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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Smarginatura: The Art And Politics Of Elena Ferrante, Ryan A. Lillestrand Oct 2023

Smarginatura: The Art And Politics Of Elena Ferrante, Ryan A. Lillestrand

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In the Neapolitan Quartet, a sprawling epic following the lives of two women in post-war Italy, the author, Elena Ferrante, explores the intimate relationship between politics and art, pushing at the borders we often construct between the two. At a particularly critical moment in the novels, the central character, Elena Greco, a poor girl from Naples who rises to the position of a successful novelist, is told by her more politically radical friends that she is not doing enough, that “this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.” But then, when is? The current political climate in Italy is …


“I, Too, Am An Occupied Territory”: Border Crossings And Personal Sovereignty In Three Novels By Dominican American Women, Leia M. Lynn Jan 2022

“I, Too, Am An Occupied Territory”: Border Crossings And Personal Sovereignty In Three Novels By Dominican American Women, Leia M. Lynn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border crossing(s) and personal sovereignty are intimately and complexly connected in novels by and about Dominican American women. Through readings of In the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez, Dominicana by Angie Cruz, and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, I argue that patriarchal forms of authority remove female autonomy by trespassing on personal boundaries, and that the renegotiation of that power is achieved through formations of community, especially with other women, through nonheteronormative relationships that are present inside and extend outside the text. The interplay of patriarchal authority, violence, and alienation on the four protagonists is examined at length, …


Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi Dec 2021

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 …


Hor Bouks: Or, Her Book: Finding Women Readers, Writers, & Producers In Early Modern Literature, Rebecca Fitzsimmons Mar 2021

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.


Maternal Criticism: Reading Two Middle Eastern Women Writers As Nonviolent Peace Activism, Charlyn Marie Ingwerson May 2019

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 …


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 Apr 2017

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

Martha McMillan Research Papers

The following essay tells a story about an undergraduate American Women Writer's course, the University archives, a nineteenth-century journal, and a Digital Recovery project. The essay explains that the story of undergraduates and their work to discover and to recover a primary text within the context of a single course could not have happened without collaboration. Because our story is a story of collaboration, I cannot tell it alone. I am Michelle Wood, an Associate Professor of English who teaches American Literature. During spring semester 2015, I collaborated with Lynn Brock, the Dean of Library Sciences, to create an archival …


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 Apr 2017

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.


Conexiones Transatlanticas: Expandiendo Limites En El Mundo Hispano (1890-1910), Argelia Garcia Saldivar Apr 2016

Conexiones Transatlanticas: Expandiendo Limites En El Mundo Hispano (1890-1910), Argelia Garcia Saldivar

Open Access Dissertations

Este trabajo examina las transformaciones a patrones socio-culturales en el mundo hispano, que permiten a la mujer incorporarse a la fuerza productiva; como producto de la presión ejercida por comunidades de escritoras en foros internacionales sobre el atraso educativo y cultural que sufre la mujer. En esta disertación se estudia una economía que gira alrededor de las necesidades de la mujer promovida por la prensa periódica, que además de fortalecer la industria cultural y de entretenimiento, también auto-educa a la sociedad sobre la necesidad de educación profesional, mejora de condiciones laborales y apertura a espacios comerciales y profesionales para la …


Kind Girls, Evil Sisters, And Wise Women: Coded Gender Discourse In Literary Fairy Tales By German Women In The 19th Century, Julie Koehler Jan 2016

Kind Girls, Evil Sisters, And Wise Women: Coded Gender Discourse In Literary Fairy Tales By German Women In The 19th Century, Julie Koehler

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an analysis of fairy tales by German women in late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Although hundreds of women published fairy tales in Germany in the nineteenth century, they remain absent from current scholarship. Recent work by scholars Shawn Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell have brought these fairy tales back into print, but there remains very little critical work on them. This dissertation takes the focus of retellings of the Kind and Unkind Girls tale type, also known as “Frau Holle.” At first glance, the women’s variants depict modest, passive, and hardworking Kind Girls who are very similar to …


Women's Wartime Life Writing In Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo Sep 2015

Women's Wartime Life Writing In Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to …


Overcoming Gender: The Impact Of The Persian Language On Iranian Women’S Confessional Literature, Farideh Dayanim Goldin Jan 2015

Overcoming Gender: The Impact Of The Persian Language On Iranian Women’S Confessional Literature, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

[From the Introduction] The idea that language embodies patriarchal thought processes, severing women writers from the written language and from their own words, was first elaborated by the French feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray argues, for example, that language generally denies women a distinct subjectivity, with the result that the voice of women has largely been excluded from mainstream cultural discourse (Donovan). In this chapter, I juxtapose this theory to the obstacles faced by Iranian women writers of life narratives. Is it possible that Persian could have impeded Iranian women’s literary aspirations, especially in the genre of …