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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
The Law And The Lady: Consent And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Heather Lea Nelson
The Law And The Lady: Consent And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Heather Lea Nelson
Open Access Dissertations
While many scholars have written on women and marriage in nineteenth-century British history and fiction, this dissertation, The Law and the Lady: Consent and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, is the first to apply consent theory to those unions. Modern consent theory dictates that for individuals to consent, they must be autonomous, capable, educated, mature, and volunteering, and they must express consent with opportunities to retract those expressions. This dissertation asserts that because nineteenth-century British women usually lacked these components, their marital consent was partial, illegitimate, or absent. Fiction frequently equivocated about this social problem of contemporary female marital consent. …
Writing New Rites: John Donne's And John Milton's Elegies As Mourning Ritual, Reme A. Bohlin
Writing New Rites: John Donne's And John Milton's Elegies As Mourning Ritual, Reme A. Bohlin
Open Access Theses
In this study, I read John Donne's The Anniversaries and John Milton's Lycidas in the context of the changing funeral and mourning ritual since the Reformation and England's turn to Protestantism, approximately begun in the 1540s. In Donne'sAnniversaries, I find that he is exploring how the body can sign spiritual health or sickness, as well as negotiating how the dead (body and spirit) might be exemplum for the living. I argue that this negotiation is particularly Protestant in that the body, despite conventional notions about Protestantism's tendency to privilege the soul, is still important in divining the quality of …