MEJ Editor 2026, Arley-Beth Cravey, Kay J. Walter, Literary Analysis, Peer Reviewed

Cover Me Up: Quilts and their Substitutes in Southern Fiction by Kay Walter and Arley-Beth Cravey

The tradition of American Patchwork Quilting is nowhere more vital than in the Mississippi Delta. The Gee’s Bend quilters, a group of rural Alabama African American women descended from enslaved people who create abstract quilts using improvisational designs, made their Delta quilting world-famous. A quilt can be many things, but at base it is a … Continue reading Cover Me Up: Quilts and their Substitutes in Southern Fiction by Kay Walter and Arley-Beth Cravey

MEJ Editor 2024, John Leppik, Kathryn Van Wert, Literary Analysis, Post-Secondary, Secondary, Writing

NW Elysium by John Leppik (Introduced by Kathryn Van Wert)

The final assignment for my upper-division modern British literature course (taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth in Fall 2023) was to ask a question about a text from our syllabus and answer it in a format and medium of the student’s choosing. Beginning with Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW, John Leppik asked the question: … Continue reading NW Elysium by John Leppik (Introduced by Kathryn Van Wert)

MEJ Editor 2020, British Literature, Literary Analysis, Peer Reviewed, Post-Secondary, Secondary, Shahin Hossain

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Cautionary Tale of Totalitarian Ideology by Shahin Hossain

In Texts and Pretexts, first published in 1932, while discussing his concern regarding the present and future, Aldous Huxley asserted, “Personally, I must confess, I am more interested in what the world is now than in what it will be, or what it might be if improbable conditions were fulfilled” (6). In the same year, … Continue reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Cautionary Tale of Totalitarian Ideology by Shahin Hossain

MEJ Editor 2020, Literary Analysis, Tanya J. Stafsholt Miller, World Literature

Shoes, Rap Music, and Guns: Transitional Objects as Objective Correlatives in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone by Tanya Stafsholt Miller

When a person has gone through extreme trauma, writing about it can have a healing effect. The act of shaping the words on a page puts the trauma outside the self and becomes an entity of its own that can be shaped and molded. Some trauma victims use writing to expunge emotional baggage—writing it down … Continue reading Shoes, Rap Music, and Guns: Transitional Objects as Objective Correlatives in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone by Tanya Stafsholt Miller