English Language and Literature Commons^™

Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)Stories In Caramelo, Sally Marie Giles

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses the ways in which Sandra Cisneros makes historical claims from a Chicana perspective by telling fictional family stories in Caramelo. Not only have Chicanas traditionally been marginalized ethnically by the Anglo mainstream, they have also suffered disenfranchisement as women in their own male-dominated cultural community. Both elements have contributed to the cultural silencing of Chicanas outside of domestic spaces, and particularly in historical discourse. Cisneros introduces storytelling as a means of empowering Chicanas through language that allows them to speak historically and still signify culturally. By telling stories from the site of the family, she ingeniously utilizes …

Fortune Personified And The Fall (And Rise) Of Women In Chaucer's Monk's Tale And The Autobiographical Writings Of Christine De Pizan, Leona C. Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will posit that a query of the medieval trope, Fortune, can be read as a query into femininity. Fortune is depicted with many quintessentially medieval feminine traits, and women in texts that discuss Fortune often have Fortune's traits. While texts that link Fortune and femininity usually do so to censure women, some writers turned the trope to their advantage for just the opposite purpose. Both Chaucer in the "Monk's Tale" and Christine de Pizan personify Fortune to subtly point out the flaws in antifeminist medieval view of women. This thesis explores the ways in which these writers cleverly …

In Pursuit Of Feminist Postfeminism And The Blessings Of Buttercup, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically …

The High Cost Of Dancing: When The Indian Women's Movement Went After The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. …

Feminism In Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners Of The Americans, The Vicar Of Wrexhill, The Life And Adventures Of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw And Jessie Phillips, Jessica S. Boulard

LSU Master's Theses

In The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the travelogue that launched Trollope's career as a literary figure, she accounts the four years spent living in America with the majority of her children and without her husband. The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), published fifteen years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, is the first anti-slavery novel written in English. Other novels, like The Vicar of Wrexhill (1834) and Jessie Phillips (1844) discuss legal matters. A common thread connects much of Trollope's work. That thread is feminism, which places her in the company of (and somewhere in between) Mary …