English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …

Once Upon A Time To Happily Ever After: Enduring Themes And Life Lessons Of Fairy Tales In “Snow White” And “Beauty And The Beast”, Alexandra J. Deluse

Senior Theses and Projects

An investigation of fairy tales through case studies of two versions of “Snow White”, one by the Brothers Grimm and one by The Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, and three versions of “Beauty and the Beast", one by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s two by Angela Carter: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”.

The Liberation Of The Heroine In Red Riding Hood : A Study On Feminist And Postfeminist Discourses, Hiu Yan Cheng

Theses & Dissertations

Fairy tales’ magic is powerful because it has the potential to enter different cultures at different times. They teleport readers and displace them in alternative realities to shock them with a profoundly different world where there are possibilities they have not seen and impossibilities to be accepted. However, despite the clichéd opening of most fairy tales— “once upon a time”, the lack of a traceable origin and the arbitrariness of the tales’ contextualization, they are not ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’. These tales have a history. They evolve with new plots, characterizations and morals in response to the dominant discourses in different …

The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …

Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …

Politics, Ethics, And Aesthetic Play In Diasporic Iranian Visual Literature: Neshat, Satrapi, Bashi, Soltani, Mehraneh Ebrahimi-Eshratabadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Does the study of aesthetics create response-ability or have tangible effects in the real world? Does the ambivalent form of word/images created by diaspora artists change our gaze toward the Other and the landscape of the possible? In the age of a global march against abstract terror which seems to be only reinforcing terrorism, the sign “Muslim-woman” along with the concept of democracy have become rallying cries for novel civilizing-missions. Leaving aside the failed efforts of littérature engagée, I resonate with Jacques Rancière that the study of aesthetics is intertwined with that of politics. Gayatri Spivak, too, asserts that …

Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

“Life Is A Luminous Halo”: Gender And Androgynous Time In Virginia Woolf, Ashley Whitmore

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of representations of time in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Orlando: A Biography, and The Waves to illustrate the development of an androgynous time that is located between the inner subjective time of each individual, inspired by Henri Bergson’s durée, and the stunted measured time of society.

The Introduction provides an overview of my argument and critical approach, as well as illustrates the background in which Woolf was writing. The Introduction also introduces the ideas of French philosopher Bergson, whose theories on time will be instrumental in forming Woolf’s androgynous time.

The remainder of the dissertation …

Tiger Shell, Christopher Sinnett

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Poetry is everything. A poem is a shell filled with a sliver of poetry. Life goes in, life comes out. These shells are filled with what we know, and deep inside, what we do not know. The ocean goes in and out. Art is in the shell. The poet enters, does not perform, does not act, does not do. The poet is.

Psychosexualism In Victorian Literature: A Psychoanalysis Of Jane Eyre And Dracula, Heather Marie Ward

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

My thesis consists of historical facts and literary analysis and is made up of three chapters. In the first chapter, I look at two varying elements of psychosexualism, the emotional and the physical, and discuss how each can be applied to Jane Eyre and Dracula. The chapter also contains an explanation for the term psychosexualism and provides a brief history of: the Victorian notion of hysteria and spermatorrhea, the twentieth-century classifications of love and sex addiction, as well as the twenty-first-century to Histrionic Personality Disorder and Sexual Sadism Disorder. The second chapter provides an analysis of Jane Eyre, specifically looking …

Male Development In Young Adult Novels: Mapping The Intersections Between Masculinity, Fatal Illness, Male Queerness, And Brotherhood, Ruth Nelson

Departmental Honors Projects

Since 2000, Young Adult (YA) literature has grown exponentially. The subgenres of cancer novels (teen “sick-lit”) and LGBTQ fiction, in particular, have experienced a recent surge in popularity. The novels in these subgenres that feature young men as the affected characters (diagnosed with cancer and/or identifying as gay or queer) are particularly interesting because of the threats that these experiences pose to heteronormative masculinity. Because this fiction is directed at an impressionable audience in the process of forming their identities, the novels’ representations of gender could have a strong influence over readers’ gender identity development. Researchers have begun exploring the …

Edna The Oblivious Oppressor: An Intersectional Analysis Of Privilege And Its Lack Thereof In The Awakening, Jessica L. Rosenthal

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Angel Outside The House: The New Woman In Brittish Periodicals 1890-1910, Lindsay Rosa

Graduate Thesis Collection

The New Woman described in short fiction and editorial articles in British periodicals not only presented the ideal New Woman to readers, but served to shape the perceptions of the reader depending on the demographic of the targeted reading audience for that specific periodical. The audience for specific British periodicals featuring the New Woman included conservative families whose youth saw the New Woman figure as a role model. The New Woman figure easily connected to readers, particularly young, female middle-class readers, who easily identified with her because she possessed similar socioeconomic characteristics. Just as there were many New Women characters …

Dystopian Cinderellas: "I Follow Him Into The Dark", Courtney Lear

All Master's Theses

Research indicates that adolescents use fiction as a template for mitigating problems in their own lives based on the ways that fictional characters handle conflict. Dystopic narratives extrapolate on the potential sociopolitical consequences of contemporary social issues that adolescents face. In recent years, authors of young adult fiction have proliferated dystopian novels about disciplinary societies that conform to Michel Foucault’s Panoptic frameworks. Using the novels Matched, Delirium, Uglies, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Knife of Never Letting Go, this project will demonstrate that the agency of female protagonists of young adult dystopian novels is curtailed by …

"A Great Man's Madness": An Inquiry Into Sanity And Gender In Jacobean Tragedy, Vittoria Mollo

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis delves deep into an analysis of madness in two seventeenth century tragic plays: William Shakespeare's Macbeth and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The first portion of the dissertation will provide historical background and context. The rest will be a critical literary analysis centered around the argument that both plays present an inextricable connection between loss of mental clarity and gender.

Sowing Seeds Of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use Of Fairy Tales And Folklore, Shandi Lynne Wagner

Wayne State University Dissertations

"Sowing Seeds of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use of Fairy Tales and Folklore" focuses on the fictional works of nineteenth-century British women authors, analyzing their use of fairy-tale and folklore motifs to criticize social mores, in particular those surrounding domestic ideology and the institution of marriage. By situating texts within their sociocultural contexts, I explore how nineteenth-century women authors revised and adapted classic fairy tales to communicate subversive, proto-feminist social criticism to a variety of audiences. I examine fiction and poetry published in literary annuals, in fairy-tale collections, and in the more generally available collections of poetry and …

Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rebecca Beach

Theses and Dissertations--English

Turning Their Talk investigates the pressures placed upon female characters’ communication styles as they enter the heterosexual market in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The title of this dissertation derives from a phrase found in each the six novels I examine--“she turned the conversation”—to suggest the subtle control female characters exercise through speech that allows them to achieve tangible forms of social agency. My dissertation argues that novelistic representations of speech mirror the paradoxical roles women historically faced as they balanced societal …

Hamlet #Princeofdenmark: Exploring Gender And Technology Through A Contemporary Feminist Re-Interpretation Of Hamlet, Allegra B. Breedlove

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploring the process of designing, producing, directing and starring in a multimedia feminist re-interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in a contemporary social media landscape.

Adaptable Monsters: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Vampire Narrative As A Metaphor For Marginalized Groups, Alexa Wei

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis paper gives a brief history of the vampire narrative and its role in representing the collective anxieties of an age as well as serving as a metaphor for oppressed peoples. It uses Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla as historical examples of how the vampire adapts to suit issues of the day such as reverse colonization and female sexuality, respectively. The latter part of this paper speculates on the future role of the vampire in literature and proposes that the vampire could be used to discuss transgender issues as well as challenge the gender binary. …

Übermensch: A Feminist, Literary, & Artistic Rebuke To Modern Patriarchy In The Institution Of Liberal Arts Education, Virginia Valenzuela

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Übermensch: a Feminist, Literary, and Artistic Rebuke to Modern Patriarchy in the Institution of Liberal Arts Education is a multi-genre, multi-dimensional hybrid project that revels in and manipulates conventional forms of literary analysis, creative expression, and feminist politics. Through a feminist literary analysis of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, accompanied by a creative companion of poems and personal essays, the author intends to elucidate society’s tactics of dominating, silencing and exploiting the female sex. In this way, her project intends to rationally and passionately describe the inescapable power of conformity in the lives of American college students, as well …

Abandoning The Shadows And Seizing The Stage: A Perspective On A Feminine Discourse Of Resistance Theatre As Informed By The Work Of Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, And The Sistren Theatre Collective, Brianna A. Bleymaier

MA in English Theses

This thesis considers the development of a unique form of theatre - feminine resistance theatre. Through the process, this work will consider the true nature and power of theatre as an artform, the placement of the problematized female voice within society, literature, and theatre, and how the theatrical form can create a unique catalyst for the female voice to be considered and implemented. In order to fully comprehend the nature of this exploration, this thesis discusses the placement and relevancy of the foundation eighteenth century theatre provides, by examining four of the women who fought for the validity of the …

The Queen's Three Bodies : Representations Of Female Sovereignty In Early Modern Women's Writing, 1588-1688, Erin V. Casey-Williams

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role …

Striving For Salvation : Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations And Revolution In Ireland, 1829-1899, Sean Heather K. Mcgraw

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Margaret Anna Cusack, later Sister Mary Frances Clare, and also known as Mother Clare, (6 May 1829 - 5 June 1899) was an Anglo-Irish Protestant who became a Catholic Nun and the foundress of a still existent Catholic religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. She was also a vociferous champion for the poor, for Irish political rights, for Irish nationalism, and was the first Irish nationalist woman historian and a prolific writer who wrote more than one hundred works. She was a radical, a revolutionary, a champion and hero, a source of conflict and …

Expanding The Literary Enterprise: How We Experience The Texts Of The Advanced Placement English Literature And Composition Curriculum, Molly Ostrow

Honors Theses

How we read the texts of the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition curriculum.

Morphing Myths And Shedding Skins: Interconnectivity And The Subversion Of The Isolated Female Self In Angela Carter’S “The Tiger’S Bride” And Margaret Atwood’S Surfacing, Sara M. Laskoski

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project is an analysis of the utilization of mythmaking and human-animal relationships reflected in Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Carter and Atwood show how societal restrictions can devalue the connections between the body, the mind, and the natural world. Through the theoretical lenses of primarily post-structuralism and ecofeminism, this project seeks to show how these two authors subvert isolated female identities through the use of the fairy tale element of the human-animal transformation. This subversion rejects dualistic tendencies of the dominant, patriarchal society, opening new ways of identifying the self through interconnections otherwise rejected or …

The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project traces how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, science fiction novels from the Romantic and contemporary literary periods respectively, contest the problematic relationships between subjecthood, science, ecological health, and patriarchal, capitalist societies by crafting radical materialist alternatives to such a system and its dualistic and destructive interpersonal/interspecies relations. Through the theoretical framework of ecofeminism that recognizes the conceptual linkages between women and nature in Western systems of thought, as well as psychoanalytical feminist critiques of the masculinization of scientific epistemology, this project examines the developmental and ontological overlaps between literary “masculine” and “scientific” subjects socialized under …