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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti Feb 2023

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …


The Burdens Of Body's Beauty: Pre-Raphaelite Representations Of The Body In William Morris's The Defence Of Guenevere And Other Poems (1858) And Algernon Swinburne's Poems, Thomas A. Steffler Mar 2010

The Burdens Of Body's Beauty: Pre-Raphaelite Representations Of The Body In William Morris's The Defence Of Guenevere And Other Poems (1858) And Algernon Swinburne's Poems, Thomas A. Steffler

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation studies representations of the body in the first two published volumes of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858) and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866). These two volumes (along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1870 Poems) were disparaged as the work of the “Fleshly School of Poetry” by the critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, and this dissertation seeks to understand through close reading how the depiction of the body in the poetry of Morris and Swinburne so perturbed their contemporaries and why it continues to elude modern readers. Particularly, this …