Arts and Humanities Commons^™

To Put Her In Her Place: An Interrogation Of Death And Gender In Shakespearean Tragedy, Isabella A. Zentner

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This analysis investigates the gendered implications of Shakespearean heroines' deaths. Using Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus as case studies, evidence is drawn from the text. This evidence is then supported by extensive historical research and reference to external critical studies of these tragedies. By identifying the gendered aspects of these heroines’ deaths, one can gain a greater understanding of Shakespeare’s view of female autonomy and power. The deaths Shakespeare inflicts often act as a punishment for the heroines' betrayal of traditional gender roles and forcibly return the heroines to the feminine sphere.

How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’S And Fitzgerald’S Portrayals Of Mental Illness, Cryslin A. Ledbetter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Cryslin Ledbetter's essay, "How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’s and Fitzgerald’s Portrayals of Mental Illness" examines the similarities and differences between Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Through a careful comparison of male and female writers, the author analyzes defining factors that effect the final product of each novel.

“The Experience Of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” As Proto-Baudrillardian Parable, Kyler Merrill

Modernist Short Story Project

Morley Roberts’s “The Experience of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” is an inferior potboiler, all too fit for The Strand, a middlebrow general interest periodical (Willis). It is repetitive, its characters are underdeveloped, and its jokes usually fall flat. Even the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates that “[c]ritics agree that he [Roberts] wrote far too much and too quickly, his popularity with the average reader being acquired at the cost of quality” (Coustillas). The present story exemplifies Roberts’s populism, but it warrants closer consideration for two special reasons: it mocks Victorian priggishness while extolling adventurous albeit patriarchal romanticism (unsurprising, given Morley …

“The Longest Day Of Her Life”: Affirming Pre-Wwi Gender Roles, Nicole Umphress

Modernist Short Story Project

The January 1913 edition of The Strand Magazine featured a short story titled “The Longest Day of Her Life” by W. B. Maxwell, prolific during his time but virtually unknown in modern studies of the Modernist Era. The son of popular novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Maxwell spent much of his life writing and pursuing the creative arts; though in contact from a young age with some of the premier figures of the British literati, including Robert Browning, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde, Maxwell was most inspired by his literary mother. Loving, kind, and immensely talented, Braddon set an example …

Including Religion In Gender: Lds Men’S Experiences In Masculinity-Making, Ashley Brocious, Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Studies in masculinity have grown significantly in the last decades as conversations concerning gender have become more conscious of the meanings and constructions of gender in men’s experiences. Masculinity studies at its core questions the assumption that men have already achieved gender equality. Rather than blanketing all men into categories of privilege, patriarchy, or even neutrality, it seeks to give more nuance to men’s experiences and the transactional nature of their masculinity in the world around them. Latter-day Saint feminists have considered differences between men’s and women’s experiences and voices an important topic. The importance of women’s narratives as a …

The Virgin's Kiss: Gender, Leprosy, And Romance In The Life Of St. Frideswide, Gary Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

The longer thirteenth-century Middle English verse life of Saint Frideswide found in the collection of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL) narrates an event unique to medieval hagiography. In the poem, a leper asks the virgin saint to kiss him with her "sweet mouth," which she does in spite of her feelings of considerable shame, and the leper is healed. The erotic nature of the leper's request, Frideswide's reluctance to grant it, and her shame throughout the incident represent a significant departure from the twelfth-century Latin texts on which the SEL version of the saint's …

Heart Religion In The British Enlightenment: Gender And Emotion In Early Methodism: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Problems of agency often materialize as problems of attribution. Early in her remarkable new study, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment, historian Phyllis Mack describes how eighteenthcentury Methodists are typically viewed as either "emotionally needy followers or ... a mob of hysterical worshippers run amok:' Such Methodists, Mack contends, "have rarely been viewed as thinkers and actors" in their own right (5). To make amends, Mack delves into the agency of the everyday. She discloses how lay Methodists and leaders, men and women alike, used various forms of writing as tools for the work of emotional self-fashioning. What made …

Pierced Through The Ear: Poetic Villainy In Othello, Kathleen Emerald Somers

Theses and Dissertations

The paper examines Othello as metapoetry. Throughout the play, key points of comparison between Iago and Shakespeare's methodologies for employing allegory, symbolism, and mimetic plot and character construction shed light upon Shakespeare's self-reflexive use of poetry as an art of imitation. More specifically, the contrast between Shakespeare and Iago's poetry delineates between dynamic and reductive uses of allegory, emphasizes an Aristotelian model of mimesis that makes reason integral to plot and character formation, and underscores an ethical function to poetry generally. In consequence of the division between Iago and Shakespeare as unethical and ethical poets respectively, critical contention concerning the …

Negotiating Identity: Culturally Situated Epideictic In The Victorian Travel Narratives Of Isabella Bird, Katherine Reilly Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Epideictic rhetoric, one of the classical modes of persuasion described by Aristotle, has faced some criticism concerning its value in the realm of rhetoric. Though attitudes have been shifting over the last several decades, there is still a tendency to undervalue epideictic, falling back on the Aristotelian system of ceremonial oratory. However, its “praise and blame” style of persuasion employs of the type of rhetor / audience identification described by Kenneth Burke. Epideictic rhetoric is a major component of virtually any communication, as the speaker or writer seeks to create a bond with that audience so as to persuade them …

Rethinking The Historical Lens: A Case For Relational Identity In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Annalisa Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis proposes a theory of relational identity development in Chicana literature. Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera offers an interpretation of Chicana identity that is largely based on historical models and mythology, which many scholars have found useful in interpreting Chicana literature. However, I contend that another text, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, not only illustrates the need for an alternative paradigm for considering identity development, but in fact offers such an alternative. I argue that Cisneros shows a model for relational identity development, wherein the individual develops in the context of her community and is not determined solely …

A Gentlemen's Benevolence: Symptoms Of Class, Gender, And Social Change In Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, And The Mill On The Floss, Aubrey Lea Hammer

Theses and Dissertations

Austen, Dickens, and Eliot each responded to discussions of their time concerning class, gender, and social change. One of the ways they addressed these issues, and sought to find solutions to the problems facing their culture, was through benevolence. Knightley, in Emma, uses benevolence as a means of mediating self-interest and sympathy. By acting out of sympathy, through benevolence, he achieves the self-interested benefits of reinforcing the class system and achieving his romantic conquests. Likewise, Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby learns how to use benevolence as a means of social mobility from his mentors, the Cheerybles. Throughout Nicholas Nickleby the hero learns …

James Thurber's Little Man And The Battle Of The Sexes: The Humor Of Gender And Conflict, Andrew S. Jorgensen

Theses and Dissertations

James Thurber, along with others who wrote for The New Yorker magazine, developed the 'little man' comic figure. The little man as a central character was a shift from earlier nineteenth-century traditions in humor. This twentieth-century protagonist was a comic antihero whose function was to create sympathy rather than scorn and bring into question the values and behaviors of society rather than affirm them, as earlier comic figures did. The little man was urban, inept, frustrated, childlike, suspicious, and stubborn. His female counterpart was often a foil: confident and controlling enough to highlight his most pitiable and funniest features. Contradictory …

Margaret Cavendish And Scientific Discourse In Seventeenth-Century England, Alisa Curtis Bolander

Theses and Dissertations

Although the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish is eclectic and uncustomary, it offers an important critique of contemporary scientific methods, especially mechanism and experimentalism. As presented in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Blazing World, Cavendish's natural philosophy incorporates rationalistic and subjective elements, urging contemporary natural philosophers to recognize that pure objectivity is unattainable through any method of inquiry and that reason is essential in making sense and use of scientific observation.

In addition to its scientific implications, Cavendish's three-tiered model of matter presents interesting sociopolitical associations. Through her own use of metaphor and her theoretical fusion of matter and motion, …