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Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Characterizing The Female Main Character, Addison Leana Butler Sep 2023

Characterizing The Female Main Character, Addison Leana Butler

Masters Theses

The strong female character is a term tossed around writing groups, book clubs, and TikTok as something to both strive to see and critique in literature. This research paper transformed throughout the actual research as it went from a study on cozy fantasy emergence and its effects to strong female characters and how to write them well, to its current iteration along similar lines of writing strong female characters. Qualitative and quantitative data was gathered through the use of a survey that I wrote and put to the field, research done primarily through JSTOR, and interviews conducted with experts in …


The Female Bildungsroman In Anne Bronte’S: Agnes Grey, Nouh Alguzo Jul 2021

The Female Bildungsroman In Anne Bronte’S: Agnes Grey, Nouh Alguzo

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

This paper examines Anne Bronte’s novel Agnes Grey as an autobiographical bildungsroman about the moral growth and development of the female protagonist in Victorian England. The heroine Agnes finds herself propelled into employment as a governess, after her family suffers financial loss, driven by her desire to explore the wider world. The evangelical upbringing of Agnes, as the daughter of a clergyman, plays significant role in developing her strong and selfless character and inspires her to sympathize with the poor. Agnes challenges the patriarchal norms and traditions that treat her as a domestic servant rather than intellectual woman and educator. …


A Feminine Gothic Revival: The Haunting Of Shirley Jackson And Toni Morrison, Mallory Danley Jan 2021

A Feminine Gothic Revival: The Haunting Of Shirley Jackson And Toni Morrison, Mallory Danley

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

In the realm of Gothic literature, the main characters typically involve a helpless woman in the clutches of her male assailant. Critics have long established that the traditional Gothic genre is considered a male-dominated discipline fixated on ideas of power, control, and submission. This essay argues that Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison separate from this trope and invent the haunted heroine, a leading lady so haunted by the past, relationships, and emotions that through unique character development, insidious use of dread, and malicious paranormal occurrences create a nouveau dichotomy within Gothic literature. This essay is a close reading of two …


"The Island Has Two Sides": Female Subjectivity In Postcolonial Adaptation, Teah Goldberg Jan 2020

"The Island Has Two Sides": Female Subjectivity In Postcolonial Adaptation, Teah Goldberg

CGU Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation is entitled: “The Island has two sides: Female Subjectivity in Postcolonial Adaptation.” In it I will argue that many postcolonial narratives either consciously or unconsciously adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest in an effort to resurrect repressed female narratives of resistance. Through an examination of Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1988), and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this dissertation will contribute to the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies by arguing that the kinds of female critical voices that we find embedded within these postcolonial texts, either …


"'The Grittiness Of Being Human' : Individualizing Sexual Expectations In Adichie's Novels", Madison Behrend Vaughn May 2019

"'The Grittiness Of Being Human' : Individualizing Sexual Expectations In Adichie's Novels", Madison Behrend Vaughn

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Critics of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels identify her as a nationalist author, as representing the voices on the periphery, and as advocating for multiple voices and perspectives. Critics have also largely dismissed sexual experience as a factor in her representations and have regarded her graphic descriptions of intimacy as mere entertainment or as a means to provoke criticism. I will argue that Adichie does include many instances of sexual intimacy in her novels, not as an escape from the tough subjects that she details, but to express the effects of public problems on individuals. Ultimately, the complexity of sexual experience …


Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari Aug 2018

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.


The (Re)Naturalization Of Margaret Cavendish: Making Active The Relationship Between Nature And Female Subjectivity In Blazing World, Daniel P. Richards, Julie Chappell (Ed.), Kamille Stone Stanton (Ed.) Jan 2015

The (Re)Naturalization Of Margaret Cavendish: Making Active The Relationship Between Nature And Female Subjectivity In Blazing World, Daniel P. Richards, Julie Chappell (Ed.), Kamille Stone Stanton (Ed.)

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Let There Be Rose Leaves’: Lesbian Subjectivity In Virginia Woolf’S The Waves., Margaret Sullivan Oct 2011

Let There Be Rose Leaves’: Lesbian Subjectivity In Virginia Woolf’S The Waves., Margaret Sullivan

English Faculty Research

This essay analyzes the religious argument that Virginia Woolf, through the paired characters of Rhoda and the lady at Elvedon, develops in The Waves. Specifically, I make a three-tiered claim. First, although both Rhoda and the lady are responses to a Judeo-Christian orthodoxy that, in Three Guineas, Woolf says quieted generations of prophetesses (146), the two differ in their relationship to one fundamental story: Genesis and the Garden of Eden. The lady is trapped in Elvedon, a quasi-Edenic space. Rhoda, on the other hand, lesbianizes the Garden, centering it around her beloved Miss Lambert. Second, Rhoda’s final soliloquy radically transforms …


Snaps Of Eden, Michael J. Hudson May 2010

Snaps Of Eden, Michael J. Hudson

Masters Theses

The following poems are and attempt at reclamation and reconciliation. The first section wades through the delicate subject of personal history and is an attempt to show truth as a means of both self and communal healing. The second is plaintive, a brief effort to interlope into and understand worlds outside (but not foreign) to my own. The third is a poetic essay detailing the journey of a young woman facing the horrors of an undeclared, and seemingly eternal war. The fourth and final sections serve as a means of exploration of the self and place; tackling issues of sex, …


“A Woman’S Story At A Winter’S Fire”: Gender Performativity And The Intrinsic Power Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Whitney Sperrazza May 2009

“A Woman’S Story At A Winter’S Fire”: Gender Performativity And The Intrinsic Power Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Whitney Sperrazza

English

No abstract provided.


Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye May 2009

Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye

English

You are standing at the doorway of a church in Philadelphia. Looking in, you see a mass of heads, all turned toward the podium, waiting for someone to get behind that podium. Then you see her. She is an attractive African American with “a fair figure, long, lustrous hair, and facial features pleasant to behold” (Logan 49). You overhear one person comment that she looks like “a bronze muse” (Logan 31). A reporter will later write that she has “a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but …


Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, And Representations Of Female Circumcision From Africa To America, Tameka Latrece Cage Jan 2006

Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, And Representations Of Female Circumcision From Africa To America, Tameka Latrece Cage

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers issues of representation and how literature, personal testimony, popular culture, and African film script a narrative of change and/or participate in change in the female circumcision debate. Texts that currently shape the female circumcision debate are increasingly focused on viable methods of social change and couch issues of change in dynamics of discourse and representation, including Obioma Nnaemeka’s Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf’s Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, and Oyèrónké Oyewùmi’s African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, all of which I cite in the …