The Common Room

Online Journal of Literary Criticism

Founded in 1997, The Common Room is a bi-annual electronic journal sponsored by the Department of English and devoted to publishing critical essays on literature from any disciplinary area.

Any Knox College student can submit work to the journal for publication consideration. There are two formal calls for essay submissions during the academic year. Students are encouraged to make submissions and contribute to yet another aspect of the literary community on campus.

Past essays

• "If the reader be inclined to judge for himself": Narrative Shifts and the Allegory of Art in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"
• Transformative Qualities of "the Wilderness" and the Role of "Non-Property" in Valerie Martin's Property
• Pity, Division, and the Creation of the Female in The First Book of Urizen
• "Belly-empty, hollow-hungry": Hemingway's Hunger and the Human Condition
• The Problem of the Poet-Philosopher: Limitations of the Imagination in Coleridge's This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
• From the Cradle to Depraved: The Structures of Containment and the Inevitability of Prostitution in 18th Century Literature
• Montana Standish, Paradox as Meaning in The Book of Urizen