Academic Papers

Donne and married love: Pregnancy and Conception in “Air and Angels” and the “Nocturnal”

The pervasive assumption that John Donne (1572-1631), the finest representative of the English metaphysical poets, does not write about traditional marital love permeates Donne scholarship and tends to color readers’ interpretations of his poetry and perceptions of his personal life. The assumption is not completely unfounded… 

The Myth of Scott-land: Romance as National Identity in The Lady of the Lake

Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, a narrative poem set in the Trossachs region during the reign of King James V of Scotland (r. 1513-1542), was first published in 1810 and immediately struck a vein in Scotland and Europe at a time of great political change. The poem was something completely new, and yet squarely within the great tradition of romance with all the conventional hallmarks of the form…

JESUS, Water Imagery, and Moses: Literary parallels in the Gospel of John

The Gospel of John’s narrative opens with a clever allusion to Genesis 1:1, appropriately beginning the story where we, perhaps, least expect it to – “in the beginning” (Jn. 1:1). While the Synoptic presentations launch their narratives from the birth, or baptism as is the case in Mark, and depict Jesus as the Son of God only from those events forward, the author of John instead chooses to begin with a cosmology and pulls the audience back much further – to the time of creation…