http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/authors/2049/vanessa-m-braganza Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Sun, 24 May 2026 16:26:50 -0400 Sun, 24 May 2026 16:26:50 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/926/the-search-for-utopia-charles-dickens-hard-times-and-alfred-tennysons-mariana By Vanessa M. Braganza - Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and Alfred Tennyson’s poem Mariana both invite readers to explore notions of utopia and the ideal setting for human beings. In a remarkably similar rhetorical process, both works present readers with a pair of antithetical settings alongside tragic and comic elements that highlight them as non-ideal. Both writers employ Hazlitt’s principle that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be” (269). By inflecting these settings... Mon, 20 Oct 2014 10:30 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/926/the-search-for-utopia-charles-dickens-hard-times-and-alfred-tennysons-mariana http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/887/exploring-virgilian-structures-in-book-iii-of-spensers-faerie-queene By Vanessa M. Braganza - Contrary to the scintillating promise of its title, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is a far cry from the insubstantial delights of light fantasy fiction. A narrative poem in six books, this hefty labyrinthine work chronicles the quests of the patron knights of six virtues through their perpetual stumblings and successes. Initially upon beholding its very physical bulk as it lies ponderously on the table, one might be excused for believing that there cannot possibly exist syntactic parallels with other works within individual lines of this work. The discovery that Spenser indeed seems to have woven... Sun, 13 Apr 2014 03:37 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/887/exploring-virgilian-structures-in-book-iii-of-spensers-faerie-queene