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Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari Aug 2018

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.


Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti Aug 2018

Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes adaptation in the Hindi film industry and how the concepts of gender and identity have changed from the original text to the contemporary adaptation. The original texts include religious epics, Shakespeare’s plays, Bengali novels which were written pre-independence, and Hollywood films. This venture uses adaptation theory as well as postmodernist and postcolonial theories to examine how women and men are represented in the adaptations as well as how contemporary audience expectations help to create the identity of the characters in the films. Ultimately, this project hopes to fulfil the gap in scholarship on adaptations in Bollywood.


The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity And Anglophone Women War Writers Of The Great War, Sareene Proodian Jul 2018

The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity And Anglophone Women War Writers Of The Great War, Sareene Proodian

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines the texts of Anglophone women writers from the First World War. Women’s roles in the war—volunteer nurses, ambulance driver, munitions workers, and land girls—gave them the opportunity to leave the protection of their homes and enter the masculine dominated public sphere. In this dissertation, I examine different genres of women’s writing from the war and trace three aspects of simultaneity as these writings explore the new freedoms, and new and old constraints, that the war brought to women. The three principles of simultaneity explain the conflicting emotions women feel over what the war means for them in …


American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish May 2018

American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines three autobiographical texts written in post-World War II America (1959-1973) that take as their subject a straight white man’s reflection on and engagement with the exercise of male power and the forces, both internal and external, that shape the degree to which he is “self-made,” i.e., an autonomous agent able to exert his will within a life domain (domestic, public, and war). Each of these writers engages in surveillance not solely of their own power, but also of the men who influence their experience, using their observations to critique, assert, and question the gendered realities and expectations …


Leaving Neverland For Narnia: Childhood And Gender In Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, And The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Calabria Turner May 2018

Leaving Neverland For Narnia: Childhood And Gender In Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, And The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Calabria Turner

English MA Theses

British gender expectations are often epitomized in mature adults, either in society or within novels, but in Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe gender roles are interpreted by the child protagonists. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan inhabits the world of the Neverland, but the gender roles of Victorian England follow them from London to the home below the tree where Peter, Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys reside in a pseudo-domestic sphere. Peter often engages in literal discussion of what it means to become an English man, while Wendy lives …


"Deceptive Intimacy": Narration And Machismo In The Works Of Junot Díaz, Ellen Elizabeth Hill May 2018

"Deceptive Intimacy": Narration And Machismo In The Works Of Junot Díaz, Ellen Elizabeth Hill

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.


Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno May 2018

Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno

Honors Theses

Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …


Hollywood Dreams: Postcolonial Nationalism And Gender Oppression In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeatersp, Andrei Wayne Kyrk Defino Apr 2018

Hollywood Dreams: Postcolonial Nationalism And Gender Oppression In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeatersp, Andrei Wayne Kyrk Defino

Honors Theses

This paper addresses how gender, sexuality, and resistance affect personal and national identity construction in Dogeaters. This 1990 novel traces the lives of Filipino characters during President Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorial regime--a period that reshaped the Philippines' national identity. Using gender theory and nationhood studies, I highlight how women and queer individuals who challenge masculine norms attempt subversion by creating communities outside of patriarchal constructs but ultimately fail. Specifically, I read Joey Sands's and Daisy Avila's marginality and failure to comply with societal expectations as futile pushbacks against the larger system. Furthermore, their embrace and use of violence as a means …


Post Title Ix Representations Of Professional Female Athletes, Emily Shaw Jan 2018

Post Title Ix Representations Of Professional Female Athletes, Emily Shaw

MA in English Theses

Since the enactment of Title IX in 1972, female participation in athletics grows every year. Interestingly, media representations of professional female athletes have not always been indicative of this exciting and growing participation. This study explores the representations of professional female athletes and discusses implications and affordances of magazine and social media. In particular, the research analyzes five Sports Illustrated magazine covers and thirty Instagram posts to explore how female athletes have been presented on magazine covers and how they are representing themselves on social media. Using theories of gender, media, self-presentation, and visual rhetoric, this thesis analyzes how Sports …


The Storytellers’ Trauma: A Place To Call Home In Caribbean Literature, Ilari Pass Jan 2018

The Storytellers’ Trauma: A Place To Call Home In Caribbean Literature, Ilari Pass

MA in English Theses

This thesis is an examination gathering of trauma, unhomeliness, and the use of non-traditional narrative structure in Caribbean literature. While literature helps the reader travel inside the skin of the character, the mystery of another human being, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, also help readers to explore the complicated process of identity formation in each work through the lenses of the imperialism, colonialism, racism and sexism that the protagonists experience. A non-traditional narrative structure enables this process of healing from trauma and allows for a new …


Tracking The Evolution Of The Companionate Marriage Ideal In Early Modern Comedies, Madison L. Pierce Jan 2018

Tracking The Evolution Of The Companionate Marriage Ideal In Early Modern Comedies, Madison L. Pierce

Honors Theses and Capstones

This thesis examines the socially constructed ideal of companionate marriage in Elizabethan and Jacobean England through four dramas by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. It probes the question of how these theatrical productions of early modern England fit within or defy the emerging social trends regarding companionate marriage. It uses socioeconomic statuses, religious affiliations, and emerging notions of race as lenses through which to analyze the romantic couples depicted in these plays. The results of this study indicate that, while exact authorial intentions remain unknown, these plays served as proponents of the companionate marriage …