this study looks at recent scholarship which examines the origins of Chaucer's Criseyde. While W.W. Skeat and R.K. Root provided us long ago with detailed lists and accounts of Chaucer's sources for the Troilus, today's scholars continue to make new additions to these, as well as new interpretations and readings which suggest further, new or different sources. The final chapter of this work examines the scholarship that reads Criseyde's role in the poem as a whole, not focusing on any one scene or act. Scholars such as David Aers and Jill Mann provide critiques on the nature of Criseyde from our initial sight of her in Book I to her final departure from the poem in Book V. Interestingly, recent scholarship on Criseyde tends to focus on one or more specific scenes in a specific book within the poem. Scholars deconstruct Criseyde's entrance at the Palladium in Book I, her reaction to Pandarus' goading her to love Troilus in Book II, or descriptions of her dress in the Greek camp in Book IV. Therefore, in structuring this bibliography, rather than focusing on themes, I sought to frame the scholarship with the poem's own narrative structure. Thus, chapters two, three, four, and five are comprised of scholarship that examines Books I, II, III, and Books IV and V of the Troilus. Users who question certain scenes in one of the poem's books can then look to the corresponding chapter of this bibliography to find whether scholars have conversed about the scene or scenes in question. In a sense, this bibliography examines Criseyde's existence prior to Chaucer's poem, her activity within Chaucer's poem, and her reputation upon exiting Chaucer's poem. This bibliography seeks to put scholarship together in such a way as to confirm whether or not scholars are continuing conversations about Chaucer's Criseyde. In many cases we find that conversations do exist and are carried forward. New landmarks in scholarship, for example Piero Boitani's edited collection The European Tragedy of the Troilus or David Aers' Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, are made apparent by the number of other scholars conversing on arguments and suggestions made by the contributing authors of these two works. Scholars pick up where their predecessors leave off in continuing arguments, patterns of interpretation, and close readings of Criseyde. Further, scholars begin new conversations. In some instances, both old and new conversations fail to move forward, whether by mischance or 'entente.' It is essential that we continue these colloquial discussions of scholarship as the critical scope of Chaucer studies widens, rather than rocketing forward as it did with the work of Skeat, Root, Donaldson, and Robertson in the early and mid twentieth-century. Certainly, we can disagree, but let us remember the ease with which C.S. Lewis discusses Medieval literature in his Discarded Image and the warmth of a conference session at MLA, NCS, or Kalamazoo, in which Chaucerians gather to move forward as one body rather than a mix of warring clans, prima donnas, or renegade dissenters. Scholarship aside, I offer this bibliography lastly to demonstrate the wonders of Chaucer's poetic arts and their chief exemplar, Criseyde.
Imitation and Adaptability in the First-Year Composition Classroom: A Pedagogical Study
Twomey, Tish Eshelle Tyra (Virginia Tech, 2003-03-31)
The use of imitation exercises—writing activities employing model texts and the modeling of writing-process behaviors—in the First Year composition classroom can have many benefits for both student writers and teachers, and offers practical solutions to some of the problems facing student writers in today's colleges. First Year writing students are often unaware that they are part of a larger academic community. They often lack exposure to and understanding of academic standards. They don't understand that "good" writing is not a blanket-concept but is determined on a situational basis, and they are frustrated by the vaguely expressed expectations of their writing teachers. These problems are interconnected and so are all addressed in this study, but because they offer so many potential avenues for discussion, the focus of this project will be limited to the benefits of clear expectations that the use of modeling activities in the classroom can bring about for both students and teachers. An in-depth look at the materials, methods, and results of student participation in the activities of a single semester of English 1105, the first course in Virginia Tech's First Year Writing Program will be the dominant component of the project; it will be supplemented by a review of literature and a contextual discussion of what Stephen M. North calls the "Practitioner" mode of inquiry—the gathering of pedagogical information through the active classroom application of educational theories and practices.
James Hogg's Ambiguously Justified Sinner
Dobbs, Joshua D. (Virginia Tech, 2016-06-27)
This thesis explores Hogg's interpretation of indeterminacy both throughout his career and in Justified Sinner, especially in the character Gil-Martin. Hogg seems to reject the tradition of choosing one side over another in such a dichotomy, and instead chooses to look at both extremes as equally co-present. Hogg wrote Justified Sinner within the framework of the literary Gothic tradition and used Gothic tropes to create ambiguity throughout his novel, as is the case throughout his body of works. Many of the ambiguities in Justified Sinner center on the character Gil-Martin. My interpretation of Gil-Martin's ambiguity complicates the traditional scholarship on Justified Sinner.
John Cleland's The Dictionary of Love: An XML Edition
Davis, Emily Katherine (Virginia Tech, 2007-04-27)
Conducting and disseminating humanities research is fast becoming a highly technological endeavor. The variety of multimedia options for presenting information changes the questions we ask and the answers we find as well as the problems we encounter and the solutions we devise. The following essays provide an account of creating a digital edition of John Cleland's The Dictionary of Love using XML. The project utilizes traditional literary research methods while working toward an untraditional digital final product, a characteristic that highlights the feedback loop between form and function. Thus, the purpose of this project is twofold: to provide students and scholars information and analysis on The Dictionary of Love and, in the process, to examine and discuss the challenges, drawbacks and benefits of producing the content as a web-compatible resource.
John Milton: A Cause Without a Rebel
Bruce, Adam Alexander (Virginia Tech, 2015-08-31)
John Milton has been frequently associated with rebellion, both by modern scholars and by his contemporaries. Objectively speaking, he may very well be a rebel; however, looking to his own works complicates the issue. In fact, Milton makes very clear in his writing, especially in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, that he abhors rebellion mainly because it is unlawful. Furthermore, he describes the uprising against King Charles I by disassociating it from any kind of rebellion, instead determining that the uprising was done lawfully. Milton writes about rebellion in the same way in many of his works leading up to and including Paradise Lost, where Satan resembles the rebel that Milton so vehemently despises. Given Milton's dislike of rebellion, his association of it with Satan complicates another commonplace scholarly argument; that Satan is sympathetic in Paradise Lost. This work will explicate Milton's definition of rebellion, especially through Tenure, and will then use that definition to demonstrate that Satan cannot be read as sympathetic.
John Tenniel and Technology: Anachronism and Social Meaning
Van Beuren, Grayson Carter Vignot (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-14)
Sir John Tenniel worked for the Victorian magazine Punch for over fifty years, from 1850 to 1901, and served as head cartoonist for the latter thirty-seven years of his tenure at the magazine. Tenniel's cartoons effectively became the heart of Punch's visual lineup, and the sentiments expressed by these cartoons both reflected and influenced the opinions of the magazine']s vast middle class readership. However, they did not generally reflect the opinions of the cartoonist himself: Tenniel had little to no say in decisions regarding the content or stance of his cartoons. The artist ostensibly had no problem with this arrangement, once telling a historian, "As for political opinions, I have none… [I] profess only those of my paper." This project argues that the artist did indeed inject a degree of personal opinion into his work, albeit in hidden and unconscious ways. Instead of using the medium of cartoons as an overt vehicle for his opinion, Tenniel's values and views come out in his use of iconography and his choice of models for his drawings. As a conservative Victorian man operating in the rapidly changing world of the latter nineteenth century, Tenniel used his drawings as a way to tap into the England of his youth and possibly reclaim the art world he originally studied to join as a young man. His iconography frequently looked back to medieval England, framing current events within these themes until the end of his career. Furthermore, Tenniel doggedly refused to update his mental drawing models for certain forms of technology, even when his depictions became obviously anachronistic. This thesis examines these tendencies through the threefold lenses of Material Culture Studies, Social Constructivism, and Nostalgia Studies in an attempt to link Tenniel's treatment of medieval iconography and depiction of modern technology with the nostalgic past.
Lord Byron's Scandals and Contemporary Cancel Culture
Jorge, Kathleen Anne (Virginia Tech, 2023-09-28)
The following is a case study in contemporary cancel culture through three cases of it in the nineteenth century. Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe serve as three prominent cases of cancel culture in their time period that are all closely linked to one another. Cancel culture changes the way that we study these figures and their writing in the modern day. This shows that although we believe that cancel culture is a new phenomenon with the rise of social media that is not the case. Cancel culture has been happening through time as a way for the public to enact social justice without getting the court involved. Cancel culture is a lesson in the public court of opinion.
Moral Panic and Political Rhetoric in the Early American Republic
Whitley, Daniel Edward (Virginia Tech, 2018-06-19)
This study analyzes the reporting and editorializing in several major American newspapers during the height of the Citizen Genêt Affair in July and August, 1793. A hybrid form of sociological moral panic theory, focused predominantly on the "iteration" of moral panics and the language used to communicate them, is used to understand the dynamics of the information landscape of 1793. Specific attention is paid to the effects of time and space, personal and political bias, and incendiary historical rhetoric on reporting of and reactions to Genêt's actions. In doing so, this study highlights possible flaws or blind spots in both moral panic theory and historiography, and brings new understanding to the media environment in which America's political traditions gestated. Brief connections are drawn between this historical information landscape and series of events and contemporary concerns with regards to social media and incendiary political rhetoric.
Open Access Dissemination Challenges: A Case Study
Radcliffe, David H.; Stovall, Connie; Young, Philip (Virginia Library Association, 2007-11-01)
Open Research/Open Data Forum: Transparency, Sharing, and Reproducibility in Scholarship
Potter, Peter J.; Chen, Daniel; DePauw, Karen P.; Morton, Sally C.; Petters, Jonathan L.; Radcliffe, David H.; Sands, Laura P. (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2017-04-10)
Join our panelists for a discussion on challenges and opportunities related to sharing and using open data in research, including meeting funder and journal guidelines: Daniel Chen (Ph.D. candidate in Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology) Karen DePauw (Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education) Sally Morton (Dean, College of Science) Jon Petters (Data Management Consultant, University Libraries) David Radcliffe (English) Laura Sands (Center for Gerontology)
Orderly Disorder: Rhetoric and Imitation in Spenser's Three Beast Poems from the Complaints Volume
Jones, Amanda Rogers (Virginia Tech, 2001-04-16)
Spenser's Complaints volume is a Menippean satire, a form characterized by mixture. Within this mixture of forms and voices, the three beast poems, Virgils Gnat, Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos are unified by shared traditions in Classical Aesopic beast fable and medieval beast poetry. Reading these three poems as a set reveals Spenser's interpretation of the literary history of beast poetry as one of several competing forms of order. The beast poems show ordering schemes of hierarchy, proportion, imitative practice, and dialectic, yet none of these is dominant. Thus, in the overall Menippean mixture that makes up the volume, the beast poems present an additional and less obvious mixture: the kinds of order available to a literary artist. Spenser's Complaints volume was the object of some censorship, and scholars still debate whether he or his printer, William Ponsonby, designed the book. The many kinds of organization demonstrated by the beast poems coalesce to form a theory of contestatory imitation in which the dominant order is disorder itself, represented by the ruin brought about by time's passage. Spenser appropriates both satiric and serious voices in the beast poems. He reflects on his political ambition to achieve the status of poet laureate in a noble, courtly manner, but he snarls like a fox, too, when he considers the ruin of his ambition.
“Paper Bullets of the Brain”: Satire, Dueling and the Rise of the Gentleman Author
Heath, Shannon Raelene (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-21)
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the duel of honor functioned as a formal recourse to attacks on a gentleman's reputation. Concurrently, many notable literary figures such as Samuel Johnson, William Gifford, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron were involved in literary disputes featuring duels or the threat of physical violence, a pattern indicating a connection between authorship and dueling. This study explicitly examines this connection, particularly as it relates to social acceptance, the gentrification of authorship, and the business of publishing. The act of publishing, putting one's work into the public sphere for consumption as well as critique, created an acute sensitivity to issues of honor because publishing automatically broadcast insults or accusations of dishonorable conduct to the reading public. This study requires a grounded discussion of complex, interconnected concepts, specifically: masculine identity, social hierarchy, and violence; satire; dueling; and authorship. Discussion moves from a foundational concern with violence and the assertion of social status, to the relationship between status and honor, to specific modes of defending honor, and finally to the attempt to establish authorship as an honorable profession. Although each of these quarrels exhibits physical violence or the threat of physical violence, these examples also exhibit verbal violence through satiric assaults or an exchange of verbal attacks and parries. As professional writers struggled to overcome the stereotype of the literary hack and gain social respectability, dueling, with either lead or paper bullets, became a way for authors to defend and maintain the fragile social status they had gained.
Poetry as a Source of Knowledge on Historic Dress in a Social, Political, and Economic Context: The Scottish Highlanders from 1603 through 1830 as an Example
Clevenger, Jennifer Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2004-09-10)
Dress is both an individual and a societal means of communication. Understanding the meaning of dress within a society, culture, and specific time period can aid researchers in understanding the social, political, and economic events and changes that take place in dress. The Scottish Highland dress differed in the 17th and early 18th centuries from that of the Scottish Lowlanders (i.e., people of Scotland below the Highlands) due to differences in culture and geography. Highland dress has been difficult to study because few extant garments exist before the 19th century and most of the records that exist deal with the upper class garments. The purpose of this research was to determine whether or not poetry (i.e., poems, ballads, and songs) could be used as a source of knowledge on historic dress in a social, political, or economic context, using the dress of Scottish Highlanders from 1603 through 1830 as an example, and to triangulate the findings with other sources that portray dress through the written word or visual image. This research cross-referenced the items of dress with social, political, and economic events that occurred in the lives of the Scottish and Highland people. The main source of documentation for this research was 3,501 Scottish poems written between 1603 and 1830 gathered from 18 anthologies and there were 394 poems with male dress references and 245 poems with female dress references, which was 18% of the poems. A large number (N=1531) of individual dress items were referenced within those poems. The poems were triangulated with 34 letters and 332 portraits from the same time period. The study of Highland dress in poetry expanded the knowledge base regarding specific items worn by males and females. The majority of the poems and dress references were found in the 18th century. The plaid and the kilt were the focus of poems related to war. The letters and portraits provided new information on dress, as well as providing support for the information gathered in the poems. Triangulation with the letters and portraits validated poetry as a source of Highland dress between 1603 and 1830.
Reason, Imagination, and Universalism in C. S. Lewis
McClinch, Christopher C. (Virginia Tech, 2004-07-19)
Though he is generally known as one of the key voices in conservative Christianity, this thesis demonstrates that C. S. Lewis was in fact far more liberal in his view of salvation than many would expect. Lewis argued for a universalist interpretation of salvation, in which the death of Christ opened up the possibility of salvation for all of humanity, not merely those people who could be identified as Christians. Lewis did believe that people could and did choose Hell over Heaven, however, and still saw evangelism as the duty of every Christian. All of Lewis's writings are in a sense evangelistic, and all attempt to effect the conversion of the reader in the same manner in which Lewis himself was first drawn to Christianity: by baptizing the imagination in the hope that the reason will follow.
The Role of Richard Savage in Composing Pope's Dunciad
Wilmoth, Traci Carol (Virginia Tech, 2007-04-13)
Murderer, bastard, spy: Richard Savage was no stranger to scandal and controversy. And yet, for a man who lived such a varied life, little is known for certain about him. There are rumors, suggestions, and accusations, but little that can be said without debates and arguments. It certainly does not help that Savage is often marginalized in eighteenth-century scholarship as scholars seek to discover and analyze all they can about his more famous, and more upstanding, contemporaries. While Savage's relationship with Johnson is well known and discussed frequently, all that is known of his relationship with Pope is that he contributed information to Pope's Dunciad Variorum (1729) and that Pope later contributed large sums to Savage's support. Pope was the driving force behind Savage's retirement to Wales, possibly alluded to in Johnson's London (1738), as well as the chief financial contributor to this retirement plan. No serious effort has been made to connect these two important episodes in Savage's life, perhaps because no serious effort has been made to establish the extent of his involvement with the Dunciad. It may have been this connection with Pope that drew Johnson to Savage in the first place. The intent of this thesis is to clarify the nature of Savage's collaborations with Pope and the extent of his contributions to the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. The Dunciad seeks to make fun not only of Pope's critics, but of writers who write for bread, the "hack writers" of Grub Street. It was here that Pope would most likely turn to Savage for information; Savage was much better acquainted with those writers than was Pope. But Savage may have done more than simply supply Pope with gossip, and I will consider the possibility that he had a more active role in the publication of the Dunciad Variorum.

Browsing by Author "Radcliffe, David H."

Results Per Page

Sort Options