English Language and Literature Commons^™

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: Rhetoric And Gender In Marriage, Andrea Marcotte

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In the Middle Ages, marriage represented a shift in the balance of power for both men and women. Struggling to define what constitutes the ideal marriage in medieval society, the marriage group of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales attempts to reconcile the ongoing battle for sovereignty between husband and wife. Existing hierarchies restricted women; therefore, marriage fittingly presented more obstacles for women. Chaucer creates the dynamic personalities of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk and the Merchant to debate marriage intelligently while citing their experiences within marriage in their prologues. The rhetorical device of ethos plays a significant role for …

A Gentlemen's Benevolence: Symptoms Of Class, Gender, And Social Change In Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, And The Mill On The Floss, Aubrey Lea Hammer

Theses and Dissertations

Austen, Dickens, and Eliot each responded to discussions of their time concerning class, gender, and social change. One of the ways they addressed these issues, and sought to find solutions to the problems facing their culture, was through benevolence. Knightley, in Emma, uses benevolence as a means of mediating self-interest and sympathy. By acting out of sympathy, through benevolence, he achieves the self-interested benefits of reinforcing the class system and achieving his romantic conquests. Likewise, Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby learns how to use benevolence as a means of social mobility from his mentors, the Cheerybles. Throughout Nicholas Nickleby the hero learns …

Female Agency And Oppression In Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, And Dancehall, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank discerningly analyzes agency and gender in public sexual performances emanating out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture, Jamaican dancehall (dancehall reggae/ dancehall queens).

Oppression And The Double Bind Of "Eveline", Leigh Griffith

The Corinthian

"Eveline" by James Joyce reveals the discrimination of women as described in Marilyn Frye's "Oppression." Frye's article discusses a "doublebind," the restraining nature of society in which a woman must present herself in a certain manner or she will be rebuked. Frye also compares a woman's situation to a birdcage. Women are encaged and not free to present themselves however they wish. If only a single perspective or ''wire" of the cage is studied, women seem unsuppressed. Such is the reason the world does not understand the prejudice.

Who Speaks And Who Listens? Genre, Gender, And Memory In Holocaust Discourses, Lisa A. Costello

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Holocaust discourses examined in Who Speaks and Who Listens? Genre, Gender and Memory in Holocaust Discourses perform writing that does something through the presentation of meaningful content and its interaction with the process of the writing act. These discourses are utterances necessarily wedged between the past and the future—between the fear that the traumatic past of the Holocaust recedes too much and the concern with what might become of this past for the generations that follow. The theory of performative memorialization describes how multiple discourses of the Holocaust engage with each other and with the audiences that receive and …

James Thurber's Little Man And The Battle Of The Sexes: The Humor Of Gender And Conflict, Andrew S. Jorgensen

Theses and Dissertations

James Thurber, along with others who wrote for The New Yorker magazine, developed the 'little man' comic figure. The little man as a central character was a shift from earlier nineteenth-century traditions in humor. This twentieth-century protagonist was a comic antihero whose function was to create sympathy rather than scorn and bring into question the values and behaviors of society rather than affirm them, as earlier comic figures did. The little man was urban, inept, frustrated, childlike, suspicious, and stubborn. His female counterpart was often a foil: confident and controlling enough to highlight his most pitiable and funniest features. Contradictory …

Gender, The Political Subject, And Dramatic Authorship: Margaret Example, Mihoko Suzuki

English Articles and Papers

An abstract for this item is not available.

Margaret Cavendish And Scientific Discourse In Seventeenth-Century England, Alisa Curtis Bolander

Theses and Dissertations

Although the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish is eclectic and uncustomary, it offers an important critique of contemporary scientific methods, especially mechanism and experimentalism. As presented in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Blazing World, Cavendish's natural philosophy incorporates rationalistic and subjective elements, urging contemporary natural philosophers to recognize that pure objectivity is unattainable through any method of inquiry and that reason is essential in making sense and use of scientific observation.

In addition to its scientific implications, Cavendish's three-tiered model of matter presents interesting sociopolitical associations. Through her own use of metaphor and her theoretical fusion of matter and motion, …

A Review Of "Dido’S Daughters: Literacy, Gender, And Empire In Early Modern England And France" By Margaret W. Ferguson, Julie Campbell

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

A Review Of "Dido’S Daughters: Literacy, Gender, And Empire In Early Modern England And France" By Margaret W. Ferguson, Julie Campbell

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

"Sweat:" Through The Lens Of Womanness, Laura Lindenberger

The Corinthian

Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat," written in 1926, explores a variety of complex issues within a politically, racially, and sexually charged backdrop. The story of Delia, an African-American laundress, who has been married to an abusive husband for fifteen years, "Sweat" questions roles of women and African-Americans within a social and personal context, and how those roles can be changed through an exploration of self-identity. Within the historical time frame of its writing, "Sweat" brings up an interesting dialogue between oppression and repression of women, as well as an emerging identification of women with their gender and the restrictions …

Gender, Class & Social Evolution In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Tim Mount

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Alterted States: Envisioning The Masculin Woman, Laura L. Behling

Scholarship and Professional Work of the Associate Provosts

To be sure, Benchley's satiric portrait does confuse our contemporary sociological notions of the differences between sex and gender...

Review Of Susan Stern’S Film, Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour, Jeannie Thomas

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Women's Lives: Different Yet The Same, Taniamarie Nylund

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Gender And Friendship In Eliza Haywood's Political Periodicals, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

British writer Eliza Haywood's two periodicals, 'The Female Spectator' (1744-46) and 'The Parrot' (1746), protested against the gendered split between political and domestic literary genres, showing that British novels and periodicals written by or addressed to women did engage in political discourse. Through her periodicals, Haywood presented a model for female-female friendship that portrayed women engaging in rational and polite political debate. Furthermore, she argued that this same debate could occur between a woman and a man apart from an apolitical, romantic relationship. Finally, she gave opportunity for friendship to be expressed between those who had been excluded from the …

Cut To The Quick: Lorena Bobbitt And America Gender Ideology, Jessica Staheli

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

On the morning of June 23rd, 1993, Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband's penis with a kitchen carving knife, literally enacting the old myth of women as castrators. America reacted to Lorena's and her husband John's situation first with horror and then with humor. Soon after the attack was made public, jokes and commentaries proliferated on television and in magazines, journals, and newspapers. Because Americans were so shocked by Lorena's action, they scrambled to represent and explain it in a manner that made the act morally comprehensible. Looking at interviews, jokes, commentaries, and John's subsequent career in pornography reveals the specific …

Clarissa's Treasonable Correspondence: Gender, Epistolary Politics, And The Public Sphere, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Western Women’S Travel Writing About The Pacific Islands, Claudia Knapman

Pacific Studies

Although there has been a revival of interest in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, this is a neglected area of Pacific scholarship. Though the work of Western women travelers who wrote about the Pacific Islands has been drawn upon by some researchers, this literature has not received attention as a genre, as a body of source material, or as the focus of academic research questions. This article, while neither a detailed analysis of particular writers and their works nor an attempt to delineate the field, uses three categorizations--the realist, the protofeminist, and the orientalist--derived from analyses of women’s travel writing elsewhere …

Power In Arda: Sources, Uses And Misuses, Edith L. Crowe

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Power and renunciation of power has long been recognised as an important theme in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This paper will examine the issue of power with particular attention to Riane Eisler's dominator/partnership model of power relations and the power within/power over dichotomy. It will consider the sources of power: spiritual, political, physical; and how these are wielded by the various peoples and individuals of Middle-earth.

Tolkien, Sayers, Sex And Gender, David Doughan

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien’s expressed “loathing” for Dorothy Sayers and her novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon is remarkable considering that Sayers is generally considered to belong to the same milieu as the Inklings. Possible reasons for this are the contrast between the orthodox Catholic Tolkien’s view of male sexuality as inherently sinful, requiring “great mortification”, and Sayers’s frankly hedonistic approach. Another reason may be Sayers’s depiction of an independent Oxford women’s college getting by successfully without men, and her representation of marriage as a source of intellectual frustration for creative women.

Female Authority Figures In The Works Of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis And Charles Williams, Lisa Hopkins

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The powerful, learned woman is a figure of fear in the works of Williams, seen as transgressing her proper role. In Lewis, legitimate authority figures are male, illegitimate ones are female, and gender roles are strictly demarcated. Tolkien, however, not only creates powerful and heroic women, but also suggests that the combination of authority and femininity can be particularly potent and talismanic.

(En)Gendered Performances And The Problematics Of Identity Construction In Contemporary Gay Literature, William Paul Banks

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations (1964–2006)

No abstract provided.

Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

We are still trying to sort out the complex legacy of romanticism. "We" here includes philosophers Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and a remarkable variety of literary theorists, from Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom through Hazard Adams and Jerome J. McGann. Julie Ellison's important book, Delicate Subjects, focuses on an especially difficult problem we have inherited from the romantics: the problem of defining the ethics of interpretation. According to Ellison, male romantic writers worry that in literary interpretation, we murder to dissect (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Criticism, from …

Gender, Class, And The Social Order In Late Elizabethan Drama, Mihoko Suzuki

English Articles and Papers

An abstract for this item is not available.

Virginia Woolf's Double Discourse, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Written by a feminist (Virginia Woolf), for a bisexual (Vita Sackville-West), about an androgyne (Orlando), the novel Orlando would seem to be the quintessential feminist text. And that, indeed, is what it is in danger of becoming, just as Woolf is in danger of becoming the acclaimed Mother of Us All. In promoting Virginia Woolf's Orlando as a feminist work, feminist critics have picked the right text, but for the wrong reasons. Orlando works as a feminist text not because of what it says about sexual identity but because of what it manages not to say; not because of what …

Progress, Process And The Critique Of Development: The Interplay Of Gender And Genre In The Morgesons, Janet E. Graber

Honors Papers

Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard's work received little public attention or critical acclaim during her lifetime. Only now, more than a hundred years after her best work was completed, has Stoddard begun to find an enthusiastic audience. Stoddard wanted badly the success which eluded her, yet she was not willing to sacrifice her intellectual and artistic integrity in order to sell books. She had only contempt for the countless women writers of her day, "the tribe of intellectual gardeners and vegetable growers," who gained widespread popularity with their frothy, ornate, and romantic fiction. She wanted to be seen as a consequential and …