English Language and Literature Commons^™

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

Contesting Victorian Beliefs: The Unintended Effects Of Victorian Novels, Christina Barquin

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Victorian society reproduced polarized gender roles known as the ideology of the separate spheres in order to confine the authority of women. However, as the Victorian Era progressed social norms were gradually contested, and the consequences of the assertion of female authority led to reform. In reinterpreting the Victorian women’s movement, I will interpret the effects of the writers of the late nineteenth century who argued explicitly against proposed changes in the traditional position of middle-class women. I will most closely examine how the late Victorian novels, A Marriage Below Zero by Alan Dale and The Revolt of Man by …

Hero/Heroine: A Study Of The Representation Of Womanhood In Victorian And Neo-Victorian Literature, Laura Depalma

Honors Capstone Projects - All

In this paper, I compare two novels: Shirley by Charlotte Brontë and A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. Shirley follows the lives of two girls navigating adolescence in the early nineteenth century; A Great and Terrible Beauty is the story of four girls, also transitioning into womanhood, in the late Victorian era.

The first interesting thing about these two pieces is that both authors choose to set them in their relative pasts: Brontë, writing near the middle of the nineteenth century, sets her work in 1812, while contemporary writer Libba Bray sets her piece in the Victorian era. …