English Language and Literature Commons^™

First Person Narration In Postwar British Women’S Fiction, Julia Mccoy

English Student Scholarship

Julia McCoy ’22
Majors: English and Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Hogan, English

A study of postwar English novelists Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson, looking particularly at the way these writers use first person narration in their works. Both writers explore how women’s identity can be ‘written into being’ against external pressures and authorities that seek to define women’s ‘proper’ role.

A Non-Normative Paradigm: Disability And Gender In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature, Malena Sol Pendola Biondi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within nineteenth century society, normalcy is presented through unfeasible means of appearance and identity, leading to a rejection of the self. By exploring characters in Victorian gothic literature, who are marginalized by society, and invoking the work of Gail Weiss, Kim Hall, and others, this essay investigates the way these norms are immortalized through published representations and how they expose the lingering presence of rejection of disabled, queer, and gender-fluid bodies. Through the analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I look at the contextualization of marginalized existence compared to able-bodiedness and normalized …

English 162w: Writing About Literature And Place, Farrah J. Goff

Open Educational Resources

Haunted spaces are occupied spaces, inhabited by some force or trace of the past. In this course we will explore the various ways in which authors have employed hauntings to understand our relation to place and to the past, to issues of time, memory, knowledge, culture, history, and mortality. How do ghosts function both as objects to fear and as historical subjects with ethical and political potential? Why does literature insist on keeping the dead (and the Gothic) alive? In focusing our course on haunted spaces we will consider the text itself as a haunted site, asking questions about how …

Asexual Protagonists: What Their Patterns Reveal About The Representation Of Asexuality In Current Literature, Jaclyn Hernandez

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

This paper analyzes the most popular books with asexual protagonists and what patterns concerning their gender, race, and romantic orientations reveal about the state of asexual representation in current literature.

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.

Multicultural Women Writers, Nashieli Marcano, Jennifer Jacobs

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Ann Yearsley, "Earl Goodwin", And The Politics Of Romantic Discontent, Chris Foss

English, Linguistics, and Communication (Legacy)

There is a dearth of more substantial critical studies on Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin in general, and while the few out there have helpfully illuminated the play’s representation of the historical plight of women and the poor during Anglo-Saxon times, as well as its application to their current predicaments in Romantic-era England and France, they have tended to leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first …

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.

Negotiating Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts—particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern,

Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of the founding …

Radical Rejections And Sloppy Seconds, Meaghan Dodson

English Student Scholarship

Jane Austen is famous for her heroines and their marriages; at the same time, however, she is also infamous for these same heroines rejecting proposals of marriage. This paper explores how Austen uses the failed marriage proposal to show how women need not fear putting their own happiness first - an idea that is just as radical in our own day and age.

“To Say Nothing”: Variations On The Theme Of Silence In Selected Works By Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Sandra Cisneros, And María Luisa Bombal, Hannah M. Frantz

Student Publications

This paper explores the various ways in which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s La Respuesta, Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and María Luisa Bombal’s “The Tree” address the theme of silence. It interrogates how the female characters in each of these works are silenced as well as their responses to that oppression. Meaning is subjective, so writing is a safe outlet for the oppressed. These works each identify an oppressor, either a husband or the male dominated church, as well as an oppressed individual, who is the female lead. In La Respuesta, the Catholic church, and specifically …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Divorcing Kin And Kind: Selective Generosity In "A Woman Killed With Kindness", Maya Mathur

English, Linguistics, and Communication (Legacy)

This article analyzes the division between kinship and kindness in the "A Woman Killed With Kindness" by Thomas Heywood.

Wordsworth And Milton: The Prelude And Paradise Lost, Colin Mccormack

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The James Brothers And The Tragic Beauty Of Individualism, Corey Plante

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"So I Shall Tell You A Story:" The Subversive Voice In Beatrix Potter's Picture Books, Veronica Bruscini

Honors Projects

Describes how recent literary scholarship has begun to interpret the themes and topics found within the children's picture books of Beatrix Potter through the lens of the code-language in Potter's secret journal, deciphered and published by Leslie Linder in 1966. Analyzes three tales from Potter's collection of picture books, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, and The Tale of Pigling Bland, to illustrate the ways these books continued to represent the social and personal observations, voicing subversive reactions to the excesses and hypocrises of Victorian culture, that Potter first began in her journal.

Language, Gender And Identity In The Works Of Louise Bennett And Michelle Cliff, Nicole Branca

Honors Projects

Examines the writings of two female, Jamaican authors, Louise Bennett and Michelle Cliff. Bennett flourished during the period of de-colonization and independence for Jamaica, while Cliff came into prominence after Jamaican independence. Shows how both writers played an important role in helping Jamaica establish a national identity by focusing on multiple dimensions of what it means to be Jamaican, including issues of language, gender, and identity.

The Footnote, In Theory, Anne H. Stevens, Jay Williams

English Faculty Research

And, so, when Richard Stern published his private dialogue with himself about the physical appearance of certain writers at the 1986 International PEN conference, Joyce Carol Oates insisted on not only an angry rebuttal-punctuated by constant page referencing to Stern's "pig-souled sexism"-but photographic evidence-a kind of footnote in itself-dismissing his physical characterization of her. When Susan Gubar published "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" her essay provoked an immediate, critical, and heavily documented response from Robyn Weigman, several letters to the editor, and Gubar's own footnoted rejoinder. Jane Gallop's defense of a sexual act she engaged in with one of her students …

Textual Possession: Manipulating Narratives In Wilkie Collins's Sensation Fiction, Kieran Ayton

Honors Projects

Examines the mechanisms through which Collins updated the gothic novel to create the sensation novel, with particular emphasis on The Woman in White, The Law and the Lady, and The Haunted Hotel. Highlights Collins's use of transgressive gender characterization, whereby his main characters use documents to gain social power over other characters. Describes the influence of Ann Radcliffe's gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, on The Woman in White.

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …

Medicine & Literature (Spring 1996) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

"In World Literature 390, I want to examine from a literary perspective medicine and medical discourse. How do authors use metaphors of sickness and health, illness and cure, disease and well-being in their literature? How in turn do these literary and rhetorical metaphors affect everyday understandings of these basic concepts?"

The Jurisprudence Of Jane Eyre, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy

Faculty Publications

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 …