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Articles 31 - 60 of 190
Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, British Isles
Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright
Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …
Ambivalent Scales: Methods For Reading Scenes Of Sexual Violation, Natalie Ruby
Ambivalent Scales: Methods For Reading Scenes Of Sexual Violation, Natalie Ruby
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The importance of unveiling rape in the #MeToo era has unintentionally obscured encounters that lack the clarity of “yes” or “no.” However, desire can be ambiguous even in unambiguous cases of assault. Feminist activists and scholars have started to address ambiguity by arguing for a new epistemology of rape, what Linda Alcoff calls “grey rape.” In this thesis, I interrogate the “grey” embedded in ordinary sexual encounters by looking at ambivalence as an example of everyday desire evident across the seduction plot and the novel tradition. Rather than seeking to make consent more inclusive to oppressed groups, I read between …
Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz
Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines how queer and postcolonial novels respond to the archive as a determiner of what stories we can and cannot tell through formal experimentation that omits expected elements. Focusing on the subject- and object-making power and the tekhne of inclusion and exclusion that shape the modern archive, I analyze how novels spanning the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century refuse to mimetically reproduce bodies that were traditionally made the object of that knowledge in ways legible to the familiar archival forms. Instead, these novels turn the exclusion of the archive back on itself by manifesting lacunae …
Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor
Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The mythical city of Troy functioned as an imagined point of origin for many medieval nations, providing a tangible connection to the legendary past and nation-building tools useful for the ruling class. Troy provided a convenient foundation narrative upon which ideas of collective identity could be built for these nations, and England, where construction of a homogeneous past was difficult due to frequent ruptures in its development of communal identity, was an eager producer and consumer of such a legitimizing device. However, the trauma of war and destruction intrinsic in Troy narratives also generates potent political anxiety about the reanimated …
Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller
Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …
Queer Mother, Hybrid Monster: Serpentine Hybridity And Monstrous Motherhood In D’Arras And Spenser, Farah R. Paterson-Cisco
Queer Mother, Hybrid Monster: Serpentine Hybridity And Monstrous Motherhood In D’Arras And Spenser, Farah R. Paterson-Cisco
Theses and Dissertations
Disparate, deformed, and hybridized bodies of women have appeared in mythology and literature in myriad allegorical incarnations as representations of monstrosity. The monstrous serpent-woman hybrid form can be traced back quite far, though at the point when one reaches antiquity, literary examples meld into the religious, mythological, and folkloric. These hybrid beings also embodied meanings particular to their time and culture that work to distinguish them as literary characters, presenting a compelling case for the consideration of the hybridized and deformed figure as a threat to patriarchal systems. Contemporary readings through the lens of feminist, gender, and disability frameworks offer …
Wench, Witch, Wife, Widow: The Power Of Address Terms In The Witch Of Edmonton, Laura Kolb
Wench, Witch, Wife, Widow: The Power Of Address Terms In The Witch Of Edmonton, Laura Kolb
Publications and Research
This chapter explores address terms and their power to shape social reality, especially for women and the socially precarious. The opening of The Witch of Edmonton—“Come, wench!”—is the first of many moments in which one character classifies another in terms of gender, class, or social position. Tracking characters’ reactions to being named (and thereby “placed”) reveals divergent perspectives on the fit between assigned social identity and self-evaluation.
"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori
"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori
Theses and Dissertations
Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …
Productive Disruptions: Using Commonplace Books To Resist Eurocentrism, Andie Silva
Productive Disruptions: Using Commonplace Books To Resist Eurocentrism, Andie Silva
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Dispatches From The Home Front: Violet Hunt As War Writer And Reluctant Modernist, Heather M. Robinson, Melissa Dinsman
Dispatches From The Home Front: Violet Hunt As War Writer And Reluctant Modernist, Heather M. Robinson, Melissa Dinsman
Publications and Research
The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism’s challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon’s key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London’s literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation …
Art, Propaganda, And Truth, Melissa Dinsman
Art, Propaganda, And Truth, Melissa Dinsman
Publications and Research
This essay explores how British and American writers and theorists in the first half of the twentieth century thought about art, propaganda, and truth. Focusing largely on literature written during the First and the Second World Wars, this essay shows that very few authors defined their art as propaganda or truth and instead used words like “political,” “resistance,” “information,” and “anti-fascist” to describe their wartime writing. However, while authors might have eschewed the term propaganda, that does not mean that they avoided producing it. As this essay illustrates, what many authors wrote would now be considered “propaganda.” Moreover, even if …
Don't Say Gay: Love Language In Coriolanus, Patrick Lynch
Don't Say Gay: Love Language In Coriolanus, Patrick Lynch
Dissertations and Theses
Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's Roman plays, a sub-genre which also includes Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. The one element these plays have in common is the ideal Roman hero, the civis romanus, who meets a tragic end. These heroes are not generally considered queer as no free Roman male could allow himself, per social indoctrination instilled since youth, to take on a submissive role. However, Caius Martius and the relationship he maintains with Tullus Aufidius could arguably be seen as homoerotic or even, possibly, homosexual. This paper takes a closer look at …
Carceral Form And Social Critique In Zadie Smith's Nw, Wesley Hackman
Carceral Form And Social Critique In Zadie Smith's Nw, Wesley Hackman
Dissertations and Theses
No abstract provided.
The Incurable Fanny Price: Disabled Perspective And Resistance To The Cure Narrative In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Aurora C. Soriano
The Incurable Fanny Price: Disabled Perspective And Resistance To The Cure Narrative In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Aurora C. Soriano
Dissertations and Theses
Improvement and cure are frequently on the minds of the characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. However, what happens when you introduce a chronically ill character like Fanny, who can’t ever be fully cured, into these curative plots? In order to better understand the ways Austen complicates curative discourse, this paper focuses on Fanny’s own perspective and embodied experience of chronic illness, in which she fatigues easily and experiences headaches and pain. Despite clear evidence in the novel of Fanny’s ill health, scholarship analyzing Fanny’s character has historically been fraught with ableist assumptions and subjective opinions. Ignoring the way …
Reading The Reception History Of Charlotte Yonge, Talia Shaffer
Reading The Reception History Of Charlotte Yonge, Talia Shaffer
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Women And Ventriloquism In Early Modern English Drama, Ja Young Jeon
Women And Ventriloquism In Early Modern English Drama, Ja Young Jeon
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bringing together feminist and theater-centered readings, this dissertation examines the status of female vessels that foreign voices inhabit and animate in early modern drama, arguing that the Greek model of ventriloquism represented by the Pythia exerted a powerful influence on the period’s ideas about women’s speech. In feminist work on ventriloquism, despite highlighting theatrical performance’s dependence on citationality, ventriloquism has been largely understood as an analogue for exploring male poets’ authorial power to appropriate women’s voices. In these readings, the term ‘ventriloquist’ is mainly identified with the person who throws his voice into human or nonhuman objects, reminding us of …
The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire
The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire
Theses and Dissertations
An evaluation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock as it apprehends the Catholic novel as form. With ample assistance from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World, and select works of Fredric Jameson—most notably The Political Unconscious—this analysis seeks to clarify the politico-spiritual "horizon" evident in Greene's first "Catholic novel." By reviewing the novel through the lens of both Catholic theology and modern historical dialectic material criticism, this evaluation reclaims Graham Greene's early political radicalism that critics identify better in his later, less-religious texts. Discovered most clearly in the ending …
The Legend Of The Legion: Nihilism And The Restoration Of The Aristocracy In Ouida’S Under Two Flags, Laura Clarke
The Legend Of The Legion: Nihilism And The Restoration Of The Aristocracy In Ouida’S Under Two Flags, Laura Clarke
Publications and Research
Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) is not a widely read Victorian novel today, but it is offers important insight into the philosophical concerns of a novelist who was hugely popular in her time. In Under Two Flags, Ouida explores what she saw as the epistemological problem developing in the nineteenth century, a nihilistic view that promoted scepticism, aestheticism, and idleness, which is a perspective she believed was responsible for the demise of the aristocracy. Wishing to restore the power and position of the aristocracy, Ouida sends her protagonist Bertie Cecil, a dandy who embodies the aestheticism and ennui of the …
Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth
Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth
Theses and Dissertations
The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …
Dancing With The Devil: Carnival And The True Witch Of The Witch Of Edmonton, James B. Barone
Dancing With The Devil: Carnival And The True Witch Of The Witch Of Edmonton, James B. Barone
Student Theses
The most obvious carnivalesque aspects in Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton—the Morris dancers and their leader Cuddy Banks, and the shapeshifting demon Dog—have received the bulk of scholarly attention. However, very little has been written about the cagey, pregnant servant girl Winifred, who as I argue in this thesis more fully embodies Carnival’s aspects of rebirth and renewal. Winifred endures the play’s turmoil by inventing and reinventing herself. Her powers of creation are antithetical to the downfalls of the play’s two main characters—Frank Thorney and Elizabeth Sawyer, the play’s eponymous witch—as well as the mischief created by …
The Ideal Elizabethan Marriage (Or Naught): How Fletcher’S Comedy, The Tamer Tamed Serves As A Sequel, Homage And Riposte To Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Katherine Brillante
The Ideal Elizabethan Marriage (Or Naught): How Fletcher’S Comedy, The Tamer Tamed Serves As A Sequel, Homage And Riposte To Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Katherine Brillante
Student Theses
In this thesis, I take my cue from Emma Smith, who observes that John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed is “a sequel, an homage, and a riposte to Shakespeare’s own Taming of the Shrew” (xii). While demonstrating Smith’s point, I also explore the ideology of marriage in Renaissance England, considering what it means to be a rebellious woman with respect to that institution. While, as Ann Jennalie Cook observes, “a play is not an exact replica of the customs of the time” (83), these two plays nevertheless illuminate the ways in which marriage customs during this …
The Visionary Mode In Anglophone Modernist Fiction, Wei Wu
The Visionary Mode In Anglophone Modernist Fiction, Wei Wu
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study is a critical reexamination of descriptions of visionary experiences in the novels of Woolf and Lawrence. Its goal is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the visionary mode, when best practiced by the modernist novelists here discussed, can overcome the ideological liabilities that its supposed individualist stance seems to entail; secondly, based on an updated understanding of the visionary mode, to reconceptualize its relation with the ordinary. Through discussions of five important modernist novels, this study concludes that modernist practicing of the visionary mode, when contextualized and historicized, portrays the subject as situated in dynamic exchanges with otherness, subscribes …
Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso
Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis focuses on how Gloria Naylor used Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest as inspiration for her character George, and how her evolution of the character reveals issues within the literary and academic community at the time of her writing. George fulfills Caliban’s limitations in that he has more power and autonomy than Caliban, but the tragedy of his death reveals that he has lost part of himself in order to gain that power. This idea that education and society can cause a loss of self is personal for Naylor, who encountered only white male authors in school and struggled …
Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva
Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva
Publications and Research
This essay explores the benefits and challenges of using digital editing as a platform for social knowledge production. First, I discuss the underlying impetus for the project, my choice of Scalar as a digital platform, and a number of specific assignments designed to develop skills toward the final edition. Next, I analyze examples from student work, considering the larger implications of students’ annotation choices and the thematic focus each of them chose for their acts. Finally, I outline some of the potential pitfalls of this course. My aim is to privilege students’ discovery, negotiation, and ownership of ideas. As a …
Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb
Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera
The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera
Theses and Dissertations
This is an ecocritical reading of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Howard's End. I argue that Forster is concerned with imperial power structures that damaged the environment, as well as the looming aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution on both landscape and the people that reside in it.
Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism And Communications Media In Violet Hunt's "Love's Last Leave.", Melissa Dinsman, Heather M. Robinson
Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism And Communications Media In Violet Hunt's "Love's Last Leave.", Melissa Dinsman, Heather M. Robinson
Publications and Research
An overlooked figure of modernist circles, Violent Hunt was a suffragette, novelist, and author of ghost stories. In her second collection of haunted narratives, More Tales of The Uneasy (1925), Hunt explores the ghostliness of the Great War, both for those on the front and at home. In this essay, we focus on the third story in this volume, “Love’s Last Leave,” and argue that Hunt includes both ghost story tropes and communications media to articulate the real deadliness of the Great War. Communications technology and spiritualism share a similar historical evolution, and in “Love’s Last Leave” both types …
The Dichotomy Of Nature And Culture In Riders To The Sea, Kayla J. Baur
The Dichotomy Of Nature And Culture In Riders To The Sea, Kayla J. Baur
Publications and Research
Jonathan Millington Synge spent his time on the Aran Islands wandering through the peasantry in the countryside, using his experiences and things he witnessed to inspire his writings. He wrote the play Riders to the Sea to portray the lives of the Aran peasants by showing the way in which they coped with the natural forces surrounding their island through believing in certain cultures. Synge constructs a dichotomy between the belief in the forces of nature and culture stemming from modern Christianity not only to portray the mixture of cultures present among the Aran peasants but also to challenge the …
Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene
Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …