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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey Nov 2008

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey

English Dissertations

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes …


Rethinking The Historical Lens: A Case For Relational Identity In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Annalisa Wiggins Nov 2008

Rethinking The Historical Lens: A Case For Relational Identity In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Annalisa Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis proposes a theory of relational identity development in Chicana literature. Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera offers an interpretation of Chicana identity that is largely based on historical models and mythology, which many scholars have found useful in interpreting Chicana literature. However, I contend that another text, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, not only illustrates the need for an alternative paradigm for considering identity development, but in fact offers such an alternative. I argue that Cisneros shows a model for relational identity development, wherein the individual develops in the context of her community and is not determined solely …


The Evolution Of Feminine Loyalty Trends In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Appalachian Literature., Candace Jean Daniel Aug 2008

The Evolution Of Feminine Loyalty Trends In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Appalachian Literature., Candace Jean Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Loyalty to the self, family, and husband create interesting tensions for feminine characters in Appalachian literature. Traditional views of loyalty dictate that the Appalachian woman chooses to be loyal to her husband and family while abandoning her self loyalty. Appalachian women writers define the terms of loyalty and the conflicts these three levels create. Furthermore, studying a progression of novels from 1926 to the present shows that feminine loyalty trends have changed. This argument focuses on examining loyalty trends of feminine Appalachian characters, studying the contentions among those loyalties, specifically showing how loyalty patterns have changed in literature, and offering …


Will Travel : Journey Memoirs, Kelly Renee Broce Jan 2008

Will Travel : Journey Memoirs, Kelly Renee Broce

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Memoirs and poetry. Concerns the travels of a West Virginian woman, the granddaughter of a first generation Sicilian West Virginian, within the U.S., the Bahamas, Thailand, and China, where she taught English as a second language for two years from 2000-2002. Themes include identity (Appalachian, Persian, African-American, Chinese, and even Uigur), ethnicity and gender in West Virginia, fatalism, religion, poverty, Diaspora, travel, discrimination, the Ugly American/European, Ah Q, Imperialism, Orientalism, otherness, political asylum, victims and survival, substance abuse in West Virginia, feminist narrative, West Virginian authors, mountaintop removal, environmentalism, and protest.


"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George Jan 2008

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …