List of scholarly journals
1. Early American Literature (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eal/)
This journal offers downloadable article abstracts as well as a limited number of
full articles and reviews from 2000-2007 (Volumes 35-43) in html and PDF
format. If you want to download full articles you must subscribe after an
optional 45-day trial period.
Abstract taken from Volume 42, Number 3, 2007, pp. 495-527
In a recent article, Stephen Carl Arch has challenged the continuing critical and pedagogical
limitations on what constitutes the American novel, despite the attention given to transatlantic
concerns within the discipline of early American studies. Classes on the novel, he claims,
cling tightly to “the old critical chestnut” that the first American novel is William Hill
Brown’s 1789 Power of Sympathy, while they ignore the work Arch holds up to our attention,
Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769), a novel that includes significant
scenes set in North America. In Arch’s understanding, that text accentuates the trope of the
interregnum, a situating between various states and lands, and is a particularly trenchant
figure for a work that imagines both sides of the Atlantic. Even if, in the end, the main male
character, Col. Ed Rivers, “brings into existence a fantasy of domestic, sensible resemblance
in the English countryside,” the critic argues that Emily Montague “deserves to be part of a
restored, transatlantic tradition of the novel” (Arch 465, 478, 481).1 Although since Arch’s
article appeared there has been increased critical interest in transatlanticism, what follows
takes its cue from Arch’s important act of restoration by asking questions about classification
through consideration of another, contemporary... (see abstract)
2. The Review of English Studies (http://res.oxfordjournals.org/)
This journal offers free abstracts from its issue 1925-2008 in html format. Full
articles can be downloaded after subscription.
Abstract from Volume 56, Number 223, 2005, pp. 119-134;
Suffrage and Virginia Woolf: ‘The Mass Behind the Single
Voice’
Sowon S. Park
Corpus Christi College Oxford
Virginia Woolf is now widely accepted as a ‘mother’ through whom twenty-first-century
feminists think back, but she was ambivalent towards the suffragette movement. Feminist
readings of the uneasy relation between Woolf and the women's movement have focused on
her practical involvement as a short-lived suffrage campaigner or as a feminist publisher, and
have tended to interpret her disapproving references to contemporary feminists as redemptive
self-critique. Nevertheless the apparent contradictions remain largely unresolved. By moving
away from Woolf in suffrage to suffrage in Woolf, this article argues that her work was in fact
deeply rooted at the intellectual centre of the suffrage movement. Through an examination of
the ideas expressed in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas and of two suffrage
characters, Mary Datchet in Night and Day and Rose Pargiter in The Years, it establishes how
Woolf's feminist ideas were informed by suffrage politics, and illuminates connections and
allegiances as well as highlighting her passionate resistance to a certain kind of feminism. (see
abstract)
3. Applied Semiotics (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/)
The journal offers free full articles (from 20 issues; 1996-2008) in html and/or
PDF format.
Excerpt from issue 15; 2005 (click here to read full article):
Fictitious Discourse in Language Teaching
Dimitrios Thanasoulas
Introduction
A cursory glance over old and newly produced EFL coursebooks
attests to the assertion that too much reliance has been placed on
the traditional "text" format as the primary source of information
about how language is used and functions. Here, it will be argued
that English language teaching is deprived of discourse as "live
language" and "grammar above the sentence," being characterised
instead by a slavish adherence to "form," which leads to stilted
language and other features that are not typical of natural language
use. Much of the discussion that ensues is based on Millrood's
article, "Discourse for Teaching Purposes" (2002), which appeared
in Research Methodology: Discourse in Teaching A Foreign
Language (Tambov State University).
4. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
A very interesting biannual online journal which offers full articles for free (no
subscription or payment necessary). It contains book, TV and film reviews as
well. The journal collects submissions for their next issues.
Excerpt from article; Issue 4 (June 2008). Full article can be viewed here.
‘The Great Disillusionment’: H.G. Wells, Mankind, and Aliens
in American Invasion Horror Films of the 1950s
Leslie Sheldon
H.G. Well’s 1898 novel The War of The Worlds (published initially in 1897 as a series
of installments in Pearson’s Magazine) establishes many of the key thematic
conventions and entertaining plot details evinced in ‘alien invasion horror’ cinema of
the two subsequent centuries, most especially in American science fiction films of the
1950s. Aliens as vampires from a dying planet, as violent parasites, as rampaging
machines, as brains-without-hearts using high-tech heat rays on their human victims
originated in Wells’ seminal work; the deeper levels of social criticism found in the
novel also making their way into such films. Though it is doubtless true that midcentury Hollywood alien invasion films frequently reflected Cold War paranoia
towards either ‘Red Scare’ fears of Soviet invasion on the one hand, or of McCarthyera “creeping conformity” (1) on the other, these films (and even some of those of
today) are also culturally centered within the original literary mythopoeia of Wells’
milestone science fiction ‘blueprint’. As the Hollywood producer George Pal noted of
the 50s, “War of the Worlds had become especially timely”. (2)
For the purposes of this discussion, it is accepted that films such as The Thing from
Another World (Dir: Christian Nyby, 1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dir: Robert
Wise, 1951), This Island Earth (Dir: Joseph M. Newman, 1955), Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (Dir: Don Siegel, 1956), The Monolith Monsters (Dir: John Sherwood,
1957), to cite some of the examples considered, are not auteurist artifacts. As Robert
Stam observes:
5. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian
Literature (http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/index)
As it was the case in previous journals, this one also offers free articles (PDF)
and abstracts (html) from 8 volumes (1997-2008).
Power, Vanishing Acts and Silent Watchers in Janette Turner Hospital's
The Last Magician (Volume 8, 2008)
Maureen Clark
Abstract
In Janette Turner Hospital’s fifth novel The Last Magician this world-wandering daughter of
Australian literature returns to the place she still calls “home”. The novel is set mainly in
central Sydney, however, the narrative could well take place in any city of the developed new
world, whether real or illusionary, and still anxious for self-definition. The narrative is
grounded in the notion that a sense of the surreal will always remain in the mental landscape
of any social and geographical space that refuses to admit the interaction of the marginalised,
or alienates and denies the value of difference.
Among other things, this paper argues that the novel declares an unwillingness to accept
woman’s value as determined and measured by the already spoken rules and expectations of
patriarchal discourse. Woman’s silence is wielded here as a weapon of resistance--an
unconventional, anti-establishment form of power that recognises how language deceives and
wishes to give the silences their say (120).
Full Text: PDF