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Literature in English, British Isles

2020

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Articles 1 - 30 of 42

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

"Blood Will Have Blood": Power, Performance, And Lady Macbeth's Gender Trouble, Cristina León Alfar Dec 2020

"Blood Will Have Blood": Power, Performance, And Lady Macbeth's Gender Trouble, Cristina León Alfar

Journal X

No abstract provided.

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Through The Devil's Mirror: The Villain And The Sinthomosexual As Manifestations Of The Death Drive, Andrew Markus Dec 2020

Through The Devil's Mirror: The Villain And The Sinthomosexual As Manifestations Of The Death Drive, Andrew Markus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) offers a model for reading queer sexuality and societal place very much in line with that which begins to emerge in early Gothic literature, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796). The Gothic villain aligns with Edelman’s sinthomosexual to illustrate a pattern of victimization and retaliation which results in both the villain and sinthomosexual’s persistent abjection from the social order. However, a close reading of Lewis’s narrative for its depiction of psychological trauma rooted in sexual expression suggests that this queer negativity is not the sum total of …

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From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen Dec 2020

From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological …

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Discourse And Discography: The Pushback Of Female Writers, Characters, And Pop Stars, Amara D. Stroud Nov 2020

Discourse And Discography: The Pushback Of Female Writers, Characters, And Pop Stars, Amara D. Stroud

Honors College Theses

In my senior thesis, I will be analyzing and comparing early modern literature and “pop” music in order to follow the development of women’s ability to gain power. Throughout history, there has been an ongoing struggle for women’s equity in education, publishing, and socially acceptable actions. While it may seem that comparing literature from the 17th Century to current pop lyrics, there are major connections that show a consistent female struggle - the inability to voice one’s true feelings due to the reaction of an educated man or an unchanging society. My thesis will focus on literary works such …

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Discourse And Discography: The Pushback Of Female Writers, Characters, And Pop Stars, Amara D. Stroud Nov 2020

Discourse And Discography: The Pushback Of Female Writers, Characters, And Pop Stars, Amara D. Stroud

Honors College Theses

In my senior thesis, I will be analyzing and comparing early modern literature and contemporary popular music in order to follow the development of women’s ability to gain power. Throughout history, there has been an ongoing struggle for women’s equity in education, publishing, and socially acceptable actions. Though the connection between literature and pop music is unordinary, there are major connections that show a consistent female struggle - the inability to voice one’s true feelings due to the reaction of an educated man or an unchanging society. Overall, the response of female characters, authors, and artists is to show their …

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Review Of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability And Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nowell Marshall Nov 2020

Review Of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability And Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nowell Marshall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

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Review Of Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure By John Cleland, Edited By Richard Terry And Helen Williams, Bethany E. Qualls Nov 2020

Review Of Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure By John Cleland, Edited By Richard Terry And Helen Williams, Bethany E. Qualls

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, edited by Richard Terry and Helen Williams, by Bethany E. Qualls.

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Beyond Victims & Villains: Teaching Cleland With Haywood & Behn, Christopher Nagle Nov 2020

Beyond Victims & Villains: Teaching Cleland With Haywood & Behn, Christopher Nagle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay explores strategies for teaching Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) in the introductory literature classroom, and why it might be especially valuable to do so at a time when issues surrounding sexual violence, rape culture, and the politics of consent continue to be prominent inside and outside the college classroom.

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“Yield It Up Cheerfully”: Teaching Consent, Violence, And Coercion In Samuel Richardson’S Pamela, Leah Grisham Nov 2020

“Yield It Up Cheerfully”: Teaching Consent, Violence, And Coercion In Samuel Richardson’S Pamela, Leah Grisham

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Drawn from the author’s experience teaching Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela during the #Metoo movement, this essay argues that bringing current discourses of consent and gender-based violence into conversation with the novel deepens students’ engagement with and interest in the eighteenth century. While students identify specters of Pamela and Mr. B’s relationship in their own worlds, the novel is also a helpful tool in revealing the many ways in which consent can be coerced.

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Review Of The London Stage Database, Fiona Ritchie Nov 2020

Review Of The London Stage Database, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The London Stage Database is an open-access and open-source website that digitises the performance records contained in the print volumes of the London Stage, published in the 1960s. The database's flexible search function and intuitive interface open up new directions in research and will change the way we think about eighteenth-century theatre.

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A Travel Writer Reconsidered: Recovering Mary Morgan’S Mary, The Osier-Peeler, Emily D. Spunaugle Nov 2020

A Travel Writer Reconsidered: Recovering Mary Morgan’S Mary, The Osier-Peeler, Emily D. Spunaugle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Recently discovered is the singly-extant 1798 quarto chapbook, Mary, the Osier-Peeler, a Simple but True Story, written by Mary Morgan, best known for her 1795 travel narrative, A Tour to Milford Haven, in the Year 1791. The inaccessibility of the osier poem has shaped the scholarly understanding of Morgan as solely a travel writer, disregarding the intertextuality of her published oeuvre and its post-publication circulation. This essay revisits the historiography of Mary Morgan and demonstrates her embeddedness in local networks, coterie relationships with notables such as Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, and introduces evidence of a broader, international audience to better …

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A Novel Moment For #Writewithaphra, Laura Runge, Tonya Howe Nov 2020

A Novel Moment For #Writewithaphra, Laura Runge, Tonya Howe

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Introduction to the Fall 2020 issue that describes our summer 2020 writing camp #WriteWithAphra.

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Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz Nov 2020

Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Extant in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, the Middle English romance Emaré has nevertheless captivated modern scholars and readers. The majority of studies have focused on the text’s material culture, centred on the description of a luxurious cloth that takes up 10% of the poem. A recent global turn in medieval studies has consistently highlighted the role of medieval Europe in defining and supporting imperial projects, simultaneously challenging the Eurocentrism of medieval studies and the supposed neutrality of medieval European culture. This article brings Emaré into conversation with material culture and postcolonial critique to investigate the imperial politics of the text. …

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Much Ado About Contemporary Women: Gender Adapted In Contemporary Settings, Jessica C. Valdes Jul 2020

Much Ado About Contemporary Women: Gender Adapted In Contemporary Settings, Jessica C. Valdes

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing has been reproduced multiple times in a contemporary context. This thesis focuses on two key productions, BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told televised adaptation and Joss Whedon’s 2013 film and examines how these productions translate the gender themes in the play to a contemporary setting. To study translations of gender, this thesis is focused on the adaptations of Beatrice and Hero, two major female characters of the play. The comparison of these adaptations is accomplished through analyzing the pieces and reviewing existing work. While there are some important differences between the adaptations, the major problems Beatrice and Hero are …

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Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng Jun 2020

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

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Women's Self-Definition Through Poetry, Olivia Samimy Jun 2020

Women's Self-Definition Through Poetry, Olivia Samimy

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

This project looks at five female poets across history – Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Forough Farrokhzad, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath – to explore the various challenges they faced writing in their patriarchal societies. Further, it looks at the way they each used their poetry to define themselves and their own identity. This project seeks to explain why this act of self-definition is significant, and why it so often drew criticism from the writers’ respective societies. What was discovered, is that the act of a woman crafting her own self-definition through poetry is a privilege in a patriarchal society, where …

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Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella Jun 2020

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

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British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh Jun 2020

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

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Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia Jun 2020

Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia

Publications and Research

This article locates Fantomina in a literary tradition that proposes all-female communities, such as convents and monasteries, as liberating and empowering spaces. I argue that the novella implies a virtual community rather than an actual one, as the heroine collectively embodies many different women, all of distinct social ranks: the heroine is both one woman and a variety of women brought together under the auspices of a single body, much the way discrete individuals together compose a community. Then, too, Beauplaisir, the object of the heroine’s desire, treats all the personae the same, no matter their social station. This emphasis …

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Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw May 2020

Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper considers the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine from the late Middle English romance Melusine. By invoking contemporary leadership theory, this paper identifies leadership maneuvers in Melusine that are similar to those often practiced by women today, but the discourses of gender identity then ultimately render Melusine’s leadership invisible, just as leadership discourses today often render female leadership invisible. By uncovering the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine and identifying commonalities with the leadership of women today, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the contemporary problem of the marked …

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Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier May 2020

Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier

College Honors Program

This thesis examines the relationship between gender and heroism in the Beowulf tale and two of its modern retellings. It includes an exploration of the medieval gender roles of the original epic using Seamus Heaney and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations. This thesis also addresses the ways in which some characters disturb gender binaries and social roles — especially in the case of Grendel’s mother. The second and third chapters focus on two retellings of the Beowulf text respectively: John Gardner’s Grendel , told from the perspective of the monster Grendel; and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife , which is …

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Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund May 2020

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

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“Lay Down My Soul At Stake”: Of Female Friendship In The Merchant Of Venice, Othello, And The Winter’S Tale, Audrey-Melody Cubas May 2020

“Lay Down My Soul At Stake”: Of Female Friendship In The Merchant Of Venice, Othello, And The Winter’S Tale, Audrey-Melody Cubas

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I will not only shift a critical eye on both male and female friendship, but more specifically and extensively, I will examine how Shakespeare treats female friendship in three of his plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. The female pairs of focus, in play order, will be Portia and Nerissa, Desdemona and Emilia, and Hermione and Paulina. Additionally, I will give an overlook of the history of Renaissance friendship portrayal in both the literary and historical accounts. This historical background will serve to highlight the clear contrast between the emphasized …

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Playing To Win: The Marriage Market In Jane Austen’S Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Caroline Elizabeth Nall May 2020

Playing To Win: The Marriage Market In Jane Austen’S Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Caroline Elizabeth Nall

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to analyze the implications of the marriage market in Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Emma. In these books, the main focus will be on Isabella Thorpe, who is actively participating in the “game” of the marriage market, Charlotte Palmer, who has won the “game” of marriage, and Miss Bates, who has lost the “game” of marriage. The historical context of these situations, taking place in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, has been taken into account. Austen has created characters to demonstrate the many aspects of a female’s life and how it relates …

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Toxic Masculinity In Henry V, Abigail King May 2020

Toxic Masculinity In Henry V, Abigail King

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Toxic masculinity motivates the characters and plot of Henry V by William Shakespeare. The play revolves around King Henry V and how he is a model leader of England during the Hundred Years War. Henry uses what a “true” man should be to inspire his soldiers when morale is low. Further, manlihood is seen in the characters or lack thereof. Characters that fail to follow the high expectations of masculinity are killed. Audience members recognize the importance of masculinity throughout the play, although the outcomes of those stereotypes are dangerous seen in the superficial friendships and suppression of authentic self.

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The Fallen Woman: An Exploration Of The Voiceless Women In Victorian England Through Three Plays Of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo May 2020

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration Of The Voiceless Women In Victorian England Through Three Plays Of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo

English (MA) Theses

This essay establishes the Christian myth within Wilde’s three plays, calling attention to the gender politics that he fought against in the Victorian era. Through Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband I will prove the Christological myth that each play adopts and establish Wilde’s ability to make the religion “transformational.” Wilde’s productions of characters like Salomé, Mrs. Allonby, Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Hester are examples of the “fallen woman” of Victorian England. The treatment of women by women will illuminate the passiveness of the Victorian Woman and their compliance with the patriarchal norm. This norm continues through …

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Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson May 2020

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

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Byron And Don Juan: A Case Study And Queer Reading Of The Closeted Libertine, Caitlin Stanfield May 2020

Byron And Don Juan: A Case Study And Queer Reading Of The Closeted Libertine, Caitlin Stanfield

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the major theme of homosexuality throughout the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron, ultimately focusing on his 1819 iteration of Don Juan. It presents historically relevant information regarding the sodomy laws, religious sermons, anti-sodomite publications, and other obstacles that, I argue, prevented Byron from expressing his sexuality openly. The queer Byron, of course, exists elsewhere. Through close readings of Byron’s correspondence and of his verse, my thesis argues that we can read Byron’s highly coded, homoerotic jargon for what it is, shedding new light on the active but concealed homosexual community of nineteenth-century England.

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Anti-Normative Women And Queer Space In Early Modern Drama, Chelsea Brooks Apr 2020

Anti-Normative Women And Queer Space In Early Modern Drama, Chelsea Brooks

Theses

The most interesting oddity about the Early Modern English stage is the overwhelming presence of the female form despite the obvious lack of female performers. Male actors performed female characters and sometimes those female characters were subversive and tested the boundaries of their constructed heteronormative society. A common comedic trope followed the crossdressed crossgendered heroine, or the boy actor dressed as women dressed as a man. This trope appears in the plays discussed in this thesis: Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 and John Lyly’s Gallathea. By adapting Michel de Certeau’s concept of space, wherein space …

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A Review Of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of The Mind, 1770–1830, Kandice Sharren Apr 2020

A Review Of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of The Mind, 1770–1830, Kandice Sharren

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A Review of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of the Mind, 1770–1830, by Kandice Sharren

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