Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle

English Dissertations

This dissertation applies posthuman theories to the concept of nurture in American literatures of 1880-1920 and 1980-2020 to explore how writers construct and imagine futurities that increasingly critique the liberal Cartesian human. While relationships between “subjects” and “objects” in Cartesian dualism can render the act of nurturing both problematic and violent, posthuman nurture decenters the nurturer, shifting focus onto the nurtured. This allows us to view nurture as an inherently mutual act that includes agencies beyond humans, including animals, plants, and other non-zoe. American literatures of 1880-1920, which often speculated futures taking place in 1980-2020, exhibit nascent strains of the …

Truth And Strength In Vulnerability: Using Topoanalysis To Reveal The Need For Expanding The Modernist Literary Canon, Misty Dawnmarie Falkenstein

English Theses

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public role of women shifted dramatically. Women asserted themselves in politics, education, and work in a way foreign to their Victorian predecessors. Although these “New Women” altered the gender landscape and set in motion a new path for women that would continue even into the twenty-first century, their writing still goes largely unnoticed in the current study of the Modernist literary canon. This project makes a case for expanding the current Modernist literary canon to include more of these women, especially women of disenfranchised racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic groups. Writers …

Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera

English Dissertations

This dissertation offers a feminist disability theory approach to women’s medical fiction during the Comstock Law Era. I argue that, in responding to Comstockian censorship, women authors of medical fiction resisted sexed and gendered narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex education discourses, but in so doing, they recast the female body within disability rhetoric. Using feminist body theorists such as Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Emily Martin, and Elizabeth Grosz, I frame each work of feminist medical fiction within a specific historical nexus before discussing how the authors–Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Perkins …

Foster's The Coquette: Audiobook, Part 2 (Chapters 8 To 14), Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Foster's The Coquette: Audiobook, Part 3 (Chapters 15 To 23), Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Foster's The Coquette: Audiobook, Part 1 (Chapters 1 To 7), Jon Miller

Jon Miller