English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dancing In The Diaspora: Remembering The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

In Canada, the classical dance bharatanatyam is both greater and less than an art form, greater because, unlike more common forms such as ballet or jazz dance, it offers its practitioners and its spectators something more than an opportunity to experience art or to be the vehicle for its expression, and less because what it offers along with its art is ethnicity. And in our multicultural society anything tagged as ethnic is caught in an intricate web of exaltation and denigration: by the very act of its celebration, which is frequently state-sponsored and state-endorsed, ethnicity is cast outside and …

From Tawa'if To Wife? Making Sense Of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa'if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" or "Yeh Kya Hua" especially to a group of north Indians over the …

Bridging The Distances: Women Writers Exploring The Nightmare Of Vietnam, Christina Triezenberg

Christina Triezenberg

This essay seeks to challenge the now-common practice of excluding Vietnam-era antiwar verse from contemporary literary anthologies by exploring the works produced by professional and amateur female poets who, in many cases, had witnessed the war firsthand and reflected on their experiences in verse that depicts the often harsh realities of this still-contested conflict. By exploring poetry written by women who served in a variety of capacities during the war, this essay underscores the repeated attempts made by women writers to bridge the distances between the home front and the battlefront and offers a compelling argument about the importance of …

Dark Avunculate: Shame, Animality, And Queer Development In Oscar Wilde’S “The Star-Child”, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Rasmus R Simonsen, PhD

This article will outline the inequalities of the relationship between the Star-Child and his temporary master, known only as the Magician, in order to argue that Wilde’s fairy tale should be read as the formalization of a queer interval that traumatizes the Victorian norm of maturation. This is not to suggest that “Wilde’s Victorian readers [would] seem to have found [any]thing untoward about the fairy tales” (Duffy 328); nothing, at least, that hinted at the “homoromantic dimensions” which were to become so devastatingly central to his libel trial of 1895 (338). John-Charles Duffy has nevertheless shown that a complex interweaving …

Rereading And Rewriting Women's History, Jacqueline Harris

Jacqueline H Harris

Rereading and Rewriting Women's History by Jacqueline Haley Harris, Master of Science Utah State University, 2008 Major Professor: Dr. Evelyn Funda Department: English In Margaret Atwood's nonfiction book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Atwood discusses the importance of the female writer's responsibility, that to write as a woman or about women means that you take upon yourself the responsibility of writing as a form of negotiation with our female dead and with what these dead took with them'the truth about who they were. By rereading and rewriting our communal past, women writers pay tribute to our …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …