English Language and Literature Commons^™

Paper: Investigating The Work Of William Styron: The Perpetuation Of The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination, William Sikich

Womanist Ethics

William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner depicts a fictitious characterization of the historical Nat Turner. Styron, a white southerner, assumes Turner's perspective in order to tell a speculative story about his slave rebellion of 1831. Similarly, he tells the story of a fictional holocaust survivor in his novel, Sophie's Choice. The decision to take on these perspective evinces some arrogance on Styron's part, and the way in which he executes the narrative of each novel delivers their stories with varying levels of respect to their subjects: Styron's indirect telling of Sophie's story allows Styron some freedom to speculate, while …

Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …

Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

One of the most ambiguous and contentious characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner, the last (and arguably worst) of the pilgrims described in the General Prologue. The Pardoner accused of being a gelding or a mare endowed with several effeminate traits, plays on multiple gendered associations—including that of a cross-dressing woman. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer manipulates gender expectations and assumptions in the figure of the Pardoner without fully clarifying the Pardoner’s sex, sexuality or gender, leaving the text open to potentially subversive interpretations. By the fourteenth century, cross-dressing was a relatively common literary motif, …

“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay traces medieval representations of intoxication and consent and links them to contemporary cases, including Brock Turner’s 2016 rape trial and the 2017 slew of lawsuits filed against Baylor University. Through an examination of medieval texts from a range of genres, including the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, proverbs, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the 1292 legal case of Isabella Plomet, and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, this essay explores past views of gender, perpetrators, culpability, alcohol, and consent. It argues that victim-blaming those who have been assaulted while intoxicated has …

What Do Women Want? The Feminist Pursuit Of Happiness, Hannah Ruth Ellen

Honors Theses

“What do Women Want?” My thesis asks whether women can genuinely seek freedom while also hoping for happiness. I look closely at how male theorists define happiness and liberty for themselves and for others, and in particular for feminized others. My two central chapters focus on theories of individual happiness, happiness sought through another or others, and the ways feminist thinkers reimagine happiness in relationship to women’s freedom. I apply feminist critiques to the concept of psychodynamic therapy as an anti-revolutionary tool designed to isolate and silence women into believing that coping with oppression is equivalent to genuine happiness. I …

“A Woman’S Story”: Lady Macbeth And Performing Femininity In The Early 1600s – Late 1900s, Phyllis Lebert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses gender studies to understand the themes of gender performance further, and more specifically, femininity, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It also explores the many ways feminine gender performance has changed as society has changed. Thus, proving gender is performative rather than innate. It does this by examining first the text within the context of Elizabethan society. Moreover, by examining three pivotal performances of Lady Macbeth through history within the context of their social structures as well. The three performances are that of Sarah Siddons in the Late 18th Century, Ellen Terry in the 19th Century, and Judy Dench in …

The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female …

Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender And Affect In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Gracie Mae Bain

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender and Affect in Victorian Sensation Fiction” explores the interactions between the shock of reading sensation fiction and the affective potential of the genre using Sara Ahmed’s definition of the killjoy and the affect alien. The sensation genre, as explained in its name, is potentially useful when thinking about affective ties in the Victorian period. The first chapter, “Tracing Sensations: Finding and Following the Killjoy” explores the affective footwork that readers of sensation fiction are asked to perform in their sympathetic process with the female villains and fallen heroines. Affective tools employed by sensational fiction create …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Humoring Violations: Uncanny Humor In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Christine Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Considering the many absurd coincidences, gender-bending characters, and unsubtle mockery of novelistic conventions that exist in Victorian sensation fiction, humor is something seldom examined in connection to the genre. Humoring Violations: Uncanny Humor in Victorian Sensation Fiction aims to fill this important critical gap by analyzing humor in well-known sensation texts as well as a later example of the genre: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and Ouida's Moths.

This study specifically considers humor in context with the uncanny and the violent, which is what makes it unique to the Victorian …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

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 …

Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination Of Lolita's And Pride And Prejudice's Costume And Revisionist Adaptations, Courtney A. Duchene Ms.

English Honors Papers

This project examines costume and revisionist media adaptations of Lolita and Pride and Prejudice to see how adapters have altered the texts in order to increase the agency of the female characters. It consists of four chapters: one on the 1962 and 1997 cinematic costume adaptations of Lolita; one on the 1995 BBC mini series and the 2005 film costume adaptations of Pride and Prejudice; one on the Pride and Prejudice revisionist adaptations, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and the 2012-2013 Youtube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; and one on the revisionist film adaptations of Lolita, The Diary …

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.

From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe

English MA Theses

Superheroes have always been used as tools of escapism. From their insurgence into popular culture in the 1930s, to their animation in television programs, and appearance in films in the late 1970s until now, superheroes have allowed audiences an avenue through which they could imagine an alternate, utopian reality. Through the analyses of modern superhero films, audiences are able to connect how the genre reflects larger social and political fears in the wake of such unexpected realities: fear of annihilation after the 9/11 attacks and existing in a potentially unsafe America following the election of Donald Trump. The superhero film …

Politicized Identity In Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl And The Fortunes, Savanna S. Batson

English Department Theses

This thesis explores the effects of politicized identities on the basis of particular aspects of an individual’s being, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality in Peter Ho Davies’s novels The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016). By carefully studying each of his protagonists within the context of the particular time and place in which they have come of age, and are now living, this thesis demonstrates how Davies engages with themes of identity, community, and alienation relative to the specific socio-cultural matrix that informs the politicization of identities at their time. It explores how Davies’s characters undergo the process …

On The Shoulders Of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation And Scholarly Perception Of Edith Tolkien, Nicole M. Duplessis

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In his obituary for Carpenter, Douglas A. Anderson reviews Carpenter’s “long and complex” involvement with the subject of his 1977 authorized biography, indicating that “with [Carpenter’s] passing it is time to begin to assess his changing perspectives on Tolkien and on his own Tolkien-related work.” Since its publication, Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, which Anderson calls “an excellent book. . . unusually accurate more than a quarter of a century after it was written, despite many advances in Tolkien scholarship” remains a largely unquestioned authority, its influence so entrenched as to be virtually invisible. As a result, scholarship on Tolkien, from …

Tolkien, Self And Other: "This Queer Creature." By Jane Chance And Tolkien And Alterity Eds. Christopher Vaccaro And Yvette Kisor, Jason Fisher

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

“Happiest Delineation:” Literature, Reading Habits, And Characterization In Austen’S "Northanger Abbey", Emily Crider

Undergraduate Research Conference

In response to the strictly gendered society of Regency England, Jane Austen’s 1817 Gothic parody novel Northanger Abbey offers insight to the nuances of gender disparities. As such, the use of a gendered and historical critical approach throughout the project allows for a more comprehensive view of the societal expectations and taboos of 18th-century reading.

Subverting The Patriarchy And Its Ties To Feminism: Du Maurier And Her Adaptations, Samantha Koller

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

This paper describes the common (mis)reading of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca as upholding Victorian patriarchal values and attempts to demonstrate that the novel is indeed feminist and acts as a critique and subversion of those patriarchal standards; it then examines the film and stage adaptations of Rebecca, demonstrating via comparison to the original medium that feminism has begun to affect other cultural interpretations and depictions of the narrator, Mrs. Danvers, and Rebecca herself.

“‘Hel-Heime!’: The Daring Love Between Men In Dome Karukoski’S Tolkien”, Christopher Vaccaro

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article briefly summarizes the homo-amorous connections between members of the T.C.B.S. in the Karukoski's film, Tolkien.

Misinterpretations Of The Taming Of The Shrew: Adaptations And Their Emphasis On Gender, Brianna Reisenwitz

HON499 projects

Misinterpretations of The Taming of the Shrew: Adaptations and Their Emphasis on Gender focuses on modern adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. Modern adaptations have a preoccupation with gender that was not necessarily present in the original play, and that is because they fail to include the induction scene. The works discussed are the book Vinegar Girl, the films Isi Life Mein, Deliver Us From Eva, 10 Things I Hate About You, and the television show BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told. In these adaptations, several gender focused themes are apparent. With the framing story, though, the play has many different interpretations, and …

Eng 100: How Would You Feel If You Were One Of Them?, Judit Gonzalez

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …

Familiar Forms, Strange Uses: Paratexts, Narrative Interventions, And The Queering Of Possible Worlds In Illicit Narratives Of Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jessica Saxon

English Theses & Dissertations

“Losing” one’s self in a story is one of the great pleasures of reading. Key to this act is the “transport” of the reader into the storyworld. Nineteenth-century British narratives offered various transport modes, including prefaces and footnotes designed to orient the reader to the storyworld and narrative interventions designed to align the reader with the values of that world. Yet this act of transport was fraught with tensions and anxieties in the nineteenth century. Worries about the dangers of reading, especially the dangers for women and the lower classes, abounded; much of the worry stemmed from fears that these …

Storm Clouds On The Horizon: Feminist Ontologies And The Problem Of Gender, Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, Rebecca Parker

Pamela Caughie

Feminist digital humanities is no longer focused primarily on recovering and preserving works by women authors. Feminist scholars are currently engaged in changing information design and data visualizations. However, as feminists seek to create new ontologies of gender, they face difficulties posed not only by current encoding standards, but by changing concepts of gender. Can ontologies ever capture the complex, multi-layered, dynamic nature of gender identities? This question is especially challenging when dealing with modernist works that represent gender and sexual identities at the very moment of their emergence as such. Our work on a digital edition and archive of …