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Literature in English, North America

Feminism

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Honors Theses

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain May 2020

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain

Honors Theses

This thesis explores themes of monstrosity in Maria Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife in connection with issues of women's bodies and feminism. It analyzes prominent female characters in the novel and the relationships of their bodies to patriarchal authority, showing how and why bodies are deemed monstrous. It discusses the role that motherhood plays in patriarchal society, as well as explores alternatives that the novel offers to this system.


Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno May 2018

Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno

Honors Theses

Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …


When Worlds Collide: Feminism, Conservatism And Twentieth Century Authors, Madison Cooney Jan 2017

When Worlds Collide: Feminism, Conservatism And Twentieth Century Authors, Madison Cooney

Honors Theses

Two streams of literary narratives appearing during the Great Depression grew from personal and historical experiences of their women authors with overlapping but very different perspectives on American cultural history. These were: 1) The accounts of rural frontier Midwestern regional experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as edited and shaped in part by her daughter and writing partner Rose Wilder Lane, in retrospect during the New Deal era; and 2) the 1920s urban African-American experience of Zora Neale Hurston in the context of an emerging national black artistic and intellectual scene. Through a shared feminism emphasizing freedom for women, these authors …