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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“An Oak In A Flower-Pot”: The Brontë Sisters’ Depictions Of Female Agency During The Victorian Era, Jessica Dunn
“An Oak In A Flower-Pot”: The Brontë Sisters’ Depictions Of Female Agency During The Victorian Era, Jessica Dunn
Honors Theses
This thesis discusses the most popular novels written by the Brontë sisters – Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – in the context of the overbearing patriarchal culture of the Victorian era, specifically through the characterization of feminine agency displayed in each novel. By engaging with the novels as a trinity, this thesis uniquely reveals the more nuanced aspects of the novels through the sisters’ respective depictions of female agency following the lives of their respective protagonists – Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, and Helen Graham. Additionally, this thesis seeks to engage in conversation …
Madwomen And Resistance: Gender And Self-Harm In Romantic And Victorian Literature, Emily V. Rasch
Madwomen And Resistance: Gender And Self-Harm In Romantic And Victorian Literature, Emily V. Rasch
Honors Theses
Literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was concerned with madness. However, relatively little research has been done to indicate how supposed “madwomen” escaped patriarchal control. This thesis will analyze madwomen from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and will argue that suicide appears in literature as the sole way that “mad” characters can resist patriarchal control. I examine the impact of self-harm and suicide in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman; John Keats’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil”; and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I connect self-harm to the desire to escape patriarchal …
Exploitation Of Land And Labor In Appalachia: The Manipulation Of Men In Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, Britani W. Baker
Exploitation Of Land And Labor In Appalachia: The Manipulation Of Men In Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, Britani W. Baker
Master's Theses
Ecofeminism is traditionally interested in the relationship between patriarchal domination of women and nature. Ann Pancake’s novel Strange As this Weather Has Been critiques the way the coal mining industry has affected the Appalachian people and land. The novel reflects natural ecofeminism, which views the connection between women and nature in essentialist terms. This outdated mode of ecofeminism leads to a reinforcement of gender stereotypes and a misrepresentation of the relationship between gender, nature, and culture. This study of Pancake’s novel employs a material ecofeminist approach to both critique and develop the novel’s gender politics. Material ecofeminism, even as it …