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Groom, Kelle. "Five Kingdoms." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2008. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/2168.
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GROOM, KELLE . Five Kingdoms. (Under the direction of Don Stap.) Five Kingdoms is a collection of 55 poems in three sections. The title refers to the five kingdoms of life, encompassing every living thing. Section I explores political themes and addresses subjects that reach across a broad expanse of time--from the oldest bones of a child and the oldest map of the world to the bombing of Fallujah in the current Iraq war. Connections between physical and metaphysical worlds are examined. The focus narrows from the world to the city in section II. The theme of shelter is important to these poems, as is the act of being a flâneur. The search for shelter, physical and spiritual, is explored. The third section of Five Kingdoms narrows further to the individual. Political themes recur, as do ekphrastic elements, in the examination of individual lives and the search for physical and metaphysical shelter. The title poem "Five Kingdoms," was written on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. This non-narrative poem is composed of a series of questions for the reader regarding personal and national security. It is a political poem that uses a language of fear and superstition to question what we are willing to sacrifice to be safe and what "safety" means. The poem ends with a call to action: "Before you break in two, categorize/the five kingdoms, count all the living things." The poems in this manuscript are a kind of counting that pays attention to the things of the world through praise and elegy. The poems in Five Kingdoms are indebted to my reading of many poets, in particular Michael Burkard, Carolyn Forché, Brenda Hillman, Tony Hoagland, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, Jane Mead, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Frank O'Hara, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand.M.F.A.
Department of English
Arts and Humanities
Creative Writing MFA
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Veitch, Karen Elizabeth. "The poetry of female radicalism in Depression-Era America." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/43051/.
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This thesis examines womens' poetry of the radical Left and organised labour movement of the Depression-Era United States and investigates the relationship between poetry and politics during this period. In so doing, it shows that women poets were concerned with precisely that problem: of poetry's political function. The work of individual poets and the acts of collective cultural production explored in this thesis articulate a radical, politically transformative poetics at a time when the continued existence of poetry was perceived to be under threat from scientific advance and wider cultural changes. Juxtaposing analysis of Left modernist poets with poets of the labour movement, the chapters focus on three individual poets including Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) and Miriam Tane (1916-2007). To provide an understanding of the role of poetry within a specific political movement and to establish the context in which Tane's poetry was produced, two chapters are included which analyse the educational culture and the collective cultural production of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. One chapter focuses on the history of the ILGWU's educational and cultural activities and the other analyses collections of poetry which the union produced. This thesis challenges the existing paradigm in which the study of American radical Left and labour poetry has been isolated from any broader enquiry about its relationship to class, American political history and also to literary modernism. This thesis advances two main arguments: that the poets considered in this thesis conceived of poetry as a politically transformative force; that these politically transformative understandings of poetry were rooted in in an engagement with the ideological and material contexts of the social movements to which these writers belonged. Furthermore, this thesis considers poetry in terms of the material context of its publication, and the political uses to which it was put.
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Armacanqui-Tipacti, Elia J. María Manuela de Santa Ana. "Sor María Manuela de Santa Ana una teresina peruana /." Cuzco, Perú : Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinas "Bartolomé de Las Casas", 1999. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZkxfAAAAMAAJ.
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Manning, Kimberly. "Authentic feminine rhetoric: A study of Leslie Silko's Laguna Indian prose and poetry." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1996. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1100.
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Hogue, Cynthia Anne. "Figuring woman (out): Feminine subjectivity in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185054.
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Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.
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Sowinska, Suzanne. "American women writers and the radical agenda 1925-1940 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9328.
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Homestead, Melissa J. "American women authors and literary property, 1822-1869 /." Cambridge : Cambridge university press, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb400550012.
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Kaufman, Anne Lee. "Shaping infinity American and Canadian women write a North American west /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/173.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2003.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Galliher, Debra L. (Debra Lee). "The Light Under." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500864/.
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A poet who is a woman and a theologian writes under three pressures, or a triple bind: individuality, spirituality, and society. The desires and drives of the ego and those of spirituality often conflict, and societal expectations which gender bestows add further stress to the poet's efforts. This constant struggle destroys some poets (Plath, Sexton) and renders silent many of the rest. The following collection of poems combats the silence in four progressive sections: The first is an introductory essay which further discusses the triple bind; the second, "Between Two," illustrates spiritual relationships from despair to disillusionment; the third section, "Life in the Mirror," describes deteriorating human relationships; the final section, "Salt," presents problems resolving to a kind of negative capability. This poetry collection continues one woman's poetic struggle toward validity and acceptance.
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Silcox, Heidi Mae-Marie. "The precocious mind : the intellectual development of Charlotte Perkins Gilman /." Read thesis online, 2010. http://library.uco.edu/UCOthesis/SilcoxHM2010.pdf.
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Kweon, Young. "The textual and imaginary world of Ho Kyongbon (1563-1589)." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19659.
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This thesis is a study of the Korean woman poet Ho Kyongbon (1563-1589) and her poetry. In it, I investigate Ho's two brothers' active involvement in her literary life, particularly her younger brother Ho Kyun's publication of her poetry collection, the Nansorhon chip and promotion of her literary works to Chinese scholars. I also examine late Ming and Qing anthologies which include Ho's poetry to disclose how late Ming and Qing scholars evaluated her poetry and represented her life. I argue that the attention these critics paid to Ho's literary works and talent reflected a blossoming of women's literary culture and a rapid growth in the anthologizing of women's poetry. I also undertake an analysis of Ho's poetry, with particular emphasis on the influence of Tang poetry on her poetic practice. This analysis is accompanied by a discussion of Ho's relationship to the "Tang revival movement" in which her two brothers were fervently engaged. This relationship provides a context through which to better understand not only Ho's particular interest in emulating Tang poetry, but also the very textual qualities of her poetry.
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Bowman, Gaillynn M. "Constance Cary Harrison, refugitta of Richmond : a nineteenth-century Southern woman writer's critically intriguing antislavery narrative strategy /." Huntington, WV : [Marshall University Libraries], 2003. http://www.marshall.edu/etd/descript.asp?ref=250.
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Gillis, Lesley. "The woman who gains : women's rights, women writers, and the periodical essay in Britain and the United States, 1850-1905." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38194.
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This dissertation examines the periodical essay as a site for women's political activity in the nineteenth century. I suggest that the essays and articles of well-known writers Fanny Fern, Marie Corelli, and Sarah Grand, and others who are less well-known, such as Ignota and Mary Livermore, together form a significant body of prose non-fiction that highlights women's active involvement in political debate. I focus primarily upon women's contributions to general-interest periodicals---where women were competing for space against a wider variety of male writers---rather than on ladies' magazines or the suffrage press, whose more narrow goals diminish the potency of women's appearance in the press. Much of my study focuses on the British Nineteenth Century and the American North American Review , both of which turned to series of articles and carefully organized groups of essays to showcase women's inclusion in the debate, often summarized as the Woman Question, over women's position in nineteenth-century society. Throughout, I posit that women's publication on topics concerning women's rights constitutes culturally and generically sanctioned political activity. The five chapters represent increasingly specific aspects of this activity. The first positions women's involvement within the press's penchant for diversity. The second argues for a connection between the influential function of the periodical press and the role of women as positive influences on others. While this influence is generally interpreted as purely domestic, I suggest an alternative reading that endorses women's publication in periodicals. The third chapter examines how women play on notions of gender and identity to create viable public voices in the press. In chapter four, I turn my attention to the ways in which women occupy the forum of the periodical to comment on and prescribe male behavior. Finally, in chapter five I discuss the ways women exert their powers to interpret and comment upon p
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Rex, Cathy Wyss Hilary E. "Indianness and womanhood textualizing the female American self /." Auburn, Ala, 2008. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/EtdRoot/2008/SUMMER/English/Dissertation/Rex_Cathy_12.pdf.
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Fankhauser, Michelle Esther Alexander. "Booked "womanhood is too tightly bound to give me scope" /." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2010. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2010/m_fankhauser_050210.pdf.
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Balic, Iva Foertsch Jacqueline. "Always painting the future utopian desire and the women's movement in selected works by United States female writers at the turn of the twentieth century /." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-11060.
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Oprava, David E. "Once America : 50 expats, 50 interviews, 50 poems." Thesis, Swansea University, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678534.
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Underwood, Jan. "Revolution, connectedness and kinwork : women's poetry in Nicaragua." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61970.
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Piroli, Marta. "Finding Voices: Italian American Female Autobiography." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1145368184.
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Chowdhury, Sajed Ali. "Dissident metaphysics in Renaissance women's poetry." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2013. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/45264/.
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This thesis considers the idea of the 'metaphysical' in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury women's poetry, notably by exploring the female-voiced lyrics affiliated with Marie Maitland (d. 1596) in the Scottish manuscript verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto (c. 1586). The study aims to reintegrate important strands of Renaissance culture which have been lost by too exclusive a focus on English, male writing and contexts. For many literary historians the 'metaphysical' refers overwhelmingly to Dryden's pejorative categorization of Donne and his followers. However, Sarah Hutton has recently shown how the 'metaphysical' can be traced to an Aristotelian Neoplatonism, whereby influential fifteenth-century thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino were conflating the spiritual and material for political purposes. For the queer Renaissance critic, Michael Morgan Holmes, the 'political' pertains to individual spiritual-material desires which can undermine hegemonic definitions of the natural and unnatural. Building on this, my thesis illuminates 'metaphysics' in the work of Maitland, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Constance Aston Fowler (1621?-1664) and Katherine Philips (1632- 1664). These poets use the physical and spiritual bonds between women to explore the nature of female space, time and identity. Hutton's and Holmes's definition of the 'metaphysical' has special applicability for these poets, as they tacitly deconstruct the patriarchal construction of the virgin/whore and offer their own configuration of the spiritual-sensual woman. While critics have foregrounded a male metaphysical tradition in the early modern period, this study proposes that there is a 'dissident' female metaphysical strand that challenges the 'dominant' male discourses of the time. Over the last few decades, feminist scholars, notably, Lorna Hutson, Barbara Lewalski, Kate Chedgzoy, Carol Barash and Valerie Traub have reinstated the work of Lanyer and Philips in the English canon of Renaissance writing. More recently Sarah Dunnigan has drawn attention to the importance of the Scots poet and compiler, Maitland. Moreover, Helen Hackett has indicated that the writings of Fowler force us to rethink the roles of women in early modern literary culture. I take this further in two ways. First, I examine these poets' relationship to the 'metaphysical', the importance of which has been underestimated by critics, despite Dryden's original gendered use of the term. Secondly, I propose that these writers are responding to a 'polyglottal' female metaphysical tradition that develops in Renaissance Europe through a female republic of letters. I also assess the difficulties in belonging to a 'female tradition' in an era where female authorship was necessarily affected by misogynistic attitudes to women as writers. The research re-contextualizes the work of these women by examining the philosophical ideologies of Aristotle, Ficino, Marguerite of Navarre, Donne, Sir Richard Maitland, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville, Olympia Morata, Herbert Aston, Katherine Thimelby, St Teresa of Ávila and Andrew Marvell. By juxtaposing these four poets and reading them from within this philosophical-political context, the thesis sheds new light on the nature of early modern female intertextuality, whilst challenging male Anglocentric definitions of the 'Renaissance'.
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Dietrich, Rayshelle. "Everyday epistles the journal-letter writing of American women, 1754-1836 /." [Fort Worth, Tex.] : Texas Christian University, 2008. http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-12192008-094554/unrestricted/Dietrich.pdf.
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Yamamoto, Traise. "Writing "that other, private self" : the construction of Japanese American female subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9436.
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Nkatingi, R. O. "Nxopoxopo wa switlhokovetselo leswi ndhunduzelaka vavasati eka xitsonga." Thesis, University of Limpopo, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10386/1415.
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Spann, Britta. "Reviving Kalliope : four North American women and the epic tradition /." Connect to title online (Scholars' Bank) Connect to title online (ProQuest), 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10356.
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Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Discusses the poetry of H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-267). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.
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Daly-Galeano, Heather Marlowe. "Little Women, Mutable Authors: Louisa May Alcott and the Question of Authorship." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223371.
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This project analyzes the ways that Louis May Alcott portrays authors in several texts, including Hospital Sketches (1863), "Enigmas" (1864), "Psyche's Art" (1868), Little Women (1868), A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), and Diana and Persis (1878). An examination of prevailing contemporary theories of authorship reveals that Alcott's interest in authorship (as shown through her experiences as a writer and the author figures she depicts within her writing) cannot be adequately analyzed under any of the existing theoretical frameworks because the theories neglect to consider markers of racial, sexual, cultural, and class-based difference. Being a female author in nineteenth-century America was, for Alcott, a preoccupation. Thus much of her writing features representations of authors. For Alcott, as well as many of her female contemporaries, the question "What does it mean to be an author?" cannot be considered without also asking, "What does it mean to be a woman?" and "How can an author be represented in a text?" Alcott's treatment of these questions in her writing was her attempt to create a dialogue between herself, other writers, and her reading public. By studying Alcott's author figures, I advance a model of authorship that highlights issues of gender and multiplicity; in this way my work has applications to other authors who have been excluded by normative definitions of authorship. The concept of "mutable authorship," a model that more accurately incorporates Alcott's treatment of authorship, is the product of several different literary, historical, and feminist theoretical lenses. This dissertation works through the different structuring figures that Alcott uses to represent the author, beginning with the semi-autobiographical first-person narrator and moving to the more metaphorical figures of the artist and the performer. The discussion culminates with the exploration of adaptation and collaboration in the three Hollywood feature films of Alcott's best-known work, Little Women, and several recent texts that respond directly to Alcott's work.
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Goldsmith, Jenna L. "Life Matter: Women Subjects and Women's Objects in Innovative American Poetry." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/47.
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Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative poetry compels an equally material framework for reading that is, at a foundational level, by and about the world.
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Chan, Suet Ni. "Women at crossroads : a study of women's search for identity in twentieth century Chinese-American fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2009. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1095.
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Eley, Dikeita N. "Color (Sub)Conscious: African American Women, Authors, and the Color Line in Their Literature." VCU Scholars Compass, 2004. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/1486.
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Color (sub)Conscious explores the African American female's experience with colorism. Divided into three distinct sections. The first section is a literary analysis of such works as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker's "If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?" an essay from her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. The second section is a research project based on data gathered from 12 African American females willing to share their own experiences and insights on colorism. The final section is a creative non-fiction piece of the author's own personal pain growing up and living with the lasting effects of colorism.
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Farnum, O'Leary Christine J. "Motherhood portrayals in American literature /." To access this resource online via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses @ UTEP, 2008. http://0-proquest.umi.com.lib.utep.edu/login?COPT=REJTPTU0YmImSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=2515.
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Li, Jing. "Self in community: twentieth-century American drama by women." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2016. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/322.
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This thesis argues that twentieth-century American women playwrights spearhead the drama of transformation, and their plays become resistance discourses that protest, subvert, or change the representation of the female self in community. Many create antisocial, deviant, and self-reflexive characters who become misfits, criminals, or activists in order to lay bare women's moral-psychological crises in community. This thesis highlights how selected women playwrights engage with, and question various dominant, regional, racial, or ethnic female communities in order to redefine themselves. Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother are representative texts that explore how the dominant culture can pose a barrier for radical women who long for self-fulfillment. To cultivate their personhood, working class Caucasian women are forced to go against their existing community so as to seek sexual freedom and reproductive rights, which are regarded as new forms of resistance or transgression. While they struggle hard to conform to the traditional, gendered notion of female altruism, self-sacrifice and care ethics, they cannot hide their discontent with the gendered division of labor. They are troubled doubly by the fact that they have to work in the public sphere, but conform to their gender roles in the private sphere. Different female protagonists resort to extreme homicidal or suicidal measures in order to assert their radical, contingent subjectivities, and become autonomous beings. By becoming antisocial or deviant characters, they reject their traditional conformity, and emphasize the arbitrariness and performativity of all gender roles. Treadwell and Norman both envision how the dominant Caucasian female community must experience radical changes in order to give rise to a new womanhood. Using Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as examples, this thesis demonstrates the difficulties women may face when living in disparate communities. The selected texts show that Southern women and African-American women desperately crave for their distinct identities, while they long to be accepted by others. Their subjectivity is a constant source of anxiety, but some women can form strong psychological bonds with women from the same community, empowering them to make new life choices. To these women, their re-fashioned self becomes a means to reexamine the dominant white culture and their racial identity. African-American women resist the discourse of assimilation, and re-identify with their African ancestry, or pan-Africanism. In the relatively traditional southern community, women can subvert the conventional southern belle stereotypes. They assert their selfhood by means of upward mobility, sexual freedom, or the rejection of woman's reproductive imperative. The present study shows these women succeed in establishing their personhood when they refuse to compromise with the dominant ways, as well as the regional, racial communal consciousness. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles are analyzed to show how women struggle to claim their dialogic selfhood in minoritarian communities (New England Community and Jewish Community). Female protagonists maintain dialogues with other women in the same community, while they choose their own modes of existence, such as single parenthood or political activism. The process of transformation shows that women are often disturbed by their moral consciousness, a result of their acceptance of gender roles and their submission to patriarchal authority. Their transgressive behaviors enable them to claim their body and mind, and strive for a new source of personhood. Both playwrights also advocate women's ability to self-critique, to differentiate the self from the Other, to allow the rise of an emergent self in the dialectical flux of inter-personal and intra-personal relations. The present study reveals that twentieth-century American female dramatists emphasize relationality in their pursuit of self. However, the transformation of the self can only be completed by going beyond, while remaining in dialogue with the dominant, residual, or emergent communities. For American women playwrights, the emerging female selves come with a strong sense of "in-betweenness," for it foregrounds the individualistic and communal dimensions of women, celebrating the rise of inclusive, mutable, and dialogic subjectivities.
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Petch, Melanie Jayne. "Women, cultural duality and space : themes in twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4276.
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A longstanding critical map which has perpetuated the differences between British and American poetries is currently in the process of being redrawn. In recent years, there has been a marked interest in literary criticism which seeks to explore the rich and complex interplay between the two nations and their respective poetries. Despite this being a necessary dialogue, the contextualisation of women poets in this important field of enquiry has been largely unrecognised. This thesis responds to the problem of female negation by setting up a critical and cultural context which explores the poetic tendencies of nine Anglo-American women poets whose publishing histories span 1913-2006: British-born poets, Mina Loy (1882-1966) and Denise Levertov (1923-1997), and American-born poets, H.D. (1886-1961), Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), Ruth Fainlight (1931-), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Anne Stevenson (1933-), Anne Rouse (1954-) and Eva Salzman (1961-) The intent of this study is to argue that the intersection of cultural duality and gender lends this poetry by Anglo-American women a particularly dynamic energy which generates a rich fretwork of spatial negotiations. This is primarily achieved through the poets' use of symbols which reflect their preoccupations with living as an outsider who oscillates in and between two places. Often, although not exclusively, metaphors of estrangement are explicitly gendered and signify the search for a female space. The theoretical work of French feminist and poststructuralist, Julia Kristeva and Marxist philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, proposes that the condition of the social outsider can be harmonised within the imaginative space of poetry, thus offering writers the potential to 'change and appropriate' the limitations of the social space in which they find themselves. Especially appealing for expatriate women poets then, the creative writing process precipitates their empowerment, liberation and the opportunity to reimagine a parallel world to inhabit. The concept of space and how it is perceived imaginatively in this range of poetry determines the thematic structure of the thesis. Individual chapters focus upon locations, homes, journeys, bodies and landscapes, and myth. The formation reflects a progression from spaces that are grounded in material conditions, as with locations, the home, and journeys, towards spaces that are highly intimate and abstract, as with bodies and landscapes, and myth. Responding to the limitations of binary discourses that uphold the divide between American and British poetries, as well as to the lack of feminist engagement with cultural discourses, this thesis offers a number of frameworks for reading Anglo-American poetry. While rejecting prescriptive definitions, it endeavours to set up a sufficiently open narrative that can encompass poets dating before the twentieth-century, contemporary poets in the current climate, as well as poets who will continue to complicate the AmericanlBritish axis in the future.
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Biedka, Kathleen G. "Life begins at fifty /." Full text available online, 2005. http://www.lib.rowan.edu/find/theses.
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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
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Ahmad, Ebtehal A. "Women's bodies in dramatic confrontations with patriarchal logic : the representation of violence against the female body in contemporary drama by women." Virtual Press, 2003. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1266037.
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In this study, I examine the dramatization of violence against the female body in contemporary drama by women and the purpose behind their representational approaches. I concentrate on the representation of three types that I consider inclusive of other minor forms of violence: the political, the medical, and the social violations of the female body. In chapter one, I study the dramatic representation of political violence against women as their bodies become ideological expressions of their lands. This chapter analyzes Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus and Naomi Wallace's In the Heart of America. These dramas represent the violation of women's bodies to parallel the violation and rape of their lands that are effeminized by their subjugation to the dominant powers of the world. In chapter two, I examine the representation of medical violence against women's bodies as connoting the lower status of the female body within patriarchy. The dramas of this chapter, Louise Page's Tissue and Margaret Edson's Wit, illustrate how the female body is dehumanized and devalued by a patriarchal medical practice that fails to recognize the distinctive physical and mental needs of women. Finally, in chapter three, I discuss the dramatic representation of social violence as the most inclusive form of aggression against women. The plays of this chapter, Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom and Maria Irene Fornes' The Conduct of Life, emphasize the masculine fear of and intimidation by the female body's sexuality and productivity, which instigates all types of physical violence against women within the social context. In the conclusion, I discuss Eve Ansler's The Vagina Monologues as a piece of performance art that instigates an active type of opposition against women's subjugations and violations. The activism of this type of drama and its effectiveness in enforcing change upon women's lives makes it an excellent extension to the type of ideas and notions brought about in this dissertation.Department of English
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Ng, Yor-ling Carly, and 吳若寧. "Representing Chineseness: the problem of ethnicity and sexuality in Chinese American female literature." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47753158.
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The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents
one of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century.
Within this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique
position in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures.
On the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from
an Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to
terms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a
dilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community,
and begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity.
It is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about
Self/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I
consider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood
in movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be
internalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too
have started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese
identity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as
alienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility
of disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent
to which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that
has a temporal element in it.
As a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular
experiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by
examining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir,
and that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their
singular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such
elements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes
the authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion,
one’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it
is not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or
individuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that
corresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical
framework.
The three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in
this project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over
Chinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself
with others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural
affiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the
footbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile
acceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in
Chapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman
conceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three
situations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese
American female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other.published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy
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Wakefield, Eleanor. "Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women's Sonnets." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22651.
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This dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form.
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Huang, Qiaole 1976. "Writing from within a women's community : Gu Taiqing (1799-1877) and her poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=81496.
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This thesis examines the life and poetry of the woman poet Gu Taiqing (1799-1877) within the context of a community of gentry women in mid-nineteenth century Beijing. This group of women was a "community" in the sense that their contact, sociability, friendship and poetry writing were meaningfully intertwined in their lives. The thesis is divided into three interconnected chapters. Two separate biographical accounts of Gu Taiqing's life---one centered around the relationship with her husband, and the second around her relationship with her female friends---are reconstructed in the first chapter. This biographical chapter underlines the importance of situating Gu in the women's community to understand her life and poetry. The second is comprised of a reconstruction of this women's community, delineating its members and distinctive features. In the third chapter, a close-reading of Gu's poems in relation to the women's community focuses on the themes of xian (leisure), parting, and friendship. This chapter shows how each of these themes are represented by Gu and how her representations are closely related to the experiences of this women's group.
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Adams, Brenda Byrne. "Patterns of healing and wholeness in characterizations of women by selected black women writers." Virtual Press, 1989. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/720157.
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Some Black women writers--Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker--of American fiction have written characterizations of winning women. Their characterizations include women who are capable of taking risks, making choices, and taking responsiblity for their choices. These winning women are capable of accepting their own successes and failures by the conclusions of the novels. They are characterized as dealing with devastating and traumatic personal histories in a growth-enhancing manner. Characterizations of winning women by these authors are consistently revealed through five developmental stages: conditioning, awareness, interiorizing, reintegrating, and winning. These stages contain patterns that are consistent from author to author.While conditioning and awareness of the negative influcences of conditioning are predictable, this study introduces the concept of interiorizing and reintegrating as positive steps toward becoming a winning woman. Frequent descriptions of numbness and disorientation mark the most obvious stages of interiorizing. It is not until the Twentieth Century that we see women writers using this interiorizing process as a necessary step toward growth. Surviving interiorizing, as these winning women do, leads to the essential stage of reintegrating.Interiorizing is a complete separation from social interaction; reintegrating is a gradual reattachment to social process. First, elaborate descriptions of bathing rituals affirm the importance of a woman's body to herself. Second, reintegrating involves food rituals which signal social reconnection. Celebration banquets and family recipes offer an important reminder to the winning woman that the future is built on the past. Taking the best of what has been learned from the past into the future provides strength and stability.The characterization of a winning woman stops with potential rather than completion. A winning woman must still take risks, make choices, and bear the consequences of her choices. The winning woman does not accept a diminished life of harmful conformity. She is characterized as discovering how to use choice and power. Novels included in this study are: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching God; Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters; Paule Marshall's Brownstone, Brown Girl; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; and Praisesong for the Widow; Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills; and Alice Walker's Meridian, and The Color Purple.Department of English
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Prindle, Paige Ann. "Publishing, property, and problematic heiresses representations of inheritance in nineteenth-century American women's popular fiction /." Diss., [La Jolla] : University of California, San Diego, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3355845.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 7, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-258).
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Boylorn, Robin M. "Southern Black Women: Their Lived Realities." [Tampa, Fla.] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://digital.lib.usf.edu/?e14.2827.
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Jadezweni, Mhlobo Wabantwana. "Aspects of isiXhosa poetry with special reference to poems produced about women." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006364.
Full textAbstract:
This study investigates the use of modern and izibongo (praise poetry) techniques in representing women in selected isiXhosa poems. The main interest of the study is to determine whether the same techniques to depict men are used when writing about women. It is also the interest of the study to ascertain how gender issues are dealt with in the selected poems. Seminal studies on izibongo by eminent scholars in this field show a serious lack of critique and little recognition of women in African languages’ poetry in general and in isiXhosa in particular. Pioneering studies in Nguni poetry about women have thus recommended that serious studies on poetry about women be undertaken. The analyses of selected poems by established isiXhosa poets show that modern poetry conventions are significantly used together with izibongo techniques. These techniques are used without any gender differentiation, which is another point of interest of this study. There are however instances where images specific to women are used. Such use has however not been found to be demeaning of women in any way. Poems where modern poetry forms and conventions are used tend to deal with subjects who have international or an urban area background. Even though the modern poetry conventions are used with izibongo techniques the presence of the modern literary conventions is prominent. This is the case particularly with poems about women in politics. That some female poet seems to accept some cultural practices that are viewed to be undermining the status of women does not take away the voice of protest against this oppression by some of the selected poets. These two voices, one of acceptance and the other one of protest are used as a basis for a debate around a need for a literary theory that addresses the question of African culture with special reference to isiXhosa poetry about women. The success of the selected poets with both modern and izibongo techniques is a good sign for the development of isiXhosa poetry in general and isiXhosa poetry about women. It is strongly recommended that continued research of a serious nature concerning poetry about, and produced by women, be undertaken.
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Hong, Kyung Won. "The histories of the propertyless : the literatures of U.S. women of color /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9975897.
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Stutesman, Drake. "Do you see what I mean? : an 'inner law of form' in Susan Howe's historicism." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.343376.
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Shea, Maureen Elizabeth. "Latin American women writers and the growing potential of political consciousness." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184310.
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This dissertation provides a feminist reading of the works of Latin American women writers since the decade of the sixties to the present who focus on the particular historical moment of their times from a political perspective. A systematic study of the narrative figure in novels by Dora Alonso, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, and Isabel Allende, reveals an awareness of the undercurrents of oppression existent in their societies based on racial and class stereotypes with a growing understanding of oppression based on sex. From the perspective of the female narrator in Tierra Inerme by the Cuban writer Dora Alonso, the Cuban social structure before 1959 is condemned for its inequality on the basis of class, race, and sex. However, the perspective of the narrator reveals that she has not entirely escaped the prejudices that permeate her society concerning women. Hasta no verte Jesus mio, by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska concentrates on the testimony of Jesusa Palancares who condemns the structural inequality existent in Mexican society. Although Palancares' perspective reveals an awareness of the unequal treatment of women, because of her underprivileged status she concentrates on oppression based on class. In Cenizas de Izalco by Darwin Flakoll from the United States and the Salvadoran Claribel Alegria, the 1931 massacre of the peasants in El Salvador is condemned. However, through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators, oppression on the basis of sex is most emphasized. La casa de los espiritus by the Chilean Isabel Allende depicts brutal class, racial and sexual oppression in Chile from the 1920's to 1973. It is in this novel that sexual oppression is portrayed most vividly, again through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators. Although a growing awareness of sexual oppression emerges in the novels studied becoming most emphatic in this decade through an awakening feminist consciousness, the perspective of the narrators emphasize to varying degrees the importance of solidarity among women to combat injustice of every form to achieve a more equitable existence for all oppressed people.
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Sarnosky, Yolonda P. "Black female authors document a loss of sexual identity Jacobs, Morrison, Walker, Naylor, and Moody /." Instructions for remote access. Click here to access this electronic resource. Access available to Kutztown University faculty, staff, and students only, 1999. http://www.kutztown.edu/library/services/remote_access.asp.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999.Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2836. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [ii]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).
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Evans, Meagan. "Sounding Silence: American Women's Experimental Poetics." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12946.
Full textAbstract:
Traditional feminist readings have valued women's writing that voices silenced experiences. In contrast, other twentieth-century theoretical formulations regard absences, refusals, and silences as constitutive of aesthetic practice rather than as imposed upon it. This dissertation attends carefully to how U.S. women writers approach the nonlinguistic, accounting for how they have been silenced as well as for the kinds of silencing that women poets themselves perform. It argues that U.S. women's experimental poetry is driven by contradictory relationships to language and silence: in one strain, gendered cultural repression spurs American women poets to push language into new territory, often figured as speaking out. But in another mode, female identification with the nonrational or nonlinguistic, whether externally enforced or strategically inhabited, impels women to develop poetic silences in order to resist the impositions of language on a feminized other. Meeting these simultaneous and opposed goals--creating poetic forms capable of greater expressive range while signaling the inadequacy of linguistic expression--necessitates formal experimentation. My primary claim that an unresolved ambivalence toward the nonlinguistic drives innovation dictates an emphasis on formal technique, including syntax, rhyme and meter, sentence and stanza structure, and figuration. This attention to poetic particulars grounds my contextualization of the work of each poet I consider--Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Gwendolyn Brooks--in relation to her own life, to broader literary and cultural histories, and to poststructuralist theories of language.
The first chapter of my dissertation explores the role that early American, particularly Puritan and Transcendental, attitudes toward wilderness shape poetic motivations both to extend and limit the reach of language throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In subsequent chapters, I evaluate how those motivations change in the context of Dickinson's nineteenth-century spirituality, Niedecker's modernist and postmodernist anxieties about the role of the poet, and Brooks's engagement with the politics and aesthetics of black nationalism. Reading U.S. women's poetic innovation as simultaneously breaking and cultivating silences opens a dialogue among historically feminist understandings of silence as oppressive, theories that put silence at the heart of poetic impulse, and avant-garde theoretical conceptions of linguistic experimentation as a feminist project.
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Hurteau, Alicia. "Pedagogies of Solidarity: Feminist Poetry Written by Arab American Women Post September 11, 2001." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/910.
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This thesis materialized out of an urgency to legitimize more creative, plural, and curious ways of thinking critically about the implications of 9/11 specifically, and global terrorism generally. This thesis actively grapples with the question: how has feminist poetry written by Arab American women post 9/11 complicated, resisted, and re-imagined the creation of one homogenizing national narrative of the event? The data used in order to answer this research question comes from an analysis of the poetic work of five Arab American women, each of whom write explicitly within an anti-imperialist feminist framework. My thesis analyzes these poems in conversation with one another in order to synthesize and establish a pattern. In doing so, I extract three of the most prominent commonalities between the poems: (1) An insistence on dehomogenizing the Arab and the Arab American in direct contrast to the Western stereotypes that polarize and essentialize the Arab “other” (2) a desire to re-negotiate the politics of identity and visibility and (3) an ability to teach a way of suturing solidarity that is anti-imperialist, necessarily plural, and embodied as art. This thesis serves as a reminder that the groundwork for building more imaginative, creative, and generative coalitions has already been laid. It concludes that in learning from places of artistic re-visioning, it becomes more possible to chart connections and provoke loyalties that are resonant, resilient, and revolutionary.
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Coleman, Julianna M. "Que cuenten las mujeres/Let the Women Speak: Translating Contemporary Female Ecuadorian Authors." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1461344085.
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Perry, Katherine Denise. "Gender on paper gender performances in American women's poetry 1650-present /." Auburn, Ala., 2007. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/2007%20Spring%20Dissertations/PERRY_KATHERINE_13.pdf.
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Abdulrahim, Safaa. "Between empire and diaspora : identity poetics in contemporary Arab-American women's poetry." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/19525.
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This dissertation aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Arab-American feminist critique through an exploration of the work of four contemporary Arab-American women poets: Etel Adnan (1925-), a poet and a visual artist and a writer, Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-), poet, a song writer, and a novelist, Mohja Kahf (1967-), a poet, an Islamic feminist critic and author, and Suheir Hammad (1973-), a hip-hop poet and political activist. The study traverses the intersections of stereotypical racial and Orientalist discourses with which these women contend, and which have been further complicated by being shaped against the backdrop of the “War on Terror” and hostility against Arabs, Muslims and Arab-Americans in the post-September 11 era. Hence, the study attempts to examine their poetry as a tool for resistance, and as a space for conciliating the complexities of their hyphenated identities. The last two decades of the twentieth-century saw the rise of a rich body of Arab-American women writing which has elicited increasing academic and critical interest. However, extensive scholarly and critical attention was mainly drawn to novels and non-fiction prose produced by Arab-American women writers as reflected in the huge array of anthologies, journal articles, book reviews and academic studies. Although such efforts aim to research and examine the racial politics that have impacted the community and how it relates to feminist discourses in the United States, they have rarely addressed or researched how the ramifications of these racialised politics and discourses are articulated in Arab-American women’s poetry per se. Informed by a wide range of postcolonial and United States ethnic theory and criticism, feminist discourses of women of colour such Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory, and Lisa Lowe's discussions of ethnic cultural formations in addition to transnational feminism, this study seeks to lay the groundwork for a complex analysis of Arab-American feminist poetics, based on both national and transnational literary approaches. The dissertation addresses the following questions: how does the genre of poetry negotiate identity politics and affiliations of belonging in the current polarized and historical moment? How do these women poets challenge the troubling oppressed/exoticised representations of Arab/Muslim women prevalent in the United States mainstream culture? How does each of these poets express their vision of social and political transformation? Emphasising the varying ethnic, religious, national, political, and cultural backgrounds and affiliations of these four poets, this dissertation attempts to defy any notion of the monolithic experience of Arab-American women, and argues for a nuanced understanding of specificity and diversity of Arab-American feminist experiences and articulations. To achieve its aim, the study depicts the historical evolution of Arab women’s poetry in the United States throughout four generations in order to examine the deriving issues and formative elements that contributed to the development of this genre, and also to pinpoint the defining characteristics marking Arab-American women poetry as a cultural production of American women of Arab descent. Through close readings and critical analyses of texts, the dissertation offers an investigation of some of the major themes and issues handled by these Arab-American women to highlight the most persistent tropes that mark this developing literary genre. Eventually, this study shows how literature, and specifically poetry becomes a conduit to investigate Arab-American cultural and sociopolitical conditions. It also offers productive explorations of identities and representations that transcend the rigid essential totalising categorisation of identity, while attempting to forge a new space for cultural translation and social transformation.