Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Terrors Of Everyday Life: The Gothic Novel As A Woman's Conduct Guide To Survival, 1791-1817, Jessica Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Gothic is often associated with the fantastical, with people and events that only take place within our darkest nightmares. In my thesis, I explore how, in the hands of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, the Gothic exposes the hidden dangers of reality perpetuated by conduct literature. Within conduct manuals, thousands of regulations direct women’s behaviors and identify the perfect woman as one who exists passively within the safety of the domestic sphere. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) engage in subterfuge against eighteenth-century conduct literature and expose the realities of the domestic sphere: …

Visions: Re-Historicizing Genre: Teaching Haywood’S The Adventures Of Eovaai In A Fantasy-Themed Survey Course, Megan E. Cole

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

Eliza Haywood is an increasingly popular author to assign in eighteenth-century literature courses. But Haywood is also a prime figure to represent the eighteenth century in courses with a broader scope. This essay proposes teaching The Adventures of Eovaai in a fantasy-focused, introductory-level survey of British Literature. Identifying Eovaai as part of the fantasy tradition leverages students’ prior knowledge and facilitates teaching this complex novel to first-year students. Eovaai provides a wealth of topics for class discussions and activities, including the development of the novel as a genre, identity and othering in fantasy literature, and the use of fantasy conventions …

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a divergence between Woolf’s vision of private physical spaces necessary for creating art and that of some feminists of color such as Alice Walker, Ortiz Cofer, and Gloria Anzaldua. Both Woolf and these contemporary scholars agree on the importance of physical spaces for female artists. However, they disagree on the nature of these spaces. Woolf’s private physical space is a room with a lock on the door whereas these writers’ room is the kitchen table, the bus, or the welfare line. Walker and like-minded writers challenge the narrowness of Woolf’s room because her locked room is a luxury …

Review Of Women Wanderers And The Writing Of Mobility, 1784-1814, By Ingrid Horrocks, Elizabeth Porter

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

A review of Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 by Ingrid Horrocks. Written by Elizabeth Porter.

Hor Bouks: Or, Her Book: Finding Women Readers, Writers, & Producers In Early Modern Literature, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The impact of women on the history of literature can be difficult to track, but they made important contributions to writing, publishing, and collecting. This short talk focuses on works in the Rare and Fine Book Collection in the Milner Library Special Collections department, with a particular emphasis on the writer Lady Mary Wroth and the collector Frances Wolfreston. Wroth was the first Englishwoman to publish a complete sonnet sequence and an original work of prose fiction and Wolfreston is considered one of the first notable women book collectors.

Between The Lines: Reflexive Misogyny And Remediated Forms In A Secret Online Group Of Women Poets, Rae Elizabeth Snobl

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis examines an online, secret writing community for 1,800+ women-only poets called “The Retreat.” Analysis of two years of Facebook posts and interviews with group members revealed a noticeable membership split between those publishing through conventional literary venues, the “traditional poets,” and social media poets. These “Instapoets,” as labeled by popular media each had between 10,000 to 125,000+ followers on sites like Instagram and Facebook—significant numbers when seen in the context of readership and monetizing. Yet, their digital, snippet poems did not hold to the literary norms of poetry, both in form and publishing method. This led to a …

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

“That Confusion Of Who Is Who, Flesh And Flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, And The Body In Postwar And Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Renee Blevins

Theses and Dissertations

In “That confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature, I investigate how the body limits, disrupts, ruptures, or recuperates the mother/daughter relationship in postwar and contemporary texts by twentieth-century US women writers. These narratives portray the construction of female subjectivity when the feminine self seems insufficiently distinct from the mother (or daughter). In four chapters arranged chronologically by decade, I examine texts by Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. On the one hand, mothers in these texts …

The Chaotic Domestic: Tracing Affect In Representations Of Nation, Class, And Gender In Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Women’S Writing, Kelly J. Hunnings

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation traces a term I call the “chaotic domestic” in the writing of a collection of eighteenth-century women laboring-class writers: Mary Barber, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. The chaotic domestic in the hands of these writers is multi-layered and affect-driven, focusing as they do on issues regarding nation, class, and gender. As both a poetic trope and the seeming natural and dynamic state of the domestic sphere, the image of the domestic that this set of writers represents and defines is turbulent, unruly, and one that deals with the tangled web of local and global, …

Maternal Criticism: Reading Two Middle Eastern Women Writers As Nonviolent Peace Activism, Charlyn Marie Ingwerson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advocates for reading the literatures of two Middle Eastern women writers through a Maternal Critical lens that recognizes the demands of universal vulnerability in characters who resist violence, and responds in Maternal communities of Readers that connect readers to characters, readers to writers, and readers to other readers, carrying the struggle for equity forward. My unfolding argument, centered on Maternal Critical activity in the novels of Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh and Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, demonstrates how literature by these Middle Eastern women is part of a narrative context of women’s peacemaking and resistance to violence, a part …

Review Of Teresa Barnard, Ed. British Women And The Intellectual World In The Long Eighteenth Century., Judith Dorn

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

Review of Teresa Barnard, ed. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Discovering And Recovering The Nineteenth-Century Journals Of Martha E. Mcmillan In An American Women Writer’S Course: A Collaborative Digital Recovery Project, Michelle M. Wood, Lynn A. Brock, Gregory A. Martin, Adam John Wagner

English, Literature, and Modern Languages Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Bluestocking Archive, Emory Women Writers Resource Project, And Women’S Travel Writing, 1780-1840: A Bio-Bibliographical Database, Megan Peiser

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

Review of The Bluestocking Archive, Emory Women Writers Resource Project, and Women's Travel Writing 1780-1840.

“Get Married Or Teach School”: Women’S Writing And Women’S Education In Antebellum America, Lindsey Sheppard

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

Abstract: This article will examine the views expressed by American female writers about the roles of women and purposes of women’s education in the early 19th century. During the antebellum period (1820-1860), the American education system prepared white female students for two roles: to be teachers before marriage and to be ideal wives and mothers. This society believed that women, as wives and mothers, should manage the home and instill traditional American and Christian values in their children. During this period, women wrote a large body of nonfiction articles about social issues, such as education reform, and the roles of …

Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditionally, naturalism and the Gothic have been seen as genres that have little to do with one another. However, Frank Norris, one of the practitioners and theoreticians of canonical naturalism, argued that the roots of naturalism lie not in realism (as is often argued) but in romanticism. This project seeks to explore Norris’s claim by positing a new genre—Gothic naturalism. Gothic naturalism is a hybrid genre that combines the Gothic’s haunting nature and representations of the abject, grotesque, and uncanny with canonical naturalism’s interrogation of making choices and the forces of chance, determinism, and heredity. Although naturalism is traditionally seen …

“The Finest Production Of The Finest Country Upon Earth”: Gender And Nationality In The Writings Of Nineteenth-Century British Women Travelers To Portugal, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Critical attention to the writings of nineteenth-century British women travelers has repeatedly stressed their value as evidence of the writers’ attempts at overcoming the constraints of nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity that constructed women as inferior or ancillary (Frawley; Robinson; Foster; Dolan; Middleton); it has also often emphasized the importance of reading them within contemporary discourses such as imperialism, colonialism, or nationalism (Blunt; Frawley; Foster; Mills; Siegel). This essay focuses on three accounts by nineteenth- century British women travelers to Portugal— Marianne Baillie’s Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824); Julia Pardoe’s Traits and Traditions of Portugal …

Bridging The Distances: Women Writers Exploring The Nightmare Of Vietnam, Christina Triezenberg

Christina Triezenberg

This essay seeks to challenge the now-common practice of excluding Vietnam-era antiwar verse from contemporary literary anthologies by exploring the works produced by professional and amateur female poets who, in many cases, had witnessed the war firsthand and reflected on their experiences in verse that depicts the often harsh realities of this still-contested conflict. By exploring poetry written by women who served in a variety of capacities during the war, this essay underscores the repeated attempts made by women writers to bridge the distances between the home front and the battlefront and offers a compelling argument about the importance of …

"Poetry", Stephen C. Behrendt

Stephen C Behrendt

No abstract provided.

Orlando: Women's Writing In The British Isles From The Beginnings To The Present, Edited By Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, And Isobel Grundy, Melanie Bigold

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

No abstract provided.

Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches To Teaching Women Writers, Karen Gevirtz, Martha Bowden, Jonathan Sadow

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches To Teaching Women Writers, Karen Gevirtz, Martha Bowden, Jonathan Sadow

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

No abstract provided.

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924-1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how identity—gender, race, sexuality, regional affiliation—intersects with considerations of the dramatic genre, commercial and critical factors in the American theatre, and understandings about the American South to complicate how contemporary southern women playwrights represent region. In light of the always-already "performative" nature of the South, and geographical, commercial, and ideological factors that set the South in opposition to the North, southern women playwrights face additional difficulties in navigating issues of authenticity and simulacra, the universal versus the specific, ideas about southern "backwardness" versus northern sophistication, and audience participation in fetishizing or distancing the South. Using drama as …

Influence, Anxiety, And Erasure In Women's Writing: Romantic Becomes Victorian.Pdf, Stephen C. Behrendt

Stephen C Behrendt

A Critic In Her Own Right: Taking Virginia Woolf's Literary Criticism Seriously, Yvonne Nicole Richter

English Theses

Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to …

'Grung Tell Me Wud': An Introduction To Karl, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Olive Senior informs us in 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su: Finding a Literary Voice' that Jamaican elders believe the ground is the place where ancestral wisdom is located and they will explain and validate their warning or advice by saying, 'Grung tell me wud' (36). Jamaican linguist/literary critic/poet/and novelist Velma Pollard has put her ear to the ground of Jamaica and shared many important words of ancestral wisdom with us. This was a natural development for the talented girlchild born into an artistic family in Woodside, Jamaica, a rural community rich in folk traditions: her father was …

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …

The Perils And Empowerments Of Mountain Literacies: Reading Loss And Shifting Identities In Appalachian Memoirs And Novels, Erica Abrams Locklear

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the literary portrayal of literacy events in memoirs and novels written by Appalachian women during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from contemporary literacy scholarship, my project engages several definitions of the term "literacy," including theories defining it as a technical skill, a social act, cultural knowledge, or a potent form of ideological power. In a region historically (and often inaccurately) stigmatized as illiterate, "literacy" is a loaded term, a concept doubly associated with cultural pride and with cultural loss. By applying literacy theories to Appalachian literature, I analyze the identity conflicts literacy attainment causes for several …