Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Selected Works

2012

Literature

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn Jun 2012

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Melanie E Osborn

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …


The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy Apr 2012

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …


Women And Sisters, Maureen T. Reddy Apr 2012

Women And Sisters, Maureen T. Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture, on the iconography of the women's abolitionist movement, is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary thought and study. Crossing the boundaries of history, feminist theory, African American studies, and literary analysis, Yellin illuminates the complex intersections of art and politics in American life. Women and Sisters traces the history of the "Woman and Sister" emblem that the antislavery feminists adopted, examining its permutations in texts both graphic and literary from the 1830s to the 1850s.