Modern Literature Commons^™

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

Occupying The Pedestal: Gender Issues In Ellen Gilchrist, Karon Reese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ellen Gilchrist's works shows the struggles of women living in a postmodern South. This dissertation explores Gilchrist's representations of southern women as they transition from the old South to modernity. Gilchrist's work depicts women who attempt to break off the pedestal of white Southern womanhood, but never quite do, often simultaneously disrupting and confirming traditional notions of a "good Southern lady." Gilchrist shows how women occupy the pedestal as a form of refuge and also as a form of protest. These are women who, as they navigate the transition to a new South, are reluctant to surrender the privilege of …

“A Southern Expendable”: Cultural Patriarchy, Maternal Abandonment, And Narrativization In Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina, Natalie Carter

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Bastard Out of Carolina is a remarkable text for many reasons: Allison’s unsentimental portrayal of profound poverty in the Old South; her unflinching depiction of incest; and the conclusion—devastating for character and reader alike—all contribute to the “flawless” nature of this novel. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is Allison’s ability to seamlessly weave a particularly Southern tradition of masculinity and violence into this heartbreaking tale of a daughter’s trauma and a mother’s abandonment. In this article, I will investigate Allison’s multifaceted portrayals of trauma in Bastard Out of Carolina, which—when combined with an analysis of social and economic traditions in …

An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George

Theses and Dissertations

Immersed in a web of short stories, poetry, and supporting biographical and life-writing sources, I investigate the narrative significance beneath and beyond two British and American modernist women authors. I evaluate sisterly connectedness between their literary production, publishing histories and life writings present in a specific cultural-temporal moment and genre: the short story. By looking on these unique, forgotten fictions through a new materialist lens, I argue for their short fiction's greater inclusion in the canon of women's modernism. Chapter I tests correlations between two authors undergoing the same stresses, alienations, joys and desires by taking up tenants of material …

Hero With A Thousand Copyright Violations: Modern Myth And An Argument For Universally Transformative Fan Fiction, Natalie H. Montano

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Copyright law is designed to protect the ownership and financial rights of the original author of a literary work. However, the internet has created new opportunities for amateur writers to create their own fan fiction based on such literary works. Borrowing from the ideas and characters of a work, fan fiction authors build upon and re-imagine these stories. Such fan works should be protected under the Fair Use Defense, but the power imbalance between amateur fan fiction authors and successful published authors often leads to the eradication of fan stories from the public domain.

This Comment argues that fan fiction …

Decoding Literary Aids: A Study On Issues Of The Body, Masculinity, And Self Identity In U.S. Aids Literature From 1984-2011, Alexander Shimon Abrams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rather than waiting decades to respond, novelists of nearly every literary genre began conceptualizing the AIDS epidemic shortly after the first documented case of the virus in the United States in 1981. Writers, feeling a sense of urgency, wasted little time constructing didactic texts that differ from much historical fiction in that they were written as the tragedy they are commenting on occurred. However, AIDS literature has changed as the disease has spread well beyond the gay communities of San Francisco and New York, causing people to reexamine their longstanding beliefs on masculinity, sexuality, and body politics.

My Master's thesis …

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

No Se Puede Ser Cubano En Cualquier Parte: La Metáfora Del Derrumbe En La Fiesta Vigilada Y Cien Botellas En Una Pared, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

En el umbral del siglo XXI, las novelas de de Antonio José Ponte y Ena Lucía Portela representan una literatura de gran complejidad, cuya narrativa urbana produce ciertas cualidades estéticas distintivas y notables.

Aurora Bertrana: Una Trayectoria Literaria Marcada Por La Perspectiva De Género, Sílvia Roig

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the mid 20^th century. The written work of Aurora Bertrana is almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Relegated almost to absolute oblivion, her rich, intellectual writting has not received the attention it deserves. I have studied seventeen of Bertrana’s novels –practically her entire oeuvre– written in Catalan and Spanish, including the following excellent books that have escaped critical attention: Ariatea (1960), “El pomell de les violes” (mn.), L’inefable Philip (mn.), La aldea sin …

Les Enfants De L’Ombre: Dalila Kerchouche. Leila: Avoir Dix-Ans Dans Un Camp De Harkis, Jimia Boutouba

Modern Languages & Literature

Dans son roman, Leila : Avoir 17 ans dans un camp de harkis, Dalila Kerchouche retrace le parcours de ceux dont la jeunesse fut passée/gâchée dans les camps de la relégation. À travers le regard blessé d’une adolescente de 17 ans, on découvre ce que l’histoire officielle a voulu couvrir du manteau de l’oubli : l’arrivée précipitée des harkis et leurs familles en France, leur dur quotidien dans les camps en marge de la communauté nationale, leur dépouillement, les humiliations, les souffrances, les folies et une gestion étatique aussi choquante qu’incohérente. Le présent article examine la portée individuelle et collective …

The Ambiguity Of Panem: Capitalism, Nationalism, And Sexuality In Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games Series, Megan Ann Peters

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The publication of and the critical and public success of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy marks a significant departure from the norms of traditionally-popular young adult literature, particularly in its portrayal of a fiercely active female protagonist. This thesis argues that despite the noticeable progress these novels make in representing a strong female character, The Hunger Games series fails to adequately challenge other important aspects of oppression. I conduct a feminist literary analysis of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay, focusing specifically on representations of capitalism and commodification, national and district pride, and sexual objectification and sexual harassment …

Creating Knowledge, Volume 6, 2013

Creating Knowledge

It is my great pleasure to introduce the sixth volume of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ “Creating Knowledge,” our undergraduate student scholarship and research journal. First published in 2008, the journal is the outcome of an initiative to enhance and enrich the academic quality of the student experience within the college. Through this publication, the college seeks to encourage students to become actively engaged in creating scholarship and research and gives them a venue for the publication of their essays.

This sixth volume is, however, unlike the previous ones in one major respect: the papers in this …

The Journey Narrative: The Trope Of Women's Mobility And Travel In Contemporary Arab Women's Literary Narratives, Banan Al-Daraiseh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the trope of women's journey and the various kinds of movement and travel it includes employed and represented by three contemporary Arab women literary writers, Ghada Samman, Ahdaf Soueif, and Leila Aboulela in their literary narratives as well as travelogue in the case of Samman. The primary texts analyzed in this study are Samman's Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela's The Translator and Minaret. These texts demonstrate how the journey trope becomes a fresh narrative strategy used by Arab women writers that …

Unbreakable Glass Slippers: Hegemony In Ella Enchanted, Tori Shereen Mirsadjadi

Scripps Senior Theses

The way Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted simultaneously conforms to its late-20^th-century American standards and rebels against its Cinderella origins is analyzed in this thesis. As an analysis of a piece of literature written for children, the thesis works to defend the notion that playful literature produces a serious dialogue with its readers, and that young female readers are a particularly apropos group for the dialogue about hegemony that Ella Enchanted allows.

Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This is a biographical overview of the life and principle works of the French author Rachilde, a.k.a. Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women writers working in the masculinist field of fin-de-siecle or decadent fiction.

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

"I Could Kill You Quite Easily, Bella, Simply By Accident": Violence And Romance In Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" Saga, Samantha Amber Oakley

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga is an exemplification of rape culture due to its valorization of romantic relationships that are psychologically abusive, violent, and ultimately destructive. In my analysis, I use a postmodern feminist framework to examine the four main books in the series: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. Specifically, focusing on how the female protagonist, Bella Swan, is portrayed, I interrogate the interactions with her two love interests, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. I found that the romantic developments between Bella, Edward, and Jacob are depicted as violent and dangerous affairs that echo non-physically …

Los Fantasmas Queer De La Dictadura Franquista: ¡Toda Una Re-Velación!, Danae Gallo González

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

This paper is part of the academic effort to recover historical memory in post-Civil War Spain and metaphorically applies the so-called Giobert Tincture to Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) in order show how these works reveal the ghosts of the repression exerted against the epitome of the abject/obscene by Franco’s dictatorship: the queer collective. This collective continues to suffer from marginalization as well as from the effects of repression. I argue that El cuarto de atrás reveals C.’s repressed hybrid/queer identity and sexual orientation, …

Postmodern Subjects And The Nation: Contemporary Arab Women Writers' Reconfigurations Of Home And Belonging, Ghadir Khalil Zannoun

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A lot has been said about the declining status of national paradigms. Most recently, the forces of change have been located in the transnational and global phenomenon. Contemporary Arabic literature, however, identifies globalism as only one among many factors undermining the existing national formations in the Arab countries. Among these factors is the postcolonial condition, and in the case of Palestine, the struggle against the continuing military occupation of Palestinian lands, wholesale and unsystematized modernization, and complex internal Social, cultural, religious and racial differences exacerbated by neo-colonialism. The contemporary Arab women writers' fiction analyzed in this dissertation posits yet another …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Perpetual Creation And Provocation Of The Self, Krista Damico

Senior Honors Projects

The Perpetual Creation and Provocation of the Self

Krista D’Amico

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

This project consists of four related parts. The first part is a critical and creative work of prose in which I converse with the thought of two philosophers, namely Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. This conversation enables me to present my own thought and subjectivity in relationship to a very important aspect of my life: music-making. The second part of my project is a critical essay in which I contemplate the work of another artist, Virginia Woolf, and the way that her credo Three Guineas (1938) …

From Larva To Butterfly: Sophia In Ding Ling’S Miss Sophia’S Diary And Coco In Wei Hui’S Shanghai Baby, Xiaoqing Liu

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Sophia and Coco are two characters in Ding Ling's Miss Sophia's Diary (1928/1995) and Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (1999), respectively. Like a larva, Sophia, who enters society in the early twentieth century, is weak and immobile. Coco, who lives at the end of the twentieth century, is like a butterfly leading an outlandish lifestyle. The differences between Sophia and Coco reflect the achievement of official feminism, which liberated Chinese women from traditional patriarchal control in the social sense. However, gender issues for women remain unresolved. To fight against traditional patriarchy and especially challenge gender oppression in official feminism, both Sophia …

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

Fractured Identity - The Jagged Path Of Diaspora In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices, Lisa Lamor

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Representation of fractured identity issues is a thematic element powerfully present in the work of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Although identity is a commonly explored theme in general, it is through fragmentation in her novels that struggles are often identified and trauma is illustrated. Complex, fragmenting experiences of persons living in the Indian diaspora are frequently present in novels by Divakaruni along with continual employment of fracturing in terms of structure, imagery, plot, language, and character. In order to illustrate the presence of fracturization in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's literature, in this thesis I do an extensive textual examination of her first …

Nothing But A Pack Of Cards: Semi-Fictitious Persons And Flopping Jellyfish In Elizabeth Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against 'interpreting' both the novel and its 'monstrous' heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, …

Wordsworth And Milton: The Prelude And Paradise Lost, Colin Mccormack

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The James Brothers And The Tragic Beauty Of Individualism, Corey Plante

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Genres Populaires Et « Érographiques » En Afrique Francophone : Le Cas Des Romans De La Collection Adoras, Sathya Rao

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article will take the Adoras novels as a case study to address the aesthetics and institutional issues related to the emergence of popular literature in francophone Africa. As the promoter of an “erographic” discourse that strives to accommodate modernity and tradition, francophone romance, which has been largely under-examined if not denigrated, raises a wide range of questions on the status of francophone literature, the socioeconomic constraints on publication in Africa, and the construction of a truly African erotic imaginary.

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner And Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather and William Faulkner represent an intriguing and potentially productive pairing for comparative study. Their works and careers are located at the rich intersection between regional ism and modernism, and both early 20th-century writers often looked back to the 19th century in their fiction. Even in the absence of influence or intertextual reference, these commonalities would give a literary historian much to say. However, in her study of these two authors, Merrill Maguire Skaggs exhaustively catalogs similarities and differences as proof of a decades-long competition between the authors at the expense of depth and subtlety in her analysis of …