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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America
The Creature In The Looking Glass: Miltonic Marriage And The Female Self In Breaking Dawn, Jay Wright
The Creature In The Looking Glass: Miltonic Marriage And The Female Self In Breaking Dawn, Jay Wright
Undergraduate Research Awards
Near the close of Breaking Dawn, the final installment of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, Edward asks his new wife Bella a question. “When will you ever see yourself clearly?” (Dawn 744). Bella has no answer for him. Edward's question and, more importantly, Bella's apparent inability to answer is symptomatic of a broader issue throughout Breaking Dawn, in which, even as Bella obtains all that she has desired, her sense of self begins to fracture. Breaking Dawn formalizes Bella’s union with Edward through a series of increasingly binding steps: first through legal marriage, then sexual intimacy and pregnancy, then through vampiric …
“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham
“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …