Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Disseminating Heterotopia, Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Publications and Research

Focuses on the motion picture The Passion of Remembrance by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, and the book Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. Highlights of the motion picture and the book; Author's argument that the tendency to ossify myths only leads to further confusion; Understanding of the mythic process.

Marsha Norman's Ghosts: The Embodiment Of The Past On The Stage, Jennifer Anne Workman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the role of the ghost figure in Marsha Norman's drama. In order to understand how this ghost figure is unique to her drama, but at the same time has roots in the American theater, I first examine her relationship to her American predecessors and their portrayal of the past in order to later show how the ghost figure is Norman's "device" that she uses to explore the past on the stage. I then attempt to determine her relationship to the current movements with which she is most often associated: new realism and feminism. Because new realism …

Meet Me In The Semiotic Glen: The Evolution Of Gender Communication In The Early Novels Of Robert Penn Warren, Lisa Day

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sexuality in the early novels of Robert Penn Warren is generally not appealing, intimate, or indicative of love between partners, in part due to the seeming coldness of the female characters and the near-asexuality of the males. However, when both social and personal interactions between the characters are analyzed semiotically according to the theories of Julia Kristeva, a pattern emerges which explains the harshness of the bond between men and women.

Ayn Rand, Female Misogynist: A Study Of Androgyny In Atlas Shrugged, Sara Kristin Parker

Theses & Honors Papers

Ayn Rand, renowned author of such titles as Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, based many of her heroines on her androgynist views derived from her upbringing and lifestyle. Parker balances her research mostly between Rand’s life and her female protagonist in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart. Taggart possesses some disdain for a few female characters in the novel, which reflects some of Rand’s lack of female friends due to anti-feministic opinions, the most notable identifying her own sex as weak and submissive. Ayn herself said that she based all of her characters off of a male hero in a children’s …

Teaching Dickinson As A Gen(I)Us: Emily Among The Women, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In this article, Walker argues that those who teach the poetry of Emily Dickinson should not only compare her to other recognized and lauded American poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. This method offers no cultural context to provide ligature. It views high art as to be only about language and, on the score of tropological discourse, any two poets could be connected, even across vast expanses of time and distance. While it's useful for students to see how elements of her work connect her not only …

A Zepetneki Tötösy Család Adattára / Records Of The Tötösy De Zepetnek Family, Steven Totosy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

A Zepetneki Tötösy család adattára/Records of the Tötösy de Zepetnek Family (Szeged: Attila József University, 1993. ISBN 9634819141 ©Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/totosyrecords1993 ) contains transcripts of published data, archival and family documents, and genealogies of the Tötösy de Zepethnek family and its selected collateral families. A Zepetneki Tötösy család adattára includes data about other Töt(t)ös(s)(i)y families not related by origin to the Tötösy de Zepetnek family. The revised and updated version of the 1993 print book is Records of the Tötösy de Zepetnek Family/A Zepetneki Tötösy család adattára. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2010-. ISSN 1715-152X …

The Lost Tribalism Of Years Gone By: Function & Variation In Gay Folklore In Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City Novels, Jimmy Browning

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis intends to demonstrate that, because of the unusual circumstances of its writing - a semi-journalistic piece produced during a period of crisis in the real-life community fictionally depicted - Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series stands as an unusually accurate and reliable ethnographic source for information concerning the gay male subculture of San Francisco in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, not only the practice and behavior themselves, but also reflecting their personal and communal function. The methodology employed in demonstrating this thesis is necessarily subjective. Like gay folklore scholar Joseph P. Goodwin in More Man Than …

Women Pioneer Diaries, 1820-1920: A Selected Annotated Bibliography, Sonia Alvarez Wilson

Theses & Honors Papers

The works of twenty women whom participated in the westward expansion at some time between 1820 and 1920 are represented. The women have participated by immigration, emigration, homesteading, or simply living a trans-Mississippi community during the aforementioned time period. The work as a whole provides a variety of examples of the lifestyle and challenges of the period, which may highlight the uniqueness of each woman, while at the same time showing some common experience. Diaries have been selected to represent as many states as possible, in as many time periods as possible within the one hundred year time span, in …

A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson

Masters Theses

By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.

Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …

Feminism, Selfhood & Emily Dickinson, Regina York

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This paper will draw on the work of leading feminist critics and the works of Dickinson, her biographers, and her critics. No effort is being made to trace the history of feminist criticism; that has been done numerous times by critic after critic. Nor does this paper attempt to provide a concordance to critical thought on Dickinson. That, too, is unnecessary. Rather, this paper looks at the relationship between self-identity in Dickinson's poetry and the fundamental need for such a pronounced sense of identity to serve as the cornerstone of feminist criticism. Dickinson's courage to be female and the implications …

Women And Revolution In Dystopian Fiction: Nadine Gordimer's July's People And Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) are both dystopias, nightmare visions of the future. Both of the worlds depicted come into being because of revolutionary coups. However, in both cases, the revolutions were in progress long before the actual takeovers, and there were opportunities for citizens to have prevented these dystopian situations from coming to pass. Yet, because changing the direction of political events requires energy, solidarity, bravery or at least some self-sacrifice, most citizens are reluctant to become involved. Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood understand this attitude because they have felt that way …

Gender And The Search For Identity In Gwendolyn Macewan’S Julian And Noman Stories, Anne Marie Martin

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis looks at the theme of gender and the search for identity in three fictional works of Canadian poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen. The works considered are her first novel Julian the Magician (1963) and her two collections of short stories Noman (1972) and Noman’s Land (1985).

The thesis examines the way self-identity is characterized and considers the way gender is presented in relation to the self. The work shows the development of MacEwen’s idea of self from a creative eternal force equivalent to the Christ image in Julian the Magician to an eternal force that finds its expression …

H. D. And Time, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

From the introduction to the volume:

"Cheryl Walker presents the work of poet H.D. as a paradigm for the changed relationship to history women have undergone during the modern period: H.D.'s early period is characterized by an avoidance of chronological time..."

A Feminist Critic Responds To Recurring Student Questions About Dickinson, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

The life and the range of topics and tones of Emily Dickinson suit her to be included in such courses as American literature, Romanticism, realism, nineteenth-century culture, and women’s literary traditions. Her poetry poses numerous challenges for readers because of its compressed style, indeterminacy, and constant surprises; her biography fascinates students and critics alike.

This volume emphasizes instruction of Dickinson’s poetry at the undergraduate level. Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses editions of Dickinson’s poetry, aids to teaching, reference works, biographies, critical …

Pilar And Brett: Female Heroes In Hemingway, Jean Kover Chandler

Masters Theses

The significant works on the hero have always assumed that the hero is male. However, feminist writers, such as Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, have recently shown many women who are, in fact, heroic in both American and British literature. The main problem is that both cultures have often been unable to recognize female heroism, primarily because of their long-conditioned patriarchal perspectives.

Men go on heroic quests; women either help or hinder them along their paths. Thus, women have been considered as supporting characters only, and they are called heroines. But some authors have created female heroes who are not …

Book Review: Alicia Ostriker, Stealing The Language: The Emergence Of Women's Poetry In America (Boston, 1986), Wendy Martin

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Book review.

The Woman Is Perfected: A Reader-Response Approach To Sylvia Plath's Ariel, Kathleen Herrick Schroeder

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

A Room Of One's Own: The Women's Room, Lou Ellen Crawford

Masters Theses

The recent resurgence of feminism has been accompanied by the development of feminist fiction. Identifying those characteristics by which feminist fiction adds to the American novel a new and valid perspective, feminist criticism has also flourished. Feminist critics agree that fiction with a new perspective demands critical evaluation from that same perspective; and Cheri Register provides a concise, thorough list of five elements which comprise effective feminist fiction. Of Register's five criteria, Carol Heilbrun stresses the equalizing, conciliatory influence of androgyny. Recent feminist authors have written many novels which perform one or more of the functions prescribed by Register. Three …

Hawthorne's Hester & Zenobia: Possible Reflections Of Nineteenth Century Feminism & The Writings Of Margaret Fuller, Carolyn Raiser

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The thesis focuses upon the possible influences of Margaret Fuller upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's creation of Hester in The Scarlet Letter and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. It suggests that Hester and Zenobia are feminists who may owe much of their characterization as developed through their feminist arguments to Margaret Fuller, a nineteenth century feminist and acquaintance of Hawthorne's. Hawthorne and Fuller are placed in historical context within the feminist movement of the nineteenth century by examining some of the leading feminists and their concerns regarding women's rights. Margaret Fuller's writings and ideas are examined, along with her relationship to Hawthorne. …

The Female Image In The Caldecott Medal Award Books, Patricia Lee Brighton Roberts

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

PROBLEM: Millions of children read and view the Caldecott Winners each year There are no published studies regarding the possible stereo-typing of the role of the human, animal and inanimate female image in the texts and illustrations of these 37 books.

Purpose: The. investigation ·was conducted to determine the extent the total population of the Caldecott books did stereo-type the role of the human, animal and inanimate female image.

Procedures: The investigation was completed in four steps: (1) First, a panel of sociologists determined the content validity of the definitions used in the hypothesis; (2) Second, a Content Analysis Form …

Trends In The Treatment Of Women In Fiction, 1890-1910, Gertrude M. Richards

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis proposes to examine six novels of the period 1890-1910 for evidence of new trends in the treatment of women in fiction and for signs of social criticism. The novels chosen are major works of representative British and American realists and naturalists. The authors to be considered, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, George Moore, George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, and Arnold Bennett, were writers who, in varying degrees, came under the influence of the Continental writers who were the cause of the aforementioned controversy.

Sara Teasdale: Her Life And Work, Virginia Mcknight

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study of Sara Teasdale was made not only in an attempt to learn more about her as a woman and as a poet but try to relate the two, to explain why she wrote the type of poetry which she did, why some of her poems express such a joyous love of life and others such as disillusionment. The latter expression is more understandable when the facts of her life are known. The studies of her imagery and stanzaic forms aid in forming an opinion of her ability as a poet and also tend to characterize her as a …

Annie Fellows Johnston & The Little Colonel Books, Gladys Wilson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this thesis is to study the original background and influences of the Little Colonel Series, their wide popularity, and the criticisms made by friends and critics. In my research work it soon became evident that Mrs. Johnston's own life and observations played too great a part in her books to be omitted; so two full chapters of her life have preceded the study of the series.

Alice Hegan Rice, Lena Collins Ellis

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Biography of Alice Hegan Rice, author from Louisville, Kentucky.