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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu
Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu
College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses
This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from …
Þorn: A Novel Excerpt Exploring Giantesses, Their Relation To Women's Bodily Expectations, And Patriarchal Control In The Literature Of Early Modern Britain And Contemporary America., Brady P Alexander
College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses
This thesis will analyze examples of women of size in the literature of the British Isles throughout history, focusing predominantly upon the Early Modern Period, and will create a fiction piece in response to such attitudes. I argue that one of the most clear ways to dissect contemporary cultural attitudes about powerful women and women who occupy more space than men is to examine giantesses and other examples of women of size within this period of literature. From this, a novel excerpt will be written from the perspective of a time-traveling woman of size who engages with these texts and …
Resonating Otherness: Rethinking The Body Through Octavia Butler's Dawn., Tristan Dewitt Carr
Resonating Otherness: Rethinking The Body Through Octavia Butler's Dawn., Tristan Dewitt Carr
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis focuses on the intersection between sound and bodies as a way of re-envision the concept of human, using Octavia Butler’s Dawn as a case study. Specifically, this study contends that Butler’s re-envisioning is sonic, imagining the concept of self as it is understood by Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of the “resonant subject,” in that sound embroils us within our environment. This sonic, resonant body is revealed in Dawn through Butler’s adaption of Roland Barthes’ concept of “grain,” which is not merely embodied sound, but the result of artifice – a carefully crafted “slip” that allows for a way of …
Flesh In Line With The Mind : Gender In Caitlin Kiernan’S The Drowning Girl., Sarah Buckley
Flesh In Line With The Mind : Gender In Caitlin Kiernan’S The Drowning Girl., Sarah Buckley
College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses
This paper analyzes how Caitlyn R. Kiernan in her novel The Drowning Girl characterizes gender identity, particularly in regards to women, both transgender and cisgender. The book's characterization of gender roles for cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women, while seeming on the surface to subvert sexist stereotypes, reproduces the pitfalls of feminist literary criticism popularized in the 1970s and 1980s. Notably, such themes include viewing women's madness as a method of transcending masculine rationality, a dichotomized essentialism of masculinity and femininity, and universalizing women's experience without regards to race, class, and nationality. Transgender autobiographical and literary archetypes employed in …
Ironic Deference : An Inquiry Into The Nineteenth-Century Feminist Rhetoric Of Kesiah Shelton., Melissa Rothman
Ironic Deference : An Inquiry Into The Nineteenth-Century Feminist Rhetoric Of Kesiah Shelton., Melissa Rothman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project examines the works of Kesiah Shelton, a writer for popular magazines in the late nineteenth century who used irony in interesting ways to critique the social norms of the period. Although, scholars have noted that female authorship was a an expanding field during this period, there were very specific gendered expectations limiting what female authors wrote about; women were primarily limited to writing about domestic matters and were discouraged from taking up other topics associated with the male public sphere such as politics. Many scholars have noted how the cult of domesticity valorized women as superior moral beings, …