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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Woman, Queer, Jewish: The Sociopolitical Importance And Impact Of Identity Labels, Megan Polun
Woman, Queer, Jewish: The Sociopolitical Importance And Impact Of Identity Labels, Megan Polun
Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies
In this thesis, I trace and analyze the historical, social, and political uses of three identity labels: woman, queer, and Jewish. These three identity categories are personally important to me because I identify as a queer, Jewish woman. The questions motivating this analysis are as follows: How have these words been defined and who gets to define them? What has it meant historically to move through the world with one of these labels, and what does it look like today? What qualifies someone to identify with one of these labels, and what experiences or qualities do we share? What challenges …
Anti-Woman Invective On The Early Modern Stage: Abuse, Degradation, And Resistance, Savannah Xaver
Anti-Woman Invective On The Early Modern Stage: Abuse, Degradation, And Resistance, Savannah Xaver
Dissertations
On the early modern stage, gendered epithets like “strumpet,” “mermaid,” “minx,” “hobby horse,” “courtesan,” “drab,” and “whore” are not just markers of misogyny. Instead, these insults harm the male user as well as their female target. My cross-playwright and cross-genre connections show the complex, wide use and impact of anti-woman terms. A wide-ranging study of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries reveals that gendered insults signify masculine mental decline in tragedies as well as comedies and tragicomedies. In tragedy, the increasingly violent language of male slur users – like, for example, the frustrated Othello, who declares, of his wife, …
More Than The Defiant Few: Lost Womanhood And Necro Women Dismantling Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideologies, Vicki Vanbrocklin
More Than The Defiant Few: Lost Womanhood And Necro Women Dismantling Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideologies, Vicki Vanbrocklin
English Language and Literature ETDs
Too many scholars still rely on adjectives such as deviant, unruly, dangerous, and wild to describe women who interrogate rigid forms of womanhood, especially women of color. My project intervenes in nineteenth-century womanhood discussions, which have traditionally solidified three main categories: Republican, True, and New Womanhood. Between True Womanhood in the mid-nineteenth century and the late nineteenth-century concept of New Womanhood lies an overlooked category aptly understood as Lost Womanhood. I focus on newspaper archives, archival research, and imaginative literature to find “lost” women who critiqued a patriarchal system that thrives on women living in a status akin to being …
Nsfw: Not So Feminist Women - A Media And Cultural Studies Analysis Of Working Women In Popular Media, Josephine Schofield
Nsfw: Not So Feminist Women - A Media And Cultural Studies Analysis Of Working Women In Popular Media, Josephine Schofield
Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies
Even though gender diversity of characters has increased in television shows and films, this study hypothesized that female characters who are presented as feminist icons function as feminist backlash and perpetuate negative and harmful stereotypes. This was found to be especially true for career-focused women. Applying a cultural studies approach to reading television and film studies through a feminist lens identified the antifeminist factors that continue to cause the perpetual loop of independent women reverting to dated social roles. This research connects what audiences consume through popular media to how they perceive their female co-workers. The findings of this study …
“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González
“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.
Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García
Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …
The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter
The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter
Late Tudor and Stuart Drama
This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.
Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens
Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …
Shakespeare And The Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender And The British Nation In The Bbc’S Hollow Crown, L Monique Pittman
Shakespeare And The Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender And The British Nation In The Bbc’S Hollow Crown, L Monique Pittman
Faculty Publications
As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, the BBC launched a season of programs, entitled Shakespeare Unlocked, most notably presenting the plays of the second tetralogy in four feature-length adaptations released under the unifying title The Hollow Crown. These plays so obviously engaged with the question of English nationalism suited a year in which the United Kingdom wrestled with British identity in a post-colonial and post-Great Recession world. Through its adaptative and filmic vocabularies, however, The Hollow Crown advances a British nationalism unresponsive to the casualties — often women and …
A Survey Of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers, Milena Mileva Blazić
A Survey Of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers, Milena Mileva Blazić
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "A Survey of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers" Milena Mileva Blažić begins with an introduction to the Slovenian fairy tale writing tradition dating back nearly 150 years. While male authors published collections of tales, women writers published only individual fairy tales and owing to their biographies giving birth to children and caring for their families gained less, if any, recognition in literary history. Blažić's overview of Slovenian women writers of fairy tales and scholarship about the genre includes the related genre of youth literature. Blažić's survey is placed in the context of West European fairy tale writing …
Fantasies Of Gender And The Witch In Feminist Theory And Literature, Justyna Sempruch
Fantasies Of Gender And The Witch In Feminist Theory And Literature, Justyna Sempruch
Comparative Cultural Studies
In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these …