Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race [Book Review], Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

No abstract provided.

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Sanctuary And Resistance, Rebecca A. Stuhr

Rebecca A Stuhr

In his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, author Khaled Hosseini provides a vivid portrait of a country shattered by a series of ideological leaders and wars imposed on it by foreign and internal forces. The narrative, which spans several decades, is driven by the stories of two women, Laila and Mariam, who, despite starkly different beginnings, find themselves intimately connected and dependent upon one another. Hosseini’s women, much like the country of Afghanistan itself, appear to be propelled by the whims of outside forces, familial and societal, with little chance of influencing their own lives and futures Yet Laila and …

Culture And Change: Attending To Early Modern Women, Elaine Beilin

Elaine V. Beilin

This is the fourth in the series of proceedings of the interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. This volume reflects the commitment of scholars to the exploration of early modern women's culture as recovered through images, literature, music, and archives of the period. In essays on 'Stories,' 'Goods,' 'Faiths,' and 'Pedagogues,' scholars from a wide variety of fields discuss the contributions that reveal early modern women's influence on the societal and cultural transformations in which they participated. Nearly thirty workshops from the conference are summarized, and these offer a detailed …

Silent But For The Word : Tudor Women As Patrons, Translators, And Writers Of Religious Works, Elaine Beilin

Elaine V. Beilin

Twelve of the fourteen essays in this volume describe much of the lives and works of an extraordinary group of English women who, despite the regime of chastity, silence and obedience imposed on them, managed to engage in particular with contemporary religious debates, through their work as writers, patrons, and especially translators. The translators discussed include Margaret More Roper, Queen Elizabeth I as a young girl, Mary Sidney, the Cooke sisters, and Lady Cary. Some essays focus on the style of individual translators, revealing "deviations" from source texts where the translator's voice, intentionally or unintentionally, shines through. Mary Ellen Lamb …

'She Had Suffered So Many Humiliations For Want Of Money’: The Quest For Financial Independence In Sarah Grand’S The Beth Book, Melissa Purdue

English Department Publications

Melissa Purdue analyzes Sarah Grand’s semi-autobiographical The Beth Book (1897), “a New Woman novel deeply concerned with money—particularly women’s lack of it,” which finds its central metaphor in the book’s “discourse about hungry bodies, food, and consumption.” Grand celebrates her protagonist Beth’s proactive attitude toward money, indicating a larger shift in New Woman literature towards an endorsement of women earning their own money while also caring for others. As The Beth Book demonstrates, Purdue writes, “financial independence and what one does with money, rather than one’s distance from money, become important signals of feminine virtue in New Woman literature.”

Reconceiving Self-Abnegation: Female Vulnerability As Embodied (Un)Sovereignty, Renee Lee Gardner

Dissertations

Liberal feminism views vulnerability as weakness and dominance as strength. This binary parallels nationalistic assertions of sovereignty. Within militaristic responses such as the U.S. retaliation to 9/11, however, we see the cost of refusing to acknowledge our vulnerability. In my analysis of eleven novels arising from eight distinct nation-states and representing historical moments from the final decades of slavery through the early post- 9/11 years, I use alternative (queer, postcolonial, Islamic) feminisms to read power in vulnerability. I explore female characters who deliberately self-abnegate – sacrificing their lives, bodies, voices, and children – but whose actions can be read as …

Victorian Women And Their Working Roles, Kara L. Barrett

English Theses

Women during the Victorian Era did not have many rights. They were viewed as only supposed to be housewives and mothers to their children. The women during this era were only viewed as people that should only concern themselves with keeping a successful household. However, during this time women were forced into working positions outside of the household.

Women that were forced into working situations outside of their households were viewed negatively by society. Many women needed to have an income to support their families because the men in the household were not making enough money to survive. When the …

“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 …

Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley

Masters Theses

Although Tennessee Williams does not openly champion the rights of women in his plays, he presents strong cases against their social alienation in a harsh and brutal world governed by men. Williams' emotional leanings, sensitivity, and intuition enable him to see life through women's eyes. In The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke, Williams astutely sounds the battle cry for women to fight against male oppression. He shows how Amanda Wingfield, Laura Wingfield, Blanche Dubois, Stella Kowalski, and Alma Winemiller are held hostage to the rules governing patriarchal society and become unhappy marginalized victims. The self-contained …

The Female Quixote As Promoter Of Social Literacy, Amy Hodges

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, the unruly Arabella clashes with the eighteenth century’s conception of England as an orderly, unromantic site of commercial trade. Arabella’s romances prompt her to expect certain power structures from English society; she invites others to see her body as a spectacle and expects that her actions will solidify her status as a powerful woman. Yet Lennox reveals that English society sees Arabella’s body not as powerful, but as an object upon which they may construct their own potential site for the exchange of knowledge, an objectification that neither Arabella nor Lennox are prepared …

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, And Nation, 1712-1812, By Emma Major, Kathryn Stasio

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Resources In Hard Times, Catherine Ingrassia

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Supporting Women Scholars: How To Get Things Done In Hard Times, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

A Call To Action: Conflict And Change In Three Major African Novels, Kate St. Ives

The Corinthian

A Grain of Wheat, The Sun By Night, and Nervous Conditions are each set in a time period and country in Africa in which tremendous changes are taking place. These changes come in many forms such as clashes between different belief systems, the development of new governments, and the changing roles of women.

Re-Orientalisation And The Pursuit Of Ecstasy: Remembering Homeland In Prisoner Of Tehran, Esmaeil Zeiny

Esmaeil Zeiny

The Western literary market is saturated with the Middle Eastern women memoirs since 9/11. What caused this saturation lies in the curiosity of the West to know about the Middle Easterners after 9/11 and the following President Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech addressed to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, followed by launching his ‘war on terror’ project. This was the time when an influx of memoirs by and about Iranian women has emerged. This paper examines Marina Nemat’s memories of her birthland in her memoir, Prisoner of Tehran. Utilizing Dabashi’s concept of ‘native informer’, Bhabha’s concept of ‘stereotypical representation’ and …