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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Performativity And Domestic Fiction In Antebellum America: The Power Dynamics Of Class And Gender Performance, Blair Hedigan
Performativity And Domestic Fiction In Antebellum America: The Power Dynamics Of Class And Gender Performance, Blair Hedigan
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis analyzes the role of performativity within the domestic novel during antebellum America; specifically, the ways in which E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask subverted cultural and societal norms by exploring the performative nature of class and gender. Through their respective protagonists, the two authors sought to question the power dynamics of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. By granting their protagonists agency through performance, Southworth and Alcott explored the ways in which women might alter existing power structures to reject the restrictions gender essentialism placed upon antebellum women, and to advocate for women’s rights, …
Against The Pursuit Of 'Life's Delirium': Modern Queer Readings Of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" And Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall", Nina Posner
Scripps Senior Theses
This essay explores modern queer readings of The Awakening and Ruth Hall, with an emphasis on feeling, time, femininity, and maternity.
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …
Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton
Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton
Scripps Senior Theses
This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a …