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Gender Benders: Shakespeare's Rosalind And Woolf's Orlando, Katrina Armenteros

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

English Renaissance playwright, William Shakespeare and twentieth century modernist author, Virginia Woolf’s works, “As You Like It” (1599) and “Orlando” (1928), respectively posit a vision of gender that transcends the physical sex of the body. The play’s heroine, Rosalind, and the novel’s protagonist, Orlando, each challenge the stability of the binary categories of male and female, demonstrating how gender is not absolute but rather a constantly adapting and evolving construct. This thesis traces the development of Rosalind and Orlando by analyzing and comparing both protagonists’ journeys towards concordia discors, considering how gender transformation plays a pivotal role in helping …

Simply Genre Films: Extracting “King Lear” From “House Of Strangers” And “Broken Lance", Sophia G. I. Funk

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and refute Yvonne Griggs’ claims that the films “House of Strangers” (1949) and “Broken Lance” (1954) are as Griggs deems “genre-based adaptations” of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” I argue that the films, although they have some essential elements of “King Lear,” lack intentionality and reception, pivotal components in determining viability as a Shakespearean film adaptation. Using Griggs’ book as my critical background, I will show that these films are better classified under their respective genre categories, Western and film noir, not as “King Lear” genre adaptations. I will …

Anti-Romance: How William Shakespeare’S “King Lear” Informed John Keats’S “Lamia”, Shelly S. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze John Keats’s “Lamia” and his style of Anti-Romance as informed by William Shakespeare’s own experimentation with Romance and Anti-Romance in “King Lear.”

In order to fulfill the purpose of my thesis, I explore both the Romance and the Anti-Romance genres and develop a definition of the latter that is more particular to “King Lear” and “Lamia.” I also look at the source material for both “King Lear” and “Lamia” to see how Shakespeare and Keats were handling the originally Romantic material. Both Shakespeare and Keats altered the original material by subverting the …

Bleaching To Reach: Skin Bleaching As A Performance Of Embodied Resistance In Jamaican Dancehall Culture, Treviene A. Harris

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how skin bleaching can be understood within the cultural context of Jamaican dancehall. I argue that as a cultural practice, skin bleaching can be viewed as a critique of the concomitant structural inequalities precipitated by colorism, which is a by-product of racism. In proposing skin bleaching as a queer performance of color, I attempt to illustrate the manner in which the lightening of the skin exposes the instability of racism and colorism as socially constructed, discursive regimes. If race and skin color are biological and embodied facts dictated by social reality, then bodies, which are racially marked …