Digital Commons Network^™

A Queen’S Reputation: A Feminist Analysis Of The Cultural Appropriations Of Cleopatra, Chamara Moore

Honors Theses

While there is no doubt that Cleopatra is considered a notable historical figure and popularly regarded character throughout modern media, there is a distinct pattern in her portrayal throughout time as a woman whose power is defined by her sexual promiscuity. Even throughout periods of powerful female monarchs, political change, and social progress her prowess as a leader has been assumingly attributed to her affairs with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. The purpose of this study is to examine how literature and media has contributed to this sexualized reputation of a queen who yielded authority over such a prosperous nation. …

Creolization Of Identity In Caribbean Texts: Towards The Healing Of The Creole, Victoria A. Marin

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Creolization became an important element to creole identity by explaining the development of cultural mixing in the Caribbean. While many scholars have focused on the marginalization of creole identity at the hands of the colonizer, this paper addresses the way creole subjects use creolization as a form of agency. Two specific post-colonial texts will be explored in the order of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven. The essay begins with Wide Sargasso Sea to gain an early historical context of the treatment of creole women, and to establish the need of developing a voice …

Shakespeare And Boyhood: Early Modern Representations And Contemporary Appropriations, Marvin Tyler Sasser

Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates that Shakespearean boyhood, both in early modern plays and contemporary reimaginings for young readers, critiques patriarchal and hegemonic ideals through the rhetoric and behavior of boy characters. Although critics have called Shakespeare’s boy characters indistinguishable, I find that they provide Shakespeare a unique resource to offer persuasive skepticism about heroic conventions, education, and political instability. This project begins by examining the lexical network of boy in order to chart its uses in early modern England. The subsequent three chapters establish how Shakespeare uses boys to comment on a range of ideal manhoods, such as the chivalrous …

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

Women's Speech As Reflected In The Television Series, Friends, Gema Del Moral

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This research focuses on analyzing how contemporary women’s speech is reflected in the popular television show Friends through the characters’ differences in gender and their variances in language forms. The aim of this thesis is to find out if there are certain lexical and syntactical characteristics that distinguish women’s language from men’s language. In this study, a corpus linguistic approach is used to collect the data and make a quantitative analysis based on the verbal communication of the characters involved in Season 4 of Friends. The analysis of the linguistic features of verbal communication of all the characters in Season …

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …

The Ties That Bind: Gender, Race, And Empire In Caribbean Indenture Narratives, Alison Joan Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the ways that oppressive gender roles and racial tensions in the Caribbean today developed out of the British imperial system of indentured labor. Between 1837 and 1920, after slavery was abolished in the British colonies and before most colonies achieved independence, approximately 750,000 laborers, primarily from India and China, traveled to the Caribbean under indenture. This is a critical but under-explored aspect of colonial history, as this immigration dramatically altered the ethnic make up of the Caribbean, the cultural norms and traditions of those who migrated, and the structure of British imperialism. I focus on depictions of …

The Impact Of Colonialism In Moll Flanders And The Belle’S Stratagem, Tamara Kathwari

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

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 …

"A Great Man's Madness": An Inquiry Into Sanity And Gender In Jacobean Tragedy, Vittoria Mollo

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis delves deep into an analysis of madness in two seventeenth century tragic plays: William Shakespeare's Macbeth and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The first portion of the dissertation will provide historical background and context. The rest will be a critical literary analysis centered around the argument that both plays present an inextricable connection between loss of mental clarity and gender.

Monsters Without To Monsters Within: The Transformation Of The Supernatural From English To American Gothic Fiction, Tryphena Y. Liu

Scripps Senior Theses

Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus …

Queer 'Paradise Lost': Reproduction, Gender, And Sexuality, Emily R. Kolpien

Scripps Senior Theses

In the span of this thesis, I investigate the queer nature of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, and argue that in spite of the biblical subject matter it is in fact a text filled with instances of queer transgression. I focus on preexisting feminist critiques of Milton in my introduction in order to ground myself within the academic field, and in order to illustrate how I will be branching out from it. In my first chapter, I discuss the queered nature of the poem’s landscapes, such as Chaos and Hell, and the specifically queer and masculine nature of …

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I address the problems of ethics and agency for women’s speech in Shakepseare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus—and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Regardless of their rhetorical skill, virtue, or agency, it seems that the Roman women in these works are doomed to fail: either their lives become unlivable or they lose the people most important to them. This prompts the project’s initiating question: why do Shakespeare’s Roman women speak if their words have no long-term effect? For these characters, rhetorical success in Shakespeare’s Rome is dependent upon a particular …

Expanding The Literary Enterprise: How We Experience The Texts Of The Advanced Placement English Literature And Composition Curriculum, Molly Ostrow

Honors Theses

How we read the texts of the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition curriculum.

Gender And The Popular Heroines (And Heroes) Of The Young Adult Dystopia, Kara E. Hemphill

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For the past few years, dystopian stories have ruled the young adult fiction aisles and the box office. Taking the reins from similarly popular predecessors like Harry Potter and Twilight, the genre has set itself apart by telling stories of action, war, and heroism that are often led by a young female protagonist. This project examines a variety of gender-related themes in six young adult dystopian novels, chosen for their popularity and subject matter. While it is not a comprehensive look at the genre, it is meant to analyze some of the most widely known works, which is important because …