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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …
How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’S And Fitzgerald’S Portrayals Of Mental Illness, Cryslin A. Ledbetter
How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’S And Fitzgerald’S Portrayals Of Mental Illness, Cryslin A. Ledbetter
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Cryslin Ledbetter's essay, "How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’s and Fitzgerald’s Portrayals of Mental Illness" examines the similarities and differences between Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Through a careful comparison of male and female writers, the author analyzes defining factors that effect the final product of each novel.
The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen
The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In this paper I discuss the nature of the fear that worked upon many of the soldiers of the Vietnam War, concentrating on a fear of the unknown. Drawing upon Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as its central focus text, my analysis suggests that the fear of the unknown is a product of communities’ efforts to distance themselves from a cultural Other. As such, I posit that those in positions of societal influence employ fear to reinforce racial stereotypes and maintain domestic unity. Perceiving ethnic and linguistic misunderstandings as forces that cultural leaders often evoke deliberately, I claim that …
Raciocultural Union And "Fraternity Of Feeling": Ishmael's Redemption In Moby-Dick, Emily Butler-Probst
Raciocultural Union And "Fraternity Of Feeling": Ishmael's Redemption In Moby-Dick, Emily Butler-Probst
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
The process of redemption, or the complete transformation of an individual’s life that enables him to avoid personal destruction is precisely what Ishmael experiences as he embraces cultural pluralism over the course of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Ishmael first begins Moby-Dick as a character who embraces isolation and abstract pondering in a manner that is similar to the obsessive, isolated madness of Captain Ahab. He is saved from the “madness” of absolutism by Queequeg, a South Pacific harpooner, in a process which not only expresses the nineteenth-century perception that cultural Others were less afflicted by madness, but also invokes a message …
Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney
Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In “Morality and Pleasure in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” I examine how representations of pleasure in O’Brien’s novel indicate how the soldiers establish a new code of morality during their military service in Vietnam. Although civilians live with a binary understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, the soldiers must commit immoral acts in order to serve honorably, thereby conflicting with this previous understanding. Western ideology asserts that pleasure accompanies moral behavior; because the soldiers perform violent acts, they must ascertain a new understanding of morality in order to continue to feel pleasure throughout and in spite of …
Reexamining Virtue In Arthur Mervyn, Clarissa Mcintire
Reexamining Virtue In Arthur Mervyn, Clarissa Mcintire
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Though Arthur Mervyn focuses primarily on the deadly 1793 invasion of the yellow fever into Philadelphia and humanitarian responses to it, the novel’s juxtaposition of contemporary societal attitudes towards fever victims with those towards unchaste or fallen women underlines striking similarities between the two. In this article I claim that, when applied to unchaste women, the novel’s argument for improved treatment of diseased and infected persons also establishes the unreliability of sexual purity as a standard of respectability due to the potential for a woman’s virtue to be taken from her. Therefore, because Arthur’s society judges the respectability of individuals …
The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee
The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …
The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht
The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
No abstract provided.