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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Thinking Back Through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare In Orlando And A Room Of One's Own, Maureen Gallagher Jul 2008

Thinking Back Through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare In Orlando And A Room Of One's Own, Maureen Gallagher

English Theses

This thesis is a feminist interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of Shakespeare in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Although Woolf’s admiration of Shakespeare is evident in both texts, Woolf’s identification of Shakespeare as a gender-neutral or feminist-friendly writer must be qualified. Woolf presents Shakespeare as a worthy but incomplete artistic model, for his work does not explore women with adequate complexity. In these texts, Woolf partially “writes with” Shakespeare, but she also uses his literary works and his status as a cultural icon both to critique the conventional treatment of women as limited by the male perspective and …


In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes Apr 2008

In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

In early 1886, William Dean Howells fell into an ugly public debate with the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. Carried out in the pages of Harper’s Monthly and the New Princeton Review, this dispute started as a disagreement about the origins of literary craftsmanship but quickly escalated into a heated epistemological squabble about the limits of historical knowledge. It began in March of that year, when Howells gave a mixed review to Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), a history of American poetry. Though Howells conceded the importance of Stedman’s contribution to the emerging discipline of American literary history, …