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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Engaging The Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods, Kevin L. Ferguson
Engaging The Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods, Kevin L. Ferguson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines a recent decade in American history whose unique notion of self-periodization generated important questions of ethical engagement and withdrawal. Situated during a time of an increasingly complex relationship between literature and theory, thinkers in the 80s self-consciously shifted towards making claims about their present moment which were based on the logic of rupture, and which thus created an either-or logic of pessimism or optimism in response to this rupture. These kinds of self-periodizing notions generally are collected under the rubric "postmodernism" and the first chapter deals with a transatlantic movement between theorists such as Fredric Jameson and …
"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett
"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett
Publications and Research
Alcott’s first adult novel, Moods, initially published in 1864, presents oral promises between women as extralegal alternatives to standard legal contracts between men and women. In the 1864 edition of Moods, Alcott's protagonist, Sylvia Yule, fails to understand the constraints of marriage as a type of contract, and the results are dramatic. In fact, Alcott undermines the idealized marriage plot so crucial to her later, wildly popular works like Little Women (1868-69). In the 1864 Moods, Alcott boldly questions both legal contracts and oral promises characteristic of nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love and heterosexual friendship.
Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett
Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett
Publications and Research
This book chapter compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban. In both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for an Anglo man. Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the more appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth-century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, at least with Alcott, of the United States’s dependence …