Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Revolution In Gothic Manners: The Rise Of Sentiment From Walpole To Radcliffe, Katherine E. Stein

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this study, I assert that prior to the French Revolution, early eighteenth-century Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron attempt to understand the potential consequences revolution could have on British society and that both texts conclude that society can only be maintained by upholding behavioral expectations through proper manners. However, the French Revolution acted as an inflection point within the genre, and—through the analysis of the polemic texts Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—I argue that the …

Cuckoldry And The “Gone For A Soldier” Narrative: Infidelity And Performance Among Eighteenth-Century English Plebeians, Elias Hubbard

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project addresses existing historical arguments about the role of performance in eighteenth-century English plebeian infidelity cases, identifying some of the cultural scripts available to married men and women from popular texts in order to better understand cases of infidelity in contemporary plebeian marriages. The thesis seeks to clarify the effect of infidelity on a plebeian individual’s social standing and relationships, and to draw conclusions about the nature of plebeian infidelity, marriage, and gender in England through the long eighteenth century.

While examining contemporary public texts of cuckoldry, I address how homosocial behavior appears in narratives of cuckoldry, how the …

Blitz Aus Heiterm Himmel: Monstrous Femininity And The Illusion Of Gender Equality In The Gdr, Sarah Bonoff

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The anthology Blitz aus heiterm Himmel was published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1975. It includes short stories written by both men and women in which the protagonist undergoes a miraculous gender change of sorts. While the various authors take different approaches to the concept of gender, there are themes that tie the stories together. In the stories that scholars have analyzed, their analyses generally focus on either the portrayal of men and the role of masculinity, or the discourse of women in science. I instead chose to focus on and analyze three of these short stories (“Selbstversuch: …