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'She Had Suffered So Many Humiliations For Want Of Money’: The Quest For Financial Independence In Sarah Grand’S The Beth Book, Melissa Purdue Jul 2013

'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.”

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“In Counterfeit Passion”: Cross-Dressing, Transgression, And Fraud In Shakespeare And Middleton, Anastasia S. Bierman May 2013

“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 …

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The Female Quixote As Promoter Of Social Literacy, Amy Hodges Apr 2013

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 …

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Madam Britannia: Women, Church, And Nation, 1712-1812, By Emma Major, Kathryn Stasio Apr 2013