English Language and Literature Commons^™

Troubling The Water: Dismantling The Ideology Of Separate Spheres, Lisa Weddell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines nineteenth century U.S. women’s maritime writings to re-evaluate and more accurately represent the roles women played in society. I contend that the nineteenth century ship is a microcosm of the United States and women’s sea experiences and maritime writings reveal their lived experiences and the visible roles they played in their relationships and in public politics. Women’s maritime writings, I argue, challenge ideologies of “True Womanhood” that define women as submissive and passive. Instead, these texts demonstrate how women equally contributed to establishing national identity in the United States by defining appropriate gender performance for men and …

Crip Time In Fin-De-Siècle Spain: Disability, Degeneration, And Eugenics, Erika Rodriguez

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A period of intense nation-building, the late nineteenth century was marked by the search for medical and legal solutions to the increasing number of bodies that did not align with culturally constructed expectations of productivity and reproduction in Spanish modernity. Authors of this time used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. In carrying out this analysis, I raise the question of how representations of disability created a space to reconfigure the social values that determined what lives matter. Focusing on canonical realist …

Narratives Of Incarcerated Women, Kaceylee Klein

Honors Scholar Theses

Our criminal-justice system mandates the silencing and disappearing of 2.3 million people, a consequence of its historical context as an inherently violent institution, carrying on traditions of slavery, oppression, and extortion. While any voice that makes it out of a prison cell is resisting the effort to silence, smother, and make compliant the voices of those labeled criminal, the form of publication of that voice allows more or less agency to the author depending on its conventions and structures. There is a spectrum from more controlled or mediated forms of publications to more author-directed ones and they vary over the …

Cuba Journals Volume I - Transcription, Laura Swarner

Undergraduate Theses

The document is a transcribed version of volume I of the digital copy of the Cuba Journals which can be found online at the New York Public Library Archives. The Cuba Journals were written by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne during her time abroad in Cuba recovering from illness.

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Gender And Yale: Where Were The Women?, Emily Stark, Patrice Collins, Claire Bowern

Yale Day of Data

Statistics on history of women scholars in Yale's English Department.

A Review Of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, By Michael Edson, Michael Edson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, by Michael Edson

Review Of Novel Ventures: Fiction And Print Culture In England, 1690-1730 By Leah Orr, Susannah Sanford

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 by Leah Orr by Susannah Sanford

Review Of Margaret Cavendish’S Poems And Fancies, James Fitzmaurice

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Liza Blake’s free website is sure to become the first stop for anyone beginning work with Poems and Fancies. Most importantly for those who want to explore Cavendish's poetry in depth is that fact that Blake’s website provides an easy means of comparison of versions of poems printed in the 1653, 1664, and 1668 editions.

The Strength Of Weak Ties: Eliza Haywood’S Social Network In The Dunciad In Four Books (1743), Ileana Baird Dr.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article uses visualizations of Eliza Haywood’s social networks, as described in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), to make visible her relations with the other characters in the poem, and the nature of these affiliations. The tools used to generate these visualizations are GraphViz, an open source visualization software that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and SHIVA Graph, an application used to visualize large sets of networks and navigate through them as through a map. In Eliza Haywood’s case, this model of social network analysis sheds new light on the nature of Pope’s attack on women …

Societal Polyphony In Burney And Austen: Using Digital Tools To Invite Students Into The Conversation, Bethany Williamson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

How can we invite our students to experience the social wit and wisdom of the eighteenth-century novel, on an interactive level? Addressing challenges faced by those who teach eighteenth-century novels in General Education surveys or seminar classes, this essay offers two lesson plans--easily adapted for different texts and courses--that use digital technology to engage students' imaginations and cultivate skills of reading comprehension and interpretation. The first, "Evelina Tweet Fest," invites students to participate in a collaborative conversation on a simulated Twitter platform, translating the literary polyphony of Frances Burney's epistolary novel into the language of our own, status-conscious milieu. …

Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies In The History Of Mary Prince, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) is the first published woman’s slave narrative. In her History, Prince describes horrendous physical violence to which she and other enslaved peoples of African descent are subjected as well as the corresponding psychological and sexual abuse they endure. While Prince “speaks” the sexual abuse to some extent, how she knows what she knows goes unspoken. She expresses her knowledge of reading and writing and, at times, of the law, but she does not explain how she obtains this knowledge or knows what she knows. Her optimism to …

“The Tranquility Of A Society Of Females”: Mary Morgan’S A Tour To Milford Haven, Elizabeth Montagu, And The Transformative Politics Of Female Governance, Linda J. Van Netten Blimke

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper explores the political function of Elizabeth Montagu’s Berkshire estate in travel writer Mary Morgan’s 1795 publication A Tour to Milford Haven, in the Year 1791. The travelogue is politically invested both in problematizing radical ideologies and the British government’s wartime policies and in providing an alternative model of governance based on the relational leadership found within Montagu’s Sandleford community. Of central importance to Morgan’s political argument is the contrast she creates between the socioeconomic philosophies manifest in Montagu’s perfectly ordered estate in Berkshire and in the Duke of Marlborough’s imposing palace in Oxfordshire. Whereas Montagu’s relational approach …

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …

How About Noah?, India Worthy

Honors Projects

How About Noah? tries to bridge the gap between old picture books and today’s society by showing children the intersectionality between Noah’s identities as an African American and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. There are very few books that show this concept especially containing a strong female lead. Most stories are always about a boy wanting to be a girl instead of a girl who identifies as a male.

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

Review Of Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, And Other Airborne Females By Serinity Young, Nancy Schultz

Nancy Lusignan Schultz

“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 …

Undiagnosing Iphis: How The Lack Of Trauma In John Gower’S “Iphis And Iante” Reinforces A Subversive Trans Narrative, C Janecek

Accessus

Trauma has long played a role in queer narratives, including Ovid’s “Iphis and Ianthe”, which many scholars have interpreted as reinforcing heteronormativity through Iphis’s transformation into a man in order to marry Ianthe. However, I argue that John Gower’s rendition of this tale reframes Iphis as a trans man and allows us to understand the poem as a subversive trans narrative that revolts against cisnormative conceptions of gender. Utilizing Judith Butler’s writing on the medicalization of gender, I explore the relationship between trauma, performance, and gender within the Ovidian and Gowerian versions of Iphis.

A Space Of Her Own: Genderfluidity And Negotiation In The Life Of Christina Of Markyate, Meghan L. Nestel

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper draws on transgender studies and theories of gender performativity and genderfluidity to consider how twelfth-century holy woman Christina of Markyate resists traditional and third-gender binary policing. It argues that Christina is genderfluid, and that as a secular, masculinized, and religious virgin, she co-exists within and moves among multiple gender spaces that allow her to establish her own authority.

Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Negotiating Ambivalent Gender Space For Collective And Individual Empowerment: Sikh Women's Life Writing In The Diaspora, Jaspal Kaur Singh 2508334

Journal Articles

In order to examine gender and identity within Sikh literature and culture and to understand the construction of gender and the practice of Sikhi within the contemporary Sikh diaspora in the US, I analyze a selection from creative non-fiction pieces, variously termed essays, personal narrative, or life writing, in Meeta Kaur’s edited collection, Her Name is Kaur: Sikh American Women Write About Love, Courage, and Faith. Gender, understood as a social construct (Butler, among others), is almost always inconsistent and is related to religion, which, too, is a construct and is also almost always inconsistent in many ways. Therefore, my …

Fictions Of Sexuality, Emelyn Schaeffer

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

I conducted a Creative Independent Study Project and wrote two short stories that include themes of women’s sexual desire/pleasure, sexual debuts, masturbation, discoveries, and understandings of one’s sexuality. Because women receive so many messages about keeping their chastity and so few about pursuing the pleasures sex can provide, the opportunities to promote the exploration of women’s sexual desire cannot be missed. To write my stories and answer my research question, I read and watched a variety of both academic and creative materials. I wanted to do this work because these are the stories I needed in high school when I …

Exploring The Emotional Language In The Twilight Novel As A Literary Discourse: An Appraisal Theory Analysis, Susan Ataei

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Emotions have always been a mysterious realm of human beings gaining an understanding of which requires the collaboration of scholars from multiple disciplines. This study employed the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) of evaluations and emotions to explore the manifestation of emotions in a popular modern prose fiction, the first book of the twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (2009) - Twilight. The objective of the study was to gain a deep understanding of how a bestselling literary prose fiction, Twilight, employs human emotions, and thus “affect”, to impose its “effect” on the reader. I applied the affect sub-system of …

"A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, And So Is An Emojis 🙂" Emojisfication Of Language: A Pragmatic Analysis Of Facebook Discourse, Alienna Kazmi, Arooj Rana, Uzma Anjum, Madiha Khan

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This research study aims to examine language change occurring in written discourse due to increase in the usage of emojis and the way emojis, in comparison to words, are performing communicative functions on social media platforms such as Facebook. The study focused on Pakistani Facebook users. For the study, Facebook is one of the most authentic social media platforms because 71.75 % (Internet Word Stat) of Pakistani internet users use Facebook which is the highest statistics among all social media applications. In order to investigate the recent language change and communicative functions performed by emojis, we utilized Speech act theory …

Ellipsis In Iraqi Arabic: An Analysis Of Gapping, Sluicing, And Stripping, Saja Albuarabi

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

The purpose of this paper is to explore the syntax of ellipsis in Iraqi Arabic. The paper sheds light on three types of ellipsis in Arabic and English, namely: sluicing, gapping, and stripping and puts each of them in a comparison between Iraqi Arabic and English languages in addition to Arabic dialects. To the best of my knowledge, these elliptical structures have not been studied in Iraqi Arabic before. Therefore, this study offers the first description of these phenomena from a generative standpoint. The paper argues that the three types of ellipsis mentioned above can be the result of Phonological …

The Acquisition Of Diminutives In Moroccan Heritage Speakers In France, Amal El Haimeur

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This study addresses the acquisition of diminutive forms by Moroccan heritage speakers in France. Diminutive formation depends on stem modification. 15 Moroccan-French participants took part in this study. In a production experiment, participants were asked to form diminutives for 6 types of stems, since the stem type determines the diminutive pattern. The findings of this study show that the mean percentage of source-like use of the diminutive forms is 38%. The results revealed that just two patterns that were acquired by a significant number of participants: CCiCa and CCiCjCjəC. Diminutive forms that do not require complex processes are acquired by …

Optimizing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition: Applied Linguistic Research, George H. Borawski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Any acquisition in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) starts as word recognition; as such vocabulary acquisition is integral to language learning as a whole and is a precursor to fluent communication (Ellis, 1996; Moore, 1996). To maximize SLA, vocabulary acquisition must be optimized. However, vocabulary acquisition is understudied and underutilized, especially compared to other aspects of SLA (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Cook states, “…the vast bulk of examinations, syllabuses, and course books around the globe show little overt influence from SLA research” (1998, p.10). Courses, teachers, and students would benefit from directly addressing SLA research, rather than utilize inefficient methods (Cook, …

Linguistic Ideologies In The Performance Of Bulgarian Identity, Chelsey Norman

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Since the end of Communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2007, Bulgarians have experienced much greater mobility and access to the global community. Despite this more global perspective, Bulgarians maintain a strong sense of national identity. Given this interplay between global and national identities, Bulgaria is an apt location to conduct this ideological research. Using a combination of ethnographic observations (June-July 2018) and semi-structured interviews with bilingual Bulgarians in Sofia, this study examines how large-scale phenomena like nationalism and globalization are found in the micro-scale interactional construction of identity. Results show that a great deal of ideological …