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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

How The World Turns Quietly, Dana N. Boyer Dec 2010

How The World Turns Quietly, Dana N. Boyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of original poems written while studying both writing and literature at the University of Nebraska. The introduction partially discusses the role that women have played in writing in the past century. It discusses the poetry of Elizabeth Spires, and the prose of Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen. More specifically, it focuses on the work that these authors have done on the subject of silence, focusing on whom and what have conspired to work against authors, specifically female ones. These obstacles include economic standing, gender, and emotional issues. The introduction then branches out to discuss the specific …


Female Liberation In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Kevin Chen '10 Apr 2010

Female Liberation In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Kevin Chen '10

2010 Spring Semester

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” both initially published in 1899, present strikingly similar stories of the plight of women in society. Both texts adopt a markedly feminist bias, narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who wrests with the restrictive conventions of a misogynistic society before finally breaking free through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Some would argue that the women themselves are flawed, through either mental instability or rampant libido, and thus the stories are skewed through the eyes …


Puppies, Pearls, And Corpses On The Road: F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Treatment Of Women In The Great Gatsby, Eleanor Cory '12 Apr 2010

Puppies, Pearls, And Corpses On The Road: F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Treatment Of Women In The Great Gatsby, Eleanor Cory '12

2010 Spring Semester

“…That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (21). These are the words of Daisy Buchanan, a woman around whom the entire novel seems to revolve. Her story is one of a woman who loses her first love and instead marries a man who proved unfaithful and angry. Knowing that the story was written as a critique of society at the time, one might expect Daisy to eventually empower herself to leave this situation and escape the stereotype of the weak woman. The actual story could not be more different. In his attempts …


The Possibility Of Female Autonomy In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Liana Nicklaus '10 Apr 2010

The Possibility Of Female Autonomy In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Liana Nicklaus '10

2010 Spring Semester

Both The Awakening by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman present female main characters pursuing individual autonomy. At first, it would appear that both of these characters gain their freedom in the course of their respective stories. In The Awakening, Edna is able to escape from her husband into a new house, and pursue romantic interests with other men, and at the end of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the protagonist exclaims, “I’ve got out at last!” (Gilman 20). However, there are several elements in each piece which hint that liberation is not truly achievable. In actuality, societal …


Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson Apr 2010

Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops and Thumbprints in Black Coffee is a creative dissertation that examines the lives of Arab women living in Jordan and Arab immigrants living in the United States. The first portion of the dissertation, Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops is an excerpt from the early portion of the novel by the same name. These first 53 pages provide the background of the characters and highlights aspects that are culturally specific to the women of the stories. For example, issues of arranged marriages, funeral practices, women’s custody rights are all illustrated through these early stories. The early …