MLA Vides 2020

Welcome to the eighth edition of VIDES, the online journal produced by the students of the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, as part of their Master’s degree in Literature and Arts. As the name of the degree suggests, the course covers many different academic fields alongside literature: history, material culture, history of art, philosophy and architecture. The journal features essays that combine these disciplines, enlightening understanding in one field through study of another.
Date created:
Resources for this course
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In Memory of Cathy Oakes |
In memory of Dr Cathy Oakes |
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Introduction |
Introduction |
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Symbols of transcendence: how religious and fantastic symbols approach the ineffability of God by Joelle David |
The transcendence of a God who exceeds human mediums of representation cannot be documented by the propositional statements of... |
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Is Tudor ideology reinforced or undermined by its representation in the artefacts of the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin in Fawsley, Northamptonshire? by Pen Keyte |
The problem which this article seeks to address is the contrasting way in which the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin in Fawsley... |
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'No one can serve two masters’:1 Female recusancy and rebellion during the Elizabethan period by Maria Neary |
In its literal sense ‘recusant’ means a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation. In its... |
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Early modern women’s letter writing viewed through the lenses of portraiture and dramatic text by Deborah Richards |
This essay will explore the epistolary activity of early modern women through the media of portraiture and dramatic text. It will... |
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The mission of departure: overcoming silence, and the legacy of posthumous image. John Donne’s marble effigy and his final sermon, Deaths Duell (1631) by Kate Vervain |
John Donne (1572-1631) – poet, preacher, and many things in between, spoke in his final sermon: ‘we come into a world that lasts many... |
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The English perception of chocolate: from invigorating remedy to exotic indulgence, c. 1660 – 1760 by Emma Vickers |
Chocolate arrived in England for the first time in the middle of the seventeenth century. Though marketed initially as a medical... |
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‘Bad taste of the town’: Hogarth satirised eighteenth-century theatre, but the public wanted spectacle by Simon Lamoon |
William Hogarth, Alexander Pope and other social commentators of their age believed there was an intellectual decline in the... |
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Luxury and licentiousness: funding the Foundling Hospital, London, 1739 – 1760 by Alison Hegarty |
A concert ticket from 1750 for a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Foundling Hospital represents the appeal to private sponsors... |
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‘The whole world in miniature’, or ‘a bad return’? by Louise A. Lamb |
By the mid-1700s, the public masquerade ball had achieved extraordinary popularity and notoriety across London, drawing thousands to... |
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Truths universally acknowledged: satire in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and James Gillray’s Harmony before Matrimony by Cecily Jenkinson |
This article investigates Jane Austen’s status as a satirist by comparing and contrasting her best-known novel with a caricature... |
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‘A vision of the “Arabian Nights” character’: Two sightings of John Frederick Lewis in Cairo by Guy Philipps |
This article considers two representations of the painter John Frederick Lewis in Cairo in the 1840s, one by W. M. Thackeray and one... |
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See no evil: Representations of suffering during the Great Irish Famine by Eibhlin Inglesby |
This article will compare two artefacts that portray the events of An Gorta Mór (The Great Irish Famine) of 1845-1852.1 These... |
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Millais, Dickens and the ‘idea’ of a picture by Paul Shaw |
One of the earliest works Millais painted under the new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood banner was later known as Christ in the House of... |
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Fragile Masculinity: an exploration into the construction of bourgeois male identity in 1850s London by Jessica Greaves |
This article considers the first scene of the painting Past and Present (Augustus Egg, 1858) alongside a contemporary advertisement for Walter... |
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‘I alone am hung in chains’: Isambard Kingdom Brunel examined through a photograph and the ugly beauty of his industrial world by Sian James |
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was both man and myth. He left a physical imprint on the nation through his bridges, railways, tunnels and... |
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‘COTTON IS KING!’ Sarah Parker Remond, Manchester and the abolitionist movement in Britain and America, 1859-1861 by Hannah Ruddle |
In 1859, abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond arrived in Liverpool to commence a series of lectures throughout Britain and Ireland, the... |
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Social engineering: an exploration of how a bandstand and a street drinking fountain exemplify the intersection of ornate design and social reform in nineteenth-century London by Jocelyn Donachie |
This article focuses on two seemingly disparate artefacts: a picture postcard sent in 1906 and a drinking fountain erected with much... |
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Victorian punitive expeditions: Orientalist rationalisations behind the looting of colonial artefacts by Mona Zutshi Opubor |
In the Victorian era, notions of civilisation, cultural superiority, and the beneficence of the British in India and Africa came into... |
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Francis Galton’s dog whistle and his albino puppy Wee Ling by Rosalind Janssen |
Housed in the Galton Collection at UCL are eight curious whistle components, in an original cardboard box, and two framed photographs... |
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A chivalric knight and deep sea dredging; or, ‘the everlasting thunder of the deep’ by Nicholas Pritchard |
For Britons in the mid- to late nineteenth century the deep sea was starting to take a hold on the imagination. The successful... |
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The role of female vampires in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Vampire by Sir Philip Burne-Jones by Gavin Fiddler |
This article is an examination of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, Dracula, and Sir Philip Burne-Jones’s controversial work, The Vampire... |
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‘A Memory and a Prophecy’: Images of W. B. Yeats’s At The Hawk’s Well by Gerard Krasnopolski |
This article examines W.B. Yeats’s ban on press photography during the first performance of At The Hawk’s Well in Lady Cunard’s... |
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