Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple

Honors Theses

Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines figures of women as represented in the literature of the U.S.-Mexico war in order to think through the ways in which the border conflict was preserved in nineteenth-century U.S. American collective memory. Central to my dissertation is a consideration of the intersections of history, myth, legend, and fiction in the memorialization of this war. This dissertation demonstrates that a close look at fictionalized accounts of women’s experiences of and roles in the U.S.-Mexico war highlights the ways in which historical fictions influence how we remember this moment of our collective past.

Focusing on popular accounts of the …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

A New Kind Of Social Dreaming: Diversifying Contemporary Dystopian Fiction, Brita M. Thielen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis argues that the dystopian genre lacks diversity not because dystopian novels with a focus on issues of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality have not been written, but because these novels are assigned to other genres. Reevaluating the importance of a future setting to dystopian fiction opens the genre to stories whose characters need not exist in a future temporal landscape because their oppression exists in the present. The entrenched norm of a future temporal setting in dystopian fiction privileges the perspectives of a group of people who largely do not experience systemic oppression in the present: white heterosexual men. …

"More Than Custom Has Pronounced Necessary”: Exploring The Correlation Between Gendered Verbs And Character In The 19th Century Novel, Nebraska Literary Lab, Oliver Baylog, Laura Dimmit, Travis Heller, Gabi Kirilloff, Shannon Smith, Grace Thomas, Chandler Warren, James Wehrwein

Department of English: Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers

During the 19th century, gender politics played a crucial role in shaping the emergence of the novel as a popular and successful form of literature. Not only were middle class women becoming an important part of the reading public, women were also authoring novels and creating complex heroines that at times pushed against, and at other times bolstered, traditional conceptions of propriety and femininity. Along with a rise in popularity came a rise in the critique of the novel as a valid literary genre; many critics claimed that novels were capable of corrupting their female readership. Authors responded to this …

“In Counterfeit Passion”: Cross-Dressing, Transgression, And Fraud In Shakespeare And Middleton, Anastasia S. Bierman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the way women cross-dressing as men functions as a crime in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night. While many modern scholars have discussed cross-dressing in these plays, many look to the end of the plays as the foundation for their analysis rather than the play as a whole. Because of this oversight, scholars deem the characters in the plays not transgressive, when, in fact, cross-dressing is transgressive. They ignore the way cross-dressing is often presented in writing in the Renaissance, i.e. as a type …

I Don't: A Study Of Marriage, Ethnicity, And Citizenship In Ethnic Women's Writing, Shannon Mcmahon

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

For the 19^th and well into the 20^th century, marriage was the most formative institution that defined women’s civic presence in the American community. Nancy Cott’s Public Vows provides crucial context for my study. Cott shows how marriage not only implied a structure for private life but also participated in public order, namely the wife’s civic status was subsumed by the status of her husband. An unmarried woman’s civic identity was ambiguous absent a husband who could represent her in the public sphere. For ethnic women, marriage did not guarantee access to the benefits and protections of U.S. …