Digital Commons Network^™

Revision As Resistance: Fanfiction As An Empowering Community For Female And Queer Fans, Diana Koehm

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis explores how fanfiction is a site of resistance and empowerment for female and queer fans. Fans rework popular cultural texts to represent themselves and reflect their own interests and concerns in the face of significant stigma on the part of fandom and media producers.

Mislabeled Muses, Deborah L. Dougherty

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Ann Yearsley, "Earl Goodwin", And The Politics Of Romantic Discontent, Chris Foss

English, Linguistics, and Communication (Legacy)

There is a dearth of more substantial critical studies on Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin in general, and while the few out there have helpfully illuminated the play’s representation of the historical plight of women and the poor during Anglo-Saxon times, as well as its application to their current predicaments in Romantic-era England and France, they have tended to leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first …

Fighting The Good Fight: Transforming Expectations Of Women In Front Of And Behind The Camera, Victoria Mills

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The film industry is a male dominated field. This is not new information. Directing, cinematography, and musical composition are the most heavily male governed above-the line crew positions, with women only making up 12% of directors as of 2018 (Quick, “The data…”). There is an unfortunate hesitation in support for female filmmakers from the part of studios. Melissa Silverstein of “Women and Hollywood” writes that there are quite specific visual expectations of a director to be a “white male with greying hair,” as this is what people are used to (Smith, “Female trouble…”). To go along with this, only 35% …

At Home In The Revolution: What Women Said And Did In 1916: An Interview With Lucy Mcdiarmid

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

Lucy McDiarmid is a scholar and writer. Her academic interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colorful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by The Irish Art of Controversy (2005) and Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014; paperback 2016). She is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her most recent monograph is At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 (published 2015). The Vibrant House: Irish Writers and Domestic Space (co-edited with Rhona Richman Kenneally) was published …

“[Taking] Responsibility For The Community”: Women Claiming Power And Legitimacy In Technical And Professional Communication In India, 1999-2016, Breeanne Matheson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Though the field of technical and professional communication has long been saturated with the narratives of Euro-Western males, technical and professional communication as a field has a responsibility to expand the lens of study to include the experiences of global and nontraditional practitioners. This study examines the experiences of Indian women working as practitioners, building power and legitimacy in a globalized economy. Drawing from interviews with 49 practitioners as well as an analysis of historical documents, this study examines the methods that Indian practitioners have used to build power and legitimacy by founding professional organizations, leveraging their educational opportunities, and …

Women & Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, And Slashers, Robin A. Reid Dr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper reports on an early pilot project that asks women who self identify as readers or fans of Tolkien's work and/or teachers who have taught Tolkien's work, and/or scholars who have published on Tolkien's work to answer a few open-ended questions about their reasons for enjoying his work. By "women," I mean anybody who identifies as a woman. By "Tolkien's work," I mean any of his published novels, stories, poems, or academic essays. The study arises from the question that is often asked of fans of Tolkien's work: why do women so enjoy it, given the relatively minor narrative …

Conrad's Erotic Women, Joyce Wexler

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is time to correct Joseph Conrad's reputation as a writer who falls short when the subject is women or sex. Praised for his ethical, political, and psychological insight, he is pitied for his love scenes. Writing about The Rescue in 1945, Walter F. Wright generalized, "Conrad usually had trouble with his women characters when they came into the foreground of a story. The themes which he best understood could be illustrated very well through the lives of men" (1945, 216). In 1956 Thomas Moser reinforced Wright's judgment, arguing that the quality of Conrad's later work declined because he tried …

Change For Women, Change The World, Kiana Stewart, Dr. Daryl Lee

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project goal was to translate from French to English significant chapters of a study on gender-based violence (GBV) in Senegal documented by Dr. Fatou Diop Sall. Dr Sall is the head coordinator of GESTES, a Senegalese research group focused on gender equality. A previous group of BYU students and ORCA recipients translated sections of the document that focused on domestic violence, and published the translation with the WomanStats Project, which is the largest statistical database regarding the status of women in the world (Hudson, 2015). The chapters I translated deal with GBV in different spheres, specifically educational spaces (schools, …

Race, Slavery, And Evasion: Whitman And Melville’S Changing Perspectives And Their Glancing Poetic Treatment Of The Core Civil War Issue, Said Fallaha

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Whitman and Melville’s poetry about the Civil War is almost completely silent when it comes to slavery. Both writers depict a newly emancipated person in their poems about the Civil War, but they seem to do so almost as an afterthought. Both Whitman's “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” and Melville's “Formerly a Slave” represent an elderly African American woman. These poems stand alone in their representation of an African American. Peter J. Bellis argues that both writers were concerned with how to negotiate national emotions and policies by the end of the war and these “emotions” and “policies” were vital to …

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which strong affective feelings, trauma, and memories are written about by women through diverse narrative forms. Through storytelling, writers engage with the relationship between deep feelings, significant places, and language, such as the frequent employment of words containing the prefix "re."

Reading Charlotte Bronte Reading, Madhumita Gupta

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre^[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to …

Breaking With Tradition(?) : Female Representations Of Heroism In Old English Poetry., Kathryn A. Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the Anglo-Saxons, strength, bravery, and the willingness to put oneself in harm’s way for king and kingdom were not only part of contemporary society but recurring themes in Old English literature. Poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon reinforce the important bond between lord and retainer and the heroic ethos key to that relationship. Women were not historically part of this relationship and, therefore, not subject to the heroic code in the same way; consequently, they are rarely seen as anything more than conventional mothers, queens, wives, sisters, daughters, and virgins, all identified by their relationships to men, …

Serving Two Masters: The Paralysis Of Early 20th-Century Women In A. E. Coppard’S “The Hurly-Burly”, Juliana Avery

Modernist Short Story Project

The theme of paralysis is evident throughout early twentieth-century British literature. Consider Joyce’s “Eveline,” in which a young woman cannot make up her mind about whether to go with her lover to South America or stay behind with her father. Eventually she stays behind, not of her own volition but rather because she is paralyzed by not knowing what her duty is, and so she cannot take the decisive step onto the boat. Joyce’s language shows this paralysis: “She stood among the swaying crowd” (15). Everyone can move but Eveline As Frank calls out to her from behind the barrier, …

Petticoats And Spurs: Female Armor In Spenser's "Faerie Queene" And Pope's "The Rape Of The Lock", Patrick D. Wilks

The Criterion

Both Britomart in Spenser’s Book 3, Canto 1 of Faerie Queene and Belinda in Pope’s The Rape of The Lock wear their clothes and (in Belinda’s case) makeup as their armor, both literally and figuratively. Both suffer unwanted advances, their image publicly besmirched as a result. Even though Belinda dresses to show off her beauty and Britomart dresses to conceal it, both women use their array as protection from cruel male world around them. Both feel safe, and both women have this safety violated and attack to defend their honor.

For Spenser, Chastity is a virtue to be held in …

Spenser’S Narrative Figuration Of Women In The Faerie Queene, Judith H. Anderson

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Concentrating on major figures of women in The Faerie Queene, together with the figures constellated around them, Anderson's Narrative Figuration explores the contribution of Spenser's epic romance to an appreciation of women's plights and possibilities in the age of Elizabeth. The figures she highlights encompass the idealization of Una, humanized by parody; the historicized fixation of Belphoebe; the cross-dressed complexity of Britomart; and the psychological misery of Serena, a throwback to Amoret. They range from cartoons to a fullness sharing numerous features with the Shakespearean women salient in recent debates about character. The critical lens most revealing for each …

We See Things With Our Eyes And We Want Them, Ann Ward

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

WE SEE THINGS WITH OUR EYES AND WE WANT THEM is a novel is stories following a female narrator, Janine, through adolescence and adulthood. Whether inspired by a spark of sexual tension over snack cakes, a broken down purple ‘96 Saturn named Lydia, a child’s pool party, or an ill-advised journey through a hospital air-vent system, Janine finds herself obsessed with trying to understand those she loves, and attempts to share the deeper parts of herself in the process.

"A Meruelous Thinge!": Elizabeth Of Spalbeek, Christina The Astonishing, And Performative Self-Abjection In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 114, Murrielle Michaud

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Contributing to the spirited discussion regarding feminist and pro-feminine readings of Middle English hagiography, this dissertation challenges the tradition of grouping accounts of medieval holy women into a single genre that relies on stereotypes of meekness and obedience. I argue that fifteenth-century England saw a pro-feminine literary movement extolling the virtues of women who engaged in what I term “performative self-abjection,” a form of vicious self-renunciation and grotesque asceticism based on Julia Kristeva's model of the abject. The corollary of women's performative self-abjection is ex-gratia spiritual authority, public recognition, and independence, emphasized in the English corpus of fifteenth-century women’s hagiography. …

"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes medical manuals published in England between 1500 and 1770 to trace developing medical understandings and prescriptive approaches to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. While there have been plenty of books written regarding social and religious changes in the reproductive process during the early modern era, there is a dearth of scholarly work focusing on the medical changes which took place in obstetrics over this period. Early modern England was a time of great change in the field of obstetrics as physicians incorporated newly-discovered knowledge about the male and female body, new fields and tools, and new or revived …