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How Early Modern English Pedagogy Shaped The Gendered And Racialized Use Of Magic In William Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Erin Lindsay Faya Dec 2023

How Early Modern English Pedagogy Shaped The Gendered And Racialized Use Of Magic In William Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Erin Lindsay Faya

Graduate Thesis Collection

Magical usage plays a significant role in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. However, who gets to use magic and in what ways? Why is Prospero painted the protagonist while Sycorax gets labeled a witch though both use magic? This thesis looks at how early modern English pedagogy shapes the use of magic in The Tempest. When magic is read as knowledge, then the pedagogy influencing early modern education dictates whose knowledge counts and is seen as correct and whose is erased and vilified. The epistemological formation happening in early modern England is apparent in The Tempest as Prospero uses magic …


The Framing Of The Shrew: Induction, Gender, And Agency In William Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Samantha Stringham May 2023

The Framing Of The Shrew: Induction, Gender, And Agency In William Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Samantha Stringham

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Shrews abound, not only in Shakespeare’s works but in our modern world. Katherine, Shakespeare’s titular shrew, is in the good company of Beatrice, Adriana, and even, some argue, her seemingly virtuous sister Bianca. These women, all of whom push against the confines posed by the social conventions of Renaissance womanhood, have become increasingly relevant as women, now more than ever, demand that their voices be heard and continue to rally against the assertion that railing, scolding, turbulent behavior makes one a shrew (or perhaps, that being a shrew is an inherently bad thing). The increasingly feminist leanings of modern audiences …


Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes May 2023

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …


Gothic Transformations And Remediations In Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Wendy Fall Apr 2023

Gothic Transformations And Remediations In Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Wendy Fall

Dissertations (1934 -)

My project considers the transformation of gothic characters as they move among different types of publications in the nineteenth century. As they meander from triple-decker novels to chapbooks, to theatrical scripts, to periodicals, and to penny serials, gothic stories and portrayals of people in them are altered by the length and technological capability of each form. They also mutate to reflect the tastes and ideologies of their changing audiences, and to hybridize genres under the popular influence of realism toward the mid-century. The mainstays of the gothic mode remain stable; these publications adhere to ambiguous or pluralistic ideologies, are obsessed …


Masculine Desire And Feminine Imitation: Contextualizing Heterosexual Relationships In Sister Carrie, Jennifer L. White Mar 2023

Masculine Desire And Feminine Imitation: Contextualizing Heterosexual Relationships In Sister Carrie, Jennifer L. White

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

Theodore Dreiser is generally considered one of the greatest American naturalist authors across the genre. His depiction of life is gritty and harsh, his characters at the mercy of their natural impulses and their unforgiving environment. However, there is also a sentimental element to Dreiser’s work, especially in his portrayal of romantic relationships. In the face of unrelenting adversity, there is a glimmer of possibility in the longing for meaningful human connection, if only under different circumstances. While Dreiser’s naturalistic approach suggests that such relationships can never be truly fulfilling due to either the innate frailty of the participants or …


"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori Jan 2023

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …


Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen Jan 2023

Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen

MSU Graduate Theses

By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …


Representations Of Military Women In Contemporary War Stories, Deborah Daley Jan 2023

Representations Of Military Women In Contemporary War Stories, Deborah Daley

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of Military Women in Contemporary War Stories seeks to understand how war stories influence our perception of who belongs in military service. With the canon of western war writing dominated by the memoirs and stories of white men, what happens when service women enter into and author war stories, and how does their appearance destabilize questions of who is fit for military service? War literature provides an important lens through which to observe how military service is scripted by culturally and socially constructed expectations of one’s gender, race, and occupation. In male-dominated workplaces, women must not only perform in …


"Why Do You Keep Alone?:" Isolated Women In The Plays Of Shakespeare, Alexus Litchfield Jan 2023

"Why Do You Keep Alone?:" Isolated Women In The Plays Of Shakespeare, Alexus Litchfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The works of William Shakespeare have been well explored, but there is a lack of criticism that examines how the depiction of women is shaped by the genre of the play. Linda Bamber is one of the few critics who have explored this connection between gender and genre. However, while she focuses on the plays’ psychological dynamics, I examine the social dynamics between characters in my study of gender and genre. I suggest that, in both tragedy and comedy, isolation is a strong marker of unhappiness for Shakespeare’s female characters. Examining three tragedies, I find that Lady Macbeth, Goneril, Regan, …