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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Patriarchal Colonization Of The Female Body In Machinal And Clit Notes, Saide Harb-Ranero Jan 2022

Patriarchal Colonization Of The Female Body In Machinal And Clit Notes, Saide Harb-Ranero

The Graduate Review

Machinal written by Sophie Treadwell in 1928 and Clit Notes written by Holly Hughes in 1996 are two plays half a century apart yet bring forth the female body upstage and center. I see Machinal bringing attention to the societal machine that takes control of the focal character, Helen, from the first act. Clit Notes shows how a woman’s body could be removed from its first society, her parental home, simply for existing in a body that refuses to fit in a patriarchal box that is designed according to its perception of what that body should be doing. Regarding the …


Living Lawn Ornaments: Middle Class Status Anxiety In George Saunders’S 
“The Semplica Girl Diaries”, Joseph M. Gorman Jan 2017

Living Lawn Ornaments: Middle Class Status Anxiety In George Saunders’S 
“The Semplica Girl Diaries”, Joseph M. Gorman

The Graduate Review

This paper offers an analysis of writer George Saunders’s satirical short story “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” I argue that by situating the story in the historic context of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, Saunders’s story not only examines middle class status anxiety, but also acts as a reflective lens for the upper class readers of the story’s original publisher: The New Yorker. I first provide a brief discussion of the economic situation faced by middle class America between 2008 and 2013. I then provide an analysis of the fears of middle class American citizens by examining the …


Assimilation And The Impossibility Of Transculturation: Reading Herland As A Captivity Narrative, Rachel-Beth Gagnon Jan 2017

Assimilation And The Impossibility Of Transculturation: Reading Herland As A Captivity Narrative, Rachel-Beth Gagnon

The Graduate Review

Although the structure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel, Herland, mimics that of a captivity narrative, there has been no scholarship that analyzes how the work fits into this tradition. This paper addresses how the themes of the captivity narrative shift under the weight of Gilman’s scientific and social preoccupations as an early twentieth-century writer, as well as the novel’s position within the genre of utopian fiction. Despite the captivity narrative’s ability to provide ground for cultural and social exchange through the process of transculturation, Gilman’s evolutionary theories and the utopian genre’s anxieties about miscegenation prevent any transmission of culture. …


A Tightrope Over An Abyss: Humanity And The Lords Of Life, Timothy Francis Urban Jan 2016

A Tightrope Over An Abyss: Humanity And The Lords Of Life, Timothy Francis Urban

The Graduate Review

The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson is a precursor to the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings have often admitted to the profound influence Emerson had on the latter's own philosophy. Both thinkers shared common ground in viewing philosophy and language as an active process, always in a state of becoming, where the subject is the sole creator of meaning. This paper argues that Emerson and Nietzsche recognized the liberating quality of language in the creation of one's subjectivity. Emerson and Nietzsche dismissed notions of objective knowledge by looking at how language is arbitrary, and, as such, …


The Man In The Field: Thoreau’S "Concern To Be Observed", Don Boivin Jan 2016

The Man In The Field: Thoreau’S "Concern To Be Observed", Don Boivin

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Divining Very: Reconciling Christian And Transcendentalist Philosophies In The Poetry Of Jones Very, Kirsten Ridlen Jan 2015

Divining Very: Reconciling Christian And Transcendentalist Philosophies In The Poetry Of Jones Very, Kirsten Ridlen

Undergraduate Review

This piece, “Divining Very: Reconciling Christian and Transcendentalist Philosophies in the Poetry of Jones Very,” combines literary analysis, scholarly research, and seminar discourse to argue that, contrary to popular critical opinion, Transcendentalist and Christian philosophies are not mutually exclusive. In his article, "Nature as Concept and Technique in the Poetry of Jones Very," Anthony Herbold identifies a seemingly blatant contradiction in the poetry of Jones Very--at once deeply reverent and undeniably Christian, the next a devotion to the secular nature, without any apparent conversation between the two modes. Herbold argues that this is evidence of a multiplicity of Verys--that there …


Alice Munro: An Appreciation, Michael Boyd May 2014

Alice Munro: An Appreciation, Michael Boyd

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


Decay And Perversion In Jacksonian America: George Lippard’S The Quaker City, Keith Lydon Jan 2014

Decay And Perversion In Jacksonian America: George Lippard’S The Quaker City, Keith Lydon

Undergraduate Review

In the United States, the period between the termination of the 18th century and the commencement of the 19th century is characterized by the struggle to forge a national identity that was uniquely American in its independence from European influence. American writers of this period understood that the creation of an American literature distinct from the influence of Europe and shaped by the social, political, and natural environment of the United States would provide the country with the first vestiges of the autonomous cultural identity it so desperately desired. However, this work proved to be problematic, as with little financial …


Wounded Women, Varied Voice, Kathryn Johnston Jan 2012

Wounded Women, Varied Voice, Kathryn Johnston

Undergraduate Review

Daphne du Maurier and Sylvia Plath both use voice as a tool in their respective pieces, “La Sainte-Vierge” and “Lesbos.” Through the implementation of varied voices, these women convey female interiors. Du Maurier’s use of a third-person narrative voice in her short story “La Sainte-Vierge” allows her to comment on the lives of the main characters through the eyes of an outsider. Du Maurier’s outsider reveals a naïve and delusional housewife, unhealthy in her denial within a failing relationship. Contrasting with du Maurier’s Marie is Plath’s first-person voice of a scorned, dissatisfied housewife in her poem, “Lesbos.” Plath’s use of …


The Irish Odyssey Of James Mccarroll, Michael Peterman Jun 2011

The Irish Odyssey Of James Mccarroll, Michael Peterman

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


Daring Deeds: Independent Moral Thought And Action In Hope Leslie, Amanda Viana Jan 2007

Daring Deeds: Independent Moral Thought And Action In Hope Leslie, Amanda Viana

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Inverting The Cave: Edgar Huntly And The Enlightenment, Abby Sherwood Jan 2007

Inverting The Cave: Edgar Huntly And The Enlightenment, Abby Sherwood

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Dakota And All We Know Of Heaven: A Spiritual Desert, Matthew Collins Jan 2007

Dakota And All We Know Of Heaven: A Spiritual Desert, Matthew Collins

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


No Ordinary English: Gertrude Stein Defines Literacy, Nicole Williams, Amanda Morrish Jan 2006

No Ordinary English: Gertrude Stein Defines Literacy, Nicole Williams, Amanda Morrish

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


The Scientific Aspect Of Melodrama: The Mind/Body Connection In The Late Eighteenth Century Seduction Novel, Nichole Wilson Jan 2006

The Scientific Aspect Of Melodrama: The Mind/Body Connection In The Late Eighteenth Century Seduction Novel, Nichole Wilson

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Painters Of A Changing New World: James Fenimore Cooper And Thomas Cole, Corie Dias Jan 2006

Painters Of A Changing New World: James Fenimore Cooper And Thomas Cole, Corie Dias

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Masterpiece Or Racist Trash? Bridgewater Students Enter The Debate Over Huckleberry Finn, Barbara Apstein Jun 2000

Masterpiece Or Racist Trash? Bridgewater Students Enter The Debate Over Huckleberry Finn, Barbara Apstein

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


The Novelist As Historian, Michael Boyd Dec 1998

The Novelist As Historian, Michael Boyd

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


The American Struggle For Identity In 18th Century Newspaper Verse, Ann Brunjes Jun 1998

The American Struggle For Identity In 18th Century Newspaper Verse, Ann Brunjes

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


Contemporary English Perspectives On The American Civil War: Rare Documents, Sylvia Larson Jun 1995

Contemporary English Perspectives On The American Civil War: Rare Documents, Sylvia Larson

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.


Mark Twain's Roughing It: A Humorist's Darker Side, Joseph Yokelson Jan 1987

Mark Twain's Roughing It: A Humorist's Darker Side, Joseph Yokelson

Bridgewater Review

Roughing It was based rather roughly on a period of Twain’s life that began in 1861, when Twain went west with his brother Orion. Orion had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada territory with the help of friend who had a friend in Lincoln’s new cabinet. Twain had just faded quietly out of the Confederate army after suffering from boils and a sprained ankle and never firing a shot. For a while out west, Twain prospected for silver around Virginia City; then for about two years he was a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1864 he drifted …


The Timely Humor Of Stephen Leacock, Harold Ridlon Jul 1984

The Timely Humor Of Stephen Leacock, Harold Ridlon

Bridgewater Review

Stephen Leacock, one of the finest humorists of this century deserves reassessment. Born in 1869 in Swansmore, Hampshire, England, and resettled with his family on a farm near Lake Simcoe, Ontario, at age six, he survived the rigors of frontier life in a family of twelve children, all reared by a mother of breeding, hardihood, and humaneness, and deserted by a profligate, Micawber-like but insensitive father. Through his mother's encouragement and meager family endowment, he attended Upper Canada College, a private secondary school in Toronto. Leacock's best known and most widely used text, Elements of Political Science (1906), earned him …


Rediscovering James T. Farrell, Charles Fanning Oct 1983

Rediscovering James T. Farrell, Charles Fanning

Bridgewater Review

No major American writer has been worse served by criticism than James T. Farrell. After the publication in 1935 of his first fictional series, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Farrell labored for four decades under an unjust and unfounded critical accusation. During these years, many influential critics dealt with his fiction as it appeared by mechanical citation of a party line which ran as follows: "James T. Farrell is that sad case, a one-book writer. Studs Lonigan is credible fiction, albeit in the limiting and dated naturalistic mode pioneered by Theodore Dreiser. But his subsequent novels have been obsessive reworkings of …