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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

An Economy Of Care: George Eliot's Middlemarch And Feminist Care Ethics, Madison V. Newman Jun 2022

An Economy Of Care: George Eliot's Middlemarch And Feminist Care Ethics, Madison V. Newman

Masters Theses

This thesis assesses the centrality of care relationships in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and, by doing so, seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of individual and collective morality. Using the ethics of care as a methodological framework to acknowledge the importance of care acts and successful care relations – especially those complicated by the presence of dichotomized socioeconomic hierarchies – will allow readers to engage more fully with this text, its author, her relations, her characters, and the community of readers; reading Eliot’s work from this lens will allow us to validate every interaction, every thread of connectedness, and every act …


Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt May 2022

Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …


Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions In Contemporary Ethnic American Women’S Fiction And Women Of Color Activism 1990-2010, Hazel Gedikli May 2022

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions In Contemporary Ethnic American Women’S Fiction And Women Of Color Activism 1990-2010, Hazel Gedikli

Doctoral Dissertations

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction and Women of Color Activism 1990-2010 reconceptualizes state-sanctioned family disintegration as gender violence, most recently evidenced in the forced separation of the central Latin American asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border. It frames family separation as part of ongoing settler colonial history and delineates the gendered aspects of this form of state violence. More specifically, Redefining Gender Violence articulates a theory of gendered logic of dispossession through analyzing the novelistic representations of family (dis)integration by Native and Black authors and resistance strategies offered by women of color (WOC) activist …


“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair Oct 2019

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …


“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth Aug 2019

“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth

Doctoral Dissertations

It is well established that Anglo-Saxon writers were concerned with a specific set of principles (chastity, wisdom and piety) articulated in monastic life. However, the representation of women’s religious lives and the exemplification of their values influencing male saint’s Lives and their authors have to date been largely overlooked. To rectify this omission, I focus on Wulfstan’s tenth-century Vita St. Æthelwoldi, in which Æthelthryth’s character plays a far more significant role than we have heretofore noticed. Apart from the traditional figurae the author uses to depict her virtuous devotion, Wulfstan’s account of Æthelthryth is a testimony of a particular …


The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber Nov 2018

The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015” presents readers with a distinct optic: if we are to fully grasp contemporary US racial politics, we must recognize the narrative work emotion performs in popular US diasporic fiction. Comparing the work of authors who have become mainstays in the multi-ethnic US literary canon such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Lan Cao, Achy Obejas, Cristina Garcia, Kiran Desai, and Nora Okja Keller, I explicate how these popular authors exhume the complex entanglements of racialization, US empire, and global capitalism by narrating the …


Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal Jul 2018

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …


‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor Nov 2017

‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor

Doctoral Dissertations

Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …


The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki Jul 2017

The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …


Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo Jul 2017

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …


Cultural Subtexts And Social Functions Of Domestic Music-Making In Jane Austen’S England, Lidia A. Chang Jul 2016

Cultural Subtexts And Social Functions Of Domestic Music-Making In Jane Austen’S England, Lidia A. Chang

Masters Theses

Barring a few notable exceptions, English music between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries earns scant notice in music history textbooks, despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture, especially during the Georgian era. However, I will argue that the English of this period were, in many respects, even more committed to music than their continental counterparts. The problem, for England, was not that it made no music during this period, but that it made the wrong kind of music, and enjoyed it in the wrong ways. At a time when Germanic critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx …


Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis Nov 2015

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies and analyzes the fop figure in early modern English drama and treats the figure as a vehicle that reveals the instability of conceptions of masculinity in the period. This project establishes a theatrical history of the character type. Although the fop did not emerge on the English stage as a stock character until late in the seventeenth century, antecedents and proto-fops appear across dramatic genres beginning in the late 1580s. Identifying these characters and deciphering their functions in plot and character development reveals, in part, how cultural anxieties about masculine codes of conduct were manifested. The project …


Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz Aug 2015

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …


Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez Aug 2014

Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez

Doctoral Dissertations

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of mixed race characters in Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on train, automobile, and boat travel, the study analyzes the relationship between the character, transportation, and technology whereby the notion of race is questioned. Furthermore, the dissertation divides …


Correspondencias Tempestuosas: Tres Ensayos Para Acompañar A Sycorax Y Calibán, Santiago Vidales Aug 2014

Correspondencias Tempestuosas: Tres Ensayos Para Acompañar A Sycorax Y Calibán, Santiago Vidales

Masters Theses

William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) theatrical work The Tempest was first performed in 1611 at the court of James I. Since the XVII century until today this work of art has travelled the world and has been (re)interpreted from the perspective of multiple ideologies. This thesis seeks to understand the representations and uses that Caliban has had in different spaces and historical moments. The anti-colonial interpretations of Roberto Fernández Retamar authorize us to read metaphorically the current socio-political situation of Latin immigrants in the United States through the perspective of The Tempest. The first chapter of this thesis studies and critically …


Mama's Boy, Jamie T. Berger Jan 2010

Mama's Boy, Jamie T. Berger

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

"Mama's Boy" is a book of fiction and nonfiction by Jamie Berger. It deals with mothers and sons and feminism and pornography and poker and love and New York and San Francisco and Western Massachusetts.


Double Consciousness, Modernism, And Womanist Themes In Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Anniad", A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd Jan 1998

Double Consciousness, Modernism, And Womanist Themes In Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Anniad", A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd

A Yęmisi Jimoh

Article on "The Anniad," a poem byGwendolyn Brooks


Review Of Soulfires: Young Black Men On Love And Violence, Amilcar Shabazz Jul 1997

Review Of Soulfires: Young Black Men On Love And Violence, Amilcar Shabazz

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

A review of a literary and cultural anthology on African American males on love and violence.