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Theses/Dissertations

Gender

English Language and Literature

University of Kentucky

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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 …


Values In The Air: Community And Capital Conversion In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Deirdre Mikolajcik Jan 2019

Values In The Air: Community And Capital Conversion In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Deirdre Mikolajcik

Theses and Dissertations--English

Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility …


New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman Jan 2017

New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection aims through the use of folktale and familial history to investigate the bounds of gender and memory against a rural Appalachian landscape. The work utilizes superstition, myth, and the commonplace to search the shadows for the forbidden and unspoken, in an attempt to redefine and reconcile personal dissonance through an observational and at times, voyeuristic lens.


The (Un)Seen, Bernard Clay Jan 2017

The (Un)Seen, Bernard Clay

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection of original poems features work created and edited over two years in the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. The poems collected for this thesis represent a Bildungsroman, a coming of age narrative, that details the psychological growth and education of a narrator who feels excluded or invisible as he grows up in America during the late eighties and early nineties. Progressing poem by poem, a myriad of subjects are explored including race, gender, religion, economics, the environment, politics, and even Muhammad Ali.


Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus Jan 2016

Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus

Theses and Dissertations--English

Patriarchal Trauma in Appalachian Literature examines the effects of subjugation on women as it is represented in three novels set in Appalachia. I define patriarchal trauma as an act causing mental anguish to a woman and perpetrated against her because she is a woman. I use the term to encompass violent, catastrophic harms but more particularly to pinpoint the traumatic effects of the quotidian, systemic deprivation of women’s autonomy. Reconsidering classic texts such as James Still’s River of Earth and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage as narratives of women’s trauma establishes a lineage on the subject, …


Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rebecca Beach Jan 2015

Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rebecca Beach

Theses and Dissertations--English

Turning Their Talk investigates the pressures placed upon female characters’ communication styles as they enter the heterosexual market in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The title of this dissertation derives from a phrase found in each the six novels I examine--“she turned the conversation”—to suggest the subtle control female characters exercise through speech that allows them to achieve tangible forms of social agency. My dissertation argues that novelistic representations of speech mirror the paradoxical roles women historically faced as they balanced societal …


Creating Domestic Dependents: Indian Removal, Cherokee Sovereignty And Women’S Rights, Jesslyn R. Collins-Frohlich Jan 2014

Creating Domestic Dependents: Indian Removal, Cherokee Sovereignty And Women’S Rights, Jesslyn R. Collins-Frohlich

Theses and Dissertations--English

What, this project asks, are the impacts of the alliance between women and Native Americans in the nineteenth century debate over Indian Removal? How might groups similarly excluded from patriarchal systems of government by race and gender turn exclusion into arguments for inclusion? In what ways might this alliance change interpretations of the women’s right and Native American rights movements? While arguments made by women and Native Americans during Indian Removal receive considerable scholarly attention, most studies-especially those concerned with women’s involvement- subordinate Indian Removal to abolition or create significant omissions in the narratives of both movements by adopting a …