Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“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 …

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 …

Nawal Al Saadawi And Hanan Al Shaykh's Authorship: Between Arab And Western Reception, Diana M. Obeid

Institute for the Humanities Theses

When Lebanese author Layla Baalbaki wrote her novel A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon in 1964 about a woman's defiance to her husband's wishes and his way of maintaining societal customs and traditions, an avalanche of criticism was directed against her. She was accused of obscenity and was put on trial before a Lebanese Prosecutor. Baalbaki's experiences are symbolic of the paradoxical and contradictory reception many Arab female authors have received in the East and the West. In this thesis, I discuss this discrepancy of reception in the works of Nawal Al Saadawi and Hanan Al Shaykh, two …

The Inner Voice, Janis Ruth Bagnall Cochrane

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The scope of this project is two-fold. The key purpose is to demonstrate the relationship between the voice of Lee Smith, a Southern writer from Appalachia and the voice of the author, another Southern writer from the Outer Banks. The foremost conclusion that has been drawn is that a writer's voice comes from deep inside the writer's unconscious. It is a product of generations of experiences that have embedded themselves in the writer's psyche. Some of the assumptions and prejudices surrounding southern women are discussed to some degree.

The second purpose is for this writer to show her work. This …

"A Terror And A Dream": Domestic Imagery In The Poetry Of Anne Sexton, Frances S. Waters

English Theses & Dissertations

Women writers often experience a conflict between traditional feminine roles and the less traditional role of the female writer. And for those writers, like Anne Sexton, who choose not to choose between roles, the result is conflict. This conflict, recognized by previous critics and evident in Sexton's biography and poetry, results in a domestic imagery expressing this vacillation. In this study, submitted in partial fulfillment for the M. A. degree in English, I provide an in-depth study of Sexton's domestic imagery. I concern myself with two imagery patterns: one, in which the symbolic image's meaning changes randomly with no controlling …