Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

In Search Of A Homeland: Jewish-American Women Writers And Their Struggle With Cultural Alienation, Alisa K. Burris

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the lives and fictional works of five Jewish-American women writers of the twentieth century within the complex context of cultural alienation. Authors Anzia Yezierska, Dorothy Parker, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Marge Piercy are each featured in separate chapters that examine how personal experiences of estrangement weave through and influence their texts. As a result of this dissertation’s scrutiny, meaningful connections emerge between these diverse Jewish women authors and the transformation of painful struggles into profound journeys to seek belonging. Through their works’ literal and figurative pilgrimages to reach an ultimate homeland, all five writers creatively illustrate …

Baby Boomer Female Identity In The Literature Of White Women Writers, Ashley Diedrich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the critical conversation on American women's fiction by examining the works of American female Boomer authors and their representations of white female identity in Boomer literature. The texts included in this study range from 2004 to 2018, offering several recent years of perspective on Boomer women. Because these books are current, few, if any, scholarly articles focus on them and their contribution to American literature, allowing this dissertation to create new theories and connect to pre-existing ideas, such as ageism. In addition, this dissertation uses some of the themes prevalent in the work of scholars who …

Telling Stories, Healing Cultures: Feminist Healing Narratives By Contemporary American Women Of Color, Lindsay Marie Vreeland

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Due to their experiences of oppression as a result of intersecting identities, women of Color are the most disenfranchised by Eurocentric patriarchal accounts and typically most in need of healing. As I explore in my research, works by women writers of Color—such as Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls, Sandra Cisneros’s Have You Seen Marie?, jia qing wilson-yang’s Small Beauty, and Toni Morrison’s Home and Paradise—gathered in this dissertation intentionally question and revise white settler versions of history that devalue people of Color; however, they also revise familiar stories and cultural traditions in their own communities. Doing so both empowers and enables …

Vulnerability, Trauma, And Testimony In American Women’S Literature: A Long History, Jennifer L. Fife

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the effects of vulnerability and trauma in American women’s literature across the intersections of genre, race, and time. In this dissertation I have applied a feminist long history approach to examine women’s literature from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries together inspired by Mary Beard’s theory that compartmentalizing women’s history ignores long-range patterns and contributions. I have assembled the beginnings of a canon of women’s trauma literature that allows women writers to form a multi-century discourse community wherein trauma and recovery may occur. This analysis applies twentieth century medical research about trauma and recovery, particularly that of Judith …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …