Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

“What Can There Be But Witchcraft?”: History, Women, And Witches In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S Lolly Willowes And Graham Swift’S Waterland, Thomas Bedenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous relationship between history, women and witchcraft in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Graham Swift’s Waterland foregrounds the constructedness of historical narratives while also recuperating women’s marginalized positions within history. Both novels link historical narratives with the received ideas upon which norms of gender, sexuality, and the nation are constructed. In recognizing this, both authors challenge the monolithic male gaze of history, revealing it to be a story which, totalizing as it may be, is not in fact “natural.” While many women in both novels are configured as haunting figures - women who confuse the boundary separation presence …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …

Queer Literary Criticism And The Biographical Fallacy, Shawna Lipton

Theses and Dissertations

“Queer Literary Criticism and the Biographical Fallacy” engages with three fields of inquiry within literary studies: queer literary criticism, modernist studies, and author theory. By looking at the critical reception of four iconic queer modernist authors – Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf– this dissertation reinvestigates the relation between criticism and the figure of the author. Queer criticism-- despite its fundamental critique of identity—relies on the identity of the author when it blurs the distinction between the literary text and the author’s biography. Ultimately this work provides a deeper understanding of the queer relation to the modernist …

Tammy Rae Carland's Queer Riot Grrrl Zine"I ( Heart ) Amy Carter": A World Of Public Intimacy, Annah-Marie Rostowsky

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Tammy Rae Carland's queer Riot Grrrl zine I (heart) Amy Carter as a counterpublic sphere engendered by acts of public intimacy that make visible the intersectional complexities of gender, sexuality, class, and race that insidious traumas continually work to conceal. It looks to Ann Cvetkovich's inquiries into the positive aspects of public cultures in the book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2006) as well as Mimi Thi Nguyen's investigation of the Riot Grrrl race crisis in the article "Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival" (2012) as frameworks to critique Carland's visual and textual …

An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George

Theses and Dissertations

Immersed in a web of short stories, poetry, and supporting biographical and life-writing sources, I investigate the narrative significance beneath and beyond two British and American modernist women authors. I evaluate sisterly connectedness between their literary production, publishing histories and life writings present in a specific cultural-temporal moment and genre: the short story. By looking on these unique, forgotten fictions through a new materialist lens, I argue for their short fiction's greater inclusion in the canon of women's modernism. Chapter I tests correlations between two authors undergoing the same stresses, alienations, joys and desires by taking up tenants of material …

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 …

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, …