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Leissner, Debra Holt. "The Gender of Time in the Eighteenth-century English Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278321/.
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This study takes a structuralist approach to the development of the novel, arguing that eighteenth-century writers build progressive narrative by rendering abstract, then conflating, literary theories of gendered time that originate in the Renaissance with seventeenth-century scientific theories of motion. I argue that writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century generate and regulate progress-as-product in their narratives through gendered constructions of time that corresponded to the generation and regulation of economic, political, and social progress brought about by developing capitalism.
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Raven, Susan. "Eighteenth-century masculinity and the construction of an ideal." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.310263.
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The thesis covers the period roughly between 1688 and the 1780s and is concerned with the construction and perfonnance of heterosexual male identity and the emergence, during that period, of what would become a culturally dominant model of an ideal masculinity. It is a model which is adapted to the requirements of a capitalising economy and is therefore inextricably linked to the rise of the middle classes and the Puritan tradition which informs their ethical perspective. The introductory chapter gives reasons why I regard the novel as particularly relevant in looking at the dissemination of culturally determined notions of gender. Chapter One is concerned with contemporary anxieties about identity and the attempts to forge a middle-class male identity, which is 'authentic' and differentiated from that of the upper classes Changes in the way gender identity was percei ved are also traced and the novels of Tobias Smollett are discussed to illustrate the struggle towards the definition of an ideal masculinity. Chapter Two examines the genesis of 'sensibility' and how it was modified and adapted by the novelists of sensibility to create a benevolent man of virtue who was dissociated from any notion of 'softness' and femininity. Chapter Three looks at the models of masculinity presented by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753/4) and the author's concern to discover and present the ideal model of a bourgeois patriarch. Chapter Four discusses the perceptions and representations of masculinity by women writers, how they portrayed gender relationships and what kind of critique they offered of a construction of gender which rendered women as passive and men as active.
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Parish, Christina M. "Gender dissonance and the bourgeois woman in the Victorian novel." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU0NWQmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=3739.
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Unwin, Diana Susan. "Narratives of gender and music in the English novel 1850-1900." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.339180.
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MCCLELLAN, ANN KRISTYN. "MIND OVER MOTHER: GENDER, EDUCATION, AND CULTURE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN'S FICTION." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin983561751.
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Jessee, Margaret Jay. "Narrative, Gender, and Masquerade in the American Novel, 1853-1920." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/222893.
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Narrative, Gender, and Masquerade tracks the way the American novel of manners structures itself on representations of a pair of purportedly opposite and opposing women, the fair, innocent girl and the dark, tempting seductress. This opposition increasingly merges into sameness even as the novel in which it appears labors to keep the two characters separate in order to stabilize its textual architecture of thematic and formal binaries. Presenting itself as a text closely related to a social reality, the American novel of manners is structured as a masquerade: purporting to reveal as it conceals, conjuring readerly doubt as to the nature of both mask and reality. There are two main theoretical traditions in the study of masquerade. The first, the anthropologically-inflected cultural and literary historical approach to masks and masquerade, typically is applied to literary texts to explain religious and political historical exigencies as reflected in a given work of literature. The second, the psychoanalically-based theory of femininity as a masquerade, is most often deployed to use the text as a means of explaining the male gaze, desire, and gender performance. My reading of the American novel as gendered rests on dissolving the disciplinary borders between the two, thereby focusing reading on the form of the novel as well as its relation to its cultural, historical, and literary context. The novels I analyze situate women into stereotypical binary roles of the virgin and the seductress. These narratives register a duality between reality and representation that is analogous to the gender masking the novels take as their theme.
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Fan, Yiting. "Capital and the heroine : reconfiguring gender in the Victorian novel." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2011. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1293.
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Mikolajcik, Deirdre. "VALUES IN THE AIR: COMMUNITY AND CAPITAL CONVERSION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/85.
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Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility of bringing women into the center of industrial capital as equal participants is foreclosed. With chapter 3, I turn my attention to the way that the abstract nature of the investment economy obscures the value of—and relationships between—different fields of capital. The focus of chapter 3 is how land becomes implicated in the abstract economy, revealing the country estate to be little more than a bargaining chip, and reducing its ability to act as a foil for capitalism. Finally, the relationship between women and the country bank depicts the clash of the myth of separate spheres and the myth of a logical economy. While the scales of Victorian studies generally emphasize the novel’s development of the individual, or its representation of uncountable populations, Values in the Air plots a middle stratum wherein novels model networks and relationships that structure local, knowable communities. Within these communities, it is possible to imagine individual women in positions of financial power even as it is unclear how multiple forms of value can be gendered and exchanged.
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Rhodes, Robi R. "Discourse and Detection: Gendered Readings of Scientific and Legal Evidence in the Victorian Novel." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1218085583.
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Jackson, Lisa Hartsell. "Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2572/.
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The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.
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Richardson, Morgan. "THE CONTEST OF MARRIAGE: DOMESTIC AUTHORITY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/49.
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In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate spheres and even the family unit have been increasingly viewed as unstable divisions and demarcations by prominent voices within nineteenth-century criticism, I argue that certain novelists were consistently engaged in exposing these insufficiencies in not only the establishment of marriage as a concept, but in the home space itself as a hypothetical location of domestic stability and success. This project will contribute to scholarship in the field not only by tracing the similar patterns and structures of seemingly disparate novels, but also by suggesting that the domestic instability discussed in groundbreaking accounts of Victorian gender ideology is not merely a feature of historical and personal accounts of the era, but is in fact a tension running through much of the period’s most popular and widely read literature as well.
In recent years, Victorian critics have collectively worked to demonstrate that separate spheres ideology is no longer a sufficient interpretive tool to employ in our attempts to excavate the nineteenth century's construction of marriage and conjugality. Just as John Tosh has argued for the husband's place within the home and Mary Poovey and Elizabeth Langland have argued for the woman's place beyond it, so too does my work demonstrate that more complex systems of gender and power relationships were functioning within even a "typical" Victorian home. Studies of domesticity have typically focused on either those citizens who embraced its precepts or the rebels who rejected them. In my work, I turn instead to characters whose earnest attempts to embody and enjoy domestic perfection are continually thwarted, proving that many writers consistently locate the trouble with domesticity not in the flaws of specific married couples, but in the implicitly universal claims domesticity makes on all married couples. I argue that in many novels of the period, even marriage enthusiasts are often transformed into its bitterest critics, due to its demands for performance and self-erasure of both spouses. Furthermore, even the seemingly neutral space of the idyllic Victorian home is often shown to be destructive to domesticity's goals, rather than lending structural support to the matrimonial endeavor. I conclude that these authors are suggesting that even marriage's harshest critics can never manage to be as persuasive about the relationship's pitfalls, hazards, and breakdowns as the actual experience of getting married inevitably proves to be.
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Hall, Suzanne. "Interpretation, gender, and the reader : Angela Carter's self-conscious novels." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1991. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2508/.
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This thesis attempts to account for the unusual problems raised for interpretation by the works of Angela Carter, as well as the particular pleasures which they provide. It demonstrates how Carter's self-conscious novels speculate about the very nature of fiction and, in doing so, challenge conventions which govern the way we interpret not only fiction but also ourselves and our world. The second half of the thesis is concerned with issues of sexual difference, specifically the strategies used by Carter to demystify the false universals which govern gender politics. Chapter 1 engages with both Nights at the Circus and a selection of reviews of Carter's work in order to establish the particular reader/text relationships which her fiction demands. The breakdown of the traditional distinction between centre and margins in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is the focus of Chapter 2: this chapter incorporates Jacques Derrida's model of invagination in its examination of the distinctive intertextual qualities Carter's work displays. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate an important strategic technique employed by Carter's novels to expose and exploit specific reading conventions which underlie the interpretation of character, identity, and gender. Chapter 3 shows how four novels, The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love, and The Passion of New Eve, promote a 'realist' mode of reading character whilst continually reminding the reader that character is a construction, in order to demonstrate the power of the conventions which create the illusion of knowablc individuals both within and outside fiction. Chapter 4 shows how The Passion of New Eve foregrounds a central feminist question, 'What is a Woman?' This chapter examines the ways in which Carter utilises gender stereotypes, particularly those used to define the female body, in order to debunk them. It also contains an account of the debate about pornography which Carter's work has excited amongst critics. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the New Eve figures which recur across Carter's fiction and examine the affirmative feminist politics which sustain it. Chapter 5 asks the question, 'What constitutes a liberated female subject?' while Chapter 6, returning to Nights at the Circus, celebrates Fevvers as just such a figure. Each chapter demonstrates how Carter's work continually anticipates readers' responses and dramatises its own fictional procedures. Each chapter also attempts to illuminate, from a variety of perspectives, the liberating 'reading space', which her fiction opens up.
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Walton, Marion Nicole. "Empire, nation, gender and romance : the novels of Cynthia Stockley (1872-1936) and Gertrude Page (1873-1922)." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9568.
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Bibliography: leaves 311-345.<br>As the first detailed study of the Southern Rhodesian romantic. novels of Cynthia Stockley (Lilian Julia Webb) and Gertrude Page (Gertrude Dobbin), this dissertation presents biographical information about the two writers as well as an analysis of the historical reception and discursive context of the novels - focusing primarily on the novels as rewritings of the gendered discourses of the British "New Imperialism" and of a nascent Rhodesian nationalism. Their novels reveal ambivalences about and conflicts between feminism and maternalism, heroic and bourgeois versions of the romance genre, and bourgeois imperialism and the representation of feminine sexuality.
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Archimedes, Sondra M. "Gendered pathologies : the female body and biomedical discourse in the nineteenth-century English novel /." New York : Routledge, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb400680041.
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Ziegler, Amber M. "Unconventional Women in a Conventional Age: Strong Female Characters in Three Victorian Novels." Connect to resource online, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1242224834.
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Day, Lisa. "Meet Me in the Semiotic Glen: The Evolution of Gender Communication in the Early Novels of Robert Penn Warren." TopSCHOLAR®, 1993. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2232.
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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.
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Koger, Tara. "Beyond Boundaries: Embodiment and Selfhood in Hilary Mantel's Novels." TopSCHOLAR®, 2008. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/48.
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Davis, Laura R. "Sensory Coding in William Faulkner's Novels: Investigating Class, Gender, Queerness, and Race through a Non-Visual Paradigm." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/70.
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ABSTRACT
Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts seems necessary to explore how Faulkner’s characters interpret the sensory stimuli in their fictional landscape and how their actions in this regard reveal the larger social constructs functioning in the novels. In particular, this dissertation seeks to borrow the theoretical approach known in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology as sensory studies to examine nine Faulkner novels: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms), Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, The Town, and The Unvanquished.
Such an approach requires moving away from examining sensory stimuli as symbols that are read the same way by everyone; instead, the way Faulkner’s characters use the senses is examined as a biased act, an act that is committed and interpreted differently depending on who is doing the sensing. Using this type of sensory studies framework can transform close readings of Faulkner’s texts, particularly since such an approach helps us understand the way the senses are constantly interwoven with characters’ attempts to define (and sometimes confine) the other characters. In fact, exploring the way characters actively use their senses to categorize others can reveal a hidden discourse, one where the language of the senses illuminates belief-systems in ways that are not otherwise obvious.
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Chanda, Geetanjali. "Indian women in the house of fiction : place, gender, and identity in post-independence Indo-English novels by women /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19736617.
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Nyffenegger, Sara Deborah. "In Defense of Ugly Women." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2007. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1178.
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My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of the plight of plainer women can be traced by contrasting novels written early in the century with novels written mid-century. I argue that beauty gained more significance for young women in nineteenth-century England because the marriage ideal shifted, a shift which especially influenced the upper and middle class. The eighteenth century brought into marriage concepts such as Rousseau's "wife-farm principle" the idea that a man chooses a significantly younger child-bride, mentoring and molding her into the woman he needs. But by the end of the century the ideal of marriage moved to the companionate ideal, which opted for an equal partnership. That ideal was based on the conception that marriage was based on personal happiness hence should be founded on compatibility and love. The companionate ideal became more influential as individuality reigned among the Romantics. The new ideal of companionate marriage limited parents' influence on their children's choice of spouse to the extent that the choice lay now largely with young men. Yet that choice was constrained because young men and women were restricted by social conventions, their social interaction limited. Thus, according to my reading of nineteenth-century authors, the companionate ideal was a charade, as young men were not able to get to know women well enough to determine whether or not they were compatible. So instead of getting to know a young woman's character and her personality, they distinguished potential brides mainly on the basis of appearance.
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Lund, Marcus. "Teaching Them to be Upstanding Members of Society is My Damn Job! : An Interview Study about Working with Gender and Novels in the English Classroom." Thesis, Jönköping University, Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-50792.
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This study aims to examine teachers’ experiences when working with novels to discuss gender related questions in their EFL-classrooms. The research questions this study aims to answer are which prerequisites and limitations affect teachers when working with novels and gender in the EFL-classroom and what are the benefits and negatives when working with novels and gender in the EFL-classroom. The data was gathered through seven semi-structured interviews with teachers from both upper- and lower secondary school. The theoretical approach that was used to analyse the answers received from the interviews were gender studies, with a focus on ‘overing’, and critical literacy. The results from this study show that teachers have an interest in working with novels and gender related questions. The study also shows that there are both prerequisites and limitations that affect how teachers can work with gender and novels in their classroom, a few of the examples brought up in the results are: meeting resistance from the students in the classroom regarding these issues, which class sets of novels are available, the teacher’s personal interest in the subject, and if there is sufficient support to teach about novels and gender. Finally, it can be discerned that a teacher’s own commitment affects how much gender related questions are incorporated when working with novels.
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Lau, Garfield Chi Sum. "The ubiquity of terror: reading family, violence and gender in selected African Anglophone novels." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2016. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/262.
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Terror in the African Anglophone novels of Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Laila Lalami originated as a consequence of a breakdown in the family structure. Traditionally, conventional patriarchy, in addition to securing the psychological and material needs of the family, has served as one of the building blocks of tribes and nations. Since the father figure within narrative is allegorized as a metonym of the state, the absence of patriarchal authority represents the disintegration of the link between individuals and national institutions. Consequently, characters may also turn to committing acts of terror as a rejection of the dominant national ideology. This dissertation aims to demonstrate how the breakdown of the family and the conventional gendering of roles may give rise to terrorist violence in the African setting. To recontextualize the persistence of the Conradian definition of terror as an Anglo-European phenomenon brought to Africa, I contrast the ways in which the breakdown of the family affects both indigenous and Anglo-European households in Africa across generations. I suggest that, under the reinvention of older gender norms, the unfulfilling Anglo-European patriarchy exposes Anglo-European women to indigenous violence. Moreover, I theorize that the absence of patriarchal authority leads indigenous families to seek substitutions in the form of alternative family institutions, such as religious and political organizations, that conflict with the national ideology. Furthermore, against the backdrop of globalized capitalism, commodity fetishism emerges as a substitute to compensate for the absent father figure. Therefore, this project demonstrates the indisputable relationship between the breakdown of the family structure and individual acts of terror that aim at the fulfillment of capitalist fetish or individual desire, and at the expense of national security. Finally, the rhetorical dimension of terror against family and women in Africa will be proven to be the allegorized norm of globalized terror in the twenty-first century.
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Nixon, Wall Audrey. "Gender-bias in literature within the high school English curriculum : a study of novels used in the Lakeshore School Board." Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61139.
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It seems self-evident that novels and other literary forms profoundly influence the way we think, feel and learn about society. However, while a number of studies have acknowledged the importance of textbooks used within the school curriculum, few have examined novels that are studied within the high school English program. Thus this thesis focuses on gender-bias found in a study of 21 novels identified as those most commonly used in the high schools of the Lakeshore School Board. The results show significant gender imbalance in all categories: the number of female authors, characters, voices, and perspectives. The recommendations that arise from this study are (1) that English teachers be aware of the issue of gender bias when they select novels for their students. (2) that strategies be developed in the classroom to address gender-bias in literature, and (3) that a balanced literature curriculum be developed.
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Alfares, Wafaa. "Serialisation, settings, characters : a comparative case study of gender roles in society, as addressed in selected novels by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Edith Wharton." Thesis, University of Essex, 2016. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/17836/.
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The principal concern of this thesis is the extent to which male and female characters in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Henry James’s The Europeans (1878) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) succeed in contributing to, or halting, the processes of change in their respective societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In combination, these three novels provide a particularly apt opportunity to look at issues of gender and social change at specific points in time, and within a transatlantic context, through the representation of attitudes and actions by individuals within the narratives. The study is divided into three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses one novel through three main areas of enquiry that aim to build a detailed understanding of the role of gender in the relevant social settings. The first area of study concerns the serialisation of the novels, with attention to the visual imagery that accompanied the texts in the case of Hardy and Wharton. The illustrations which accompanied the first, serialised versions of The Return of the Native and The Age of Innocence disclose concealed themes. They also provide added insight into the expectations of the period. The second area of enquiry explores the setting of each novel: Egdon Heath in Hardy's English west-country Wessex, Boston for James and New York in the case of Wharton. Those settings are discussed in relation to historical indicators within the works, including public gathering places which are portrayed as points of social pressure. A study of characterisation in the novels concludes each of the three chapters. The focus is on individuals, representing certain social categories, that are either struggling to attain a degree of autonomy over their lives or trying to maintain a status quo that would enable them to keep their social position. The conclusion brings into the thesis a conversation about technical devices and further contextual considerations that the three authors deployed in order effectively to portray how men and women of their respective societies reacted to changes at different levels of their everyday lives. A main contribution to knowledge in this study lies in the examination of serialisation and the use of illustrations in light of the role of gender in social change. Despite cultural differences between the American and the British societies portrayed , Hardy, James and Wharton as major authors of their time share a number of concerns about male and female interactions within vastly changing societies. Furthermore, this investigation aims to establish an example that might prompt future comparisons of more global writers from different periods and parts of the world; in particular, asking how they differently reflect change in diverse social contexts.
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Redmond, Robert Stanley. "Female authors and their male detectives: the ideological contest in female-authored crime fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." Massey University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1057.
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In the nineteen-eighties a host of female detectives appeared in crime fiction authored by women. Ostensibly these detectives challenged hegemonic norms, but the consensus of opinion was that their appropriation of male values and adherence to conventional generic closures colluded with a gender system of male privilege. Academic interest in the work of female authors featuring male detectives was limited. Yet it can be argued that these texts could have the potential to disrupt the hegemonic order through the introduction, whether deliberately, or inadvertently, of a female counterpoint to the hegemony. The hypothesis I am advancing claims that the reconfiguration of male detectives in works authored by women avoids the visible contradictions of gender and genre that are characteristic of works featuring female detectives. However, through their use of disruptive performatives, these works allow scope for challenging normal gender practices—without damage to the genre. This hypothesis is tested by applying the performative theories of Judith Butler to a close reading of selected crime novels. Influenced by the theories of Austin, Lacan and Althusser, Butler’s concept of performativity claims that hegemonic notions of gender are a fiction. This discussion also uses Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author as a means of distinguishing the performative agency of the text from that of the characters. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, and Donna Leon, each with their male detective heroes, come from different generations. A Butlerian reading illustrates their potential for disrupting gender norms. Of the three, however, only Donna Leon avoids the return to hegemonic control that is a feature of the genre. Christie’s women who have agency are inevitably eliminated, while conformist women are rewarded. James’s lead female character is never fully at ease in her professional role. When thrust into a leadership she proves herself to be competent, but not ready or desirous of the senior position. Instead her role is to mediate the transition of her junior, a male, to that position. Donna Leon is different. The moral and emotional content of her narratives suggests an implied author committed to ideological change. Her characters simultaneously renounce and collude with illusions of patriarchal authority, and could lay claim to be models for Butler’s notion of performative resistance.
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Notgrass, Jessica D. "Social influences on the female in the novels of Thomas Hardy." [Johnson City, Tenn. : East Tennessee State University], 2004. http://etd-submit.etsu.edu/etd/theses/available/etd-0328104-205447/unrestricted/NotgrassJ040804f.pdf.
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Thesis (M.A.)--East Tennessee State University, 2004.<br>Title from electronic submission form. ETSU ETD database URN: etd-0328104-205447. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via Internet at the UMI web site.
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Lindskog, Åsa. "(The Missing) Mirrors and Windowsin the English Classroom : Representation and Diversity in Novels Used in Upper Secondary School." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-84931.
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This essay aims to investigate representation and diversity in novels used in the English teaching inupper secondary school, and whether teachers take representation into account when choosing whatnovels to work with. A web survey was used to ask 71 teachers of English open questions regardingwhat novels they use in their teaching and why. The results demonstrate that the majority of the usednovels depict normative protagonists and settings, although there is some diversity and representationof different genders, races, ages, abilities and settings. It is also shown in the results that the majorityof the responding teachers do not think about representation when choosing what novels to workwith, while some respondents do indicate that they take aspects of representation into account. Theresults are discussed by drawing on ideas about representation, diversity and an intersectional genderpedagogy from Rudine Sims Bishop and Nina Lykke.<br>Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka representation och mångfald i romaner som används iengelskundervisning i gymnasiet, samt om lärare har representation i åtanke när de väljer vilkaromaner de skall arbeta med. En webbenkät användes för att fråga 71 engelsklärare öppna frågorangående vilka romaner de arbetar med och varför. Resultatet visar att en majoritet av användaromaner skildrar normativa protagonister och miljöer, även att det finns viss mångfald ochrepresentation av olika kön, etniska tillhörigheter, åldrar, funktionsvariationer och miljöer. Det visarsig även i resultatet att majoriteten av responderande lärare inte har representation i åtanke när deväljer vilka romaner de skall arbeta med, medan några respondenter indikerar att de tar hänsyn tillaspekter av representation. Resultaten diskuteras med hjälp av idéer om representation, diversitet ochintersektionell genuspedagogik från Rudine Sims Bishop och Nina Lykke.
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Lewis, Abby N. "“It could have happened to any of you”: Post-Wounded Women in Three Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Novels." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2021. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3883.
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My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; and in Blue Ticket, it is the social structure as a whole reflected in the character of Doctor A. To simply label these novels’ woman protagonists as ill would be to ignore that their behavior is not mental illness but in fact rational behavior produced by the traumatic dystopian environments.
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Casablancas, i. Cervantes Anna. "Closing circles: the construction of mother archetypes in five novels by doris lessing." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/400144.
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Aquesta tesi investiga la construcció i desenvolupament dels personatges femenins a l´obra de Doris Lessing, considerant especialment la relació personal que estableixen amb el concepte de maternitat.
El capítol 1 ofereix una revisió dels diferents enfocaments existents sobre l’escriptura de Doris Lessing, i també un repàs al seu context cultural i teòric, parant atenció a la psicoanàlisi i el feminisme i especialment, dins d´aquests camps d´estudi, a la psicoanàlisi Junguiana i Lacaniana i al feminisme post-Lacanià. A més, també planteja la qüestió de la figura materna a la novel·la postmoderna i el lloc que hi ocupa.
El cos de l’estudi analitza cinc personatges representatius del cànon de Lessing, que daten de diferents períodes de la seva carrera. Cada figura ocupa un capítol separat de la tesi, que es centra en el seu desenvolupament intern: així, el capítol 2 examina la Mary Turner (The Grass is Singing, 1950); el capítol 3, l’Anna Wulf (The Golden Notebook, 1962); el capítol 4, la Kate Brown (The Summer Before the Dark, 1973); el capítol 5, la Harriet Lovatt (The Fifth Child, 1988); i el capítol 6, l’Emily McVeagh (Alfred and Emily, 2008). Es proposa una lectura Junguiana tot analitzant el procés d’individuació que els personatges proven d´assolir per tal d’adquirir una identitat plena. Amb aquest objectiu, es descriuen i s’interpreten diferents conjunts d’arquetips Junguians presents en les novel·les segons el paper que juguen en l’evolució de les protagonistes. Cal afegir que s’examinen altres conceptes psicoanalítics fonamentals, tals com la influència Lacaniana subjacent que s’evidencia en la recreació de l’estadi del mirall, o en la importància de nocions com “l’abjecció” de Julia Kristeva. Alguns motius textuals com els somnis, els records, les fantasies i la imaginació dels personatges resulten centrals per a la discussió.
En l’última secció, després de l’anàlisi de les cinc novel·les, s’estableix un fil conductor entre elles pel que fa a la construcció de la identitat. A més, queda justificat l´ús de les teories psicoanalítiques de Jung i (en menor mesura) Lacan com a base per a una lectura, ja que permet aclarir aquest procés de construcció i evolució. D’altra banda, aquest marc teòric permet treure conclusions sobre les diferents reinterpretacions de l’arquetip de la mare per part de Lessing i, com a conseqüència, sobre el lloc que la maternitat ocupa a la literatura contemporània. Finalment, el concepte de circularitat es treballa especialment, a diferents nivells: primer, com a estructura que conforma cadascuna de les novel·les pel que fa a la forma i al contingut, com a mode de creació artística associada al mite i als símbols, o com a patró general de tota l’obra de Lessing.<br>The present thesis investigates the construction and development of Doris Lessing’s female characters, taking into account their personal relationship with their potential motherhood.
Chapter 1 offers a review of the different approaches to the writing of Doris Lessing, as well as an overview of its cultural and theoretical background, focusing on psychoanalysis and feminism, and, most especially, on Jungian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Lacanian feminism. In addition, the question of the mother figure in the postmodern novel and the place it occupies is also raised.
The body of the study analyses five representative characters of Lessing’s canon, dating from different stages in her career. Each figure occupies a separate chapter in the thesis, which focuses on internal development: chapter 2 examines Mary Turner (The Grass is Singing, 1950); chapter 3, Anna Wulf (The Golden Notebook, 1962); chapter4, Kate Brown (The Summer Before the Dark, 1973); chapter 5, Harriet Lovatt (The Fifth Child, 1988); and chapter 6, Emily McVeagh (Alfred and Emily, 2008). A Jungian reading is offered by analysing the individuation process they are trying to undergo as characters trying to achieve a full identity. In order to do so, different sets of Jungian archetypes present in the novels are outlined and interpreted according to their role in the evolution of the protagonists. Moreover, other prevalent psychoanalytic concepts are examined, such as the underlying Lacanian influence made evident by the recreation of the mirror stage, or the importance of such notions as Kristevan “abjection”. Some textual details as dreams, memories, fantasies and imagination of the characters are central to the discussion.
In the last section, after the analysis of the five novels, a common thread is established among them in terms of identity building. Moreover, the psychoanalytic theories of Jung and (to a lesser degree) Lacan as a basis for a reading is justified as they clarify this process of construction and development. In addition, this theoretical framework allows for conclusions on Lessing’s different reinterpretations of the mother archetype, and, subsequently, the place of motherhood in contemporary literature is reinterpreted according to Lessing’s work. Finally, special mention is made to circularity, at different levels; namely: as the structure that underlies each of the novels either formally or conceptually, as a mode of artistic creation associated with myth and symbol, and as the general pattern of Lessing’s entire career.
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Browning, Jimmy. "The Lost Tribalism of Years Gone By: Function & Variation in Gay Folklore in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City Novels." TopSCHOLAR®, 1992. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2173.
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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 You'll Ever Be, the seminal study of the folklore of gay men in the United States, I am a gay man, who, to some degree, draws on personal knowledge and observation to recognize and identify elements of gay folklore depicted in the fictional milieu I have chosen to study. This is unavoidable to an extent: ethnographic work within the gay communities has been limited by a number of factors, including the covert nature of the group, the biases of exoteric analysts, and the lack of observations informed by insiders' perspectives. Nonetheless, the groundwork that has been accomplished by Goodwin and a handful of other scholars provides an adequate basis for comparison between the "real" world, professional folk study, and the fictive domain of Armistead Maupin.
In addition to an examination of gay oral folklore in the novels - including how gay oral tradition informs both the content of the novels and Maupin's authorial voice - this thesis also considers aspects of gay customary folklore and gay material culture, including how the content of the novels chronicles some of those folkloric forms and how the novels themselves have become a significant part of gay customary and material tradition. To a large degree, folklore functions in gay folk culture to encourage communication and cohesion and to divulge important psychological insights into the minds of many group members.
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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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Rose, Natalie Anne. "Modalities of gender and nation in the mid-Victorian novel /." 2005. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1362501381&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=12520&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Shea, COLLEEN. "Author of Prodigies: Representing the Female Letter-Writer in English Renaissance Literature." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1974/1628.
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This dissertation seeks to show that the figure of the female letter-writer in English Renaissance literature, rather than reflecting the culture’s desire to contain, undermine, or destroy the notion of women’s textual production, in fact represents the culture’s desire to imagine and see women as writers. The image of the female letter-writer was sufficiently pervasive both to normalize the idea that real women might properly engage in textual production, and to function as a literary trope which was used to investigate issues beyond gender ideology. “Author of Prodigies” explores representations of women’s epistolary creation in a broad selection of fictional texts, primarily drama. Based on these representations, I argue that the figure of the female letter-writer functioned as a means through which the fragile and epistemologically fraught relationship between the subject and the writing in which she engages was explored. In Chapter One, I focus primarily on the history of early feminist criticism, issues of how letters are related to non-epistolary texts, Renaissance notions of subjectivity and its relationship to gender, and how subjectivity was understood to adhere in epistolary writing. In Chapter Two, I examine texts in which female characters pen letters in their own blood. Blood letters figure the fragility, marginality, and vulnerability associated with self revelation in a context in which female subjectivity was not comfortably acknowledged. Chapter Three features texts that contemplate the fantasy of female characters wooing their beaux by merging epistolary production and metadramatic performances of femininity. These characters use gendered social constraints to their advantage, revealing themselves to be sufficiently skillful to manipulate social and material signs of their marginalized position in order to achieve their personal desires. Chapter Four focuses on male fetishization of women’s intellectual labour through letter-writing, and the ways in which women writers anticipate and manipulate this response. These depictions of women’s mental work are infused with mystery, which is integral to the pleasure of imagining women engaged in letter-writing. However, as the terms of the fetish are being established in these texts they are also in the process of being normalized.<br>Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-12-15 21:08:25.539
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Sheehan, Lucy Ludwig. "Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery." Thesis, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8000236.
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The commencement of the Victorian period in the 1830s coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Consequently, modern readers have tended to focus on how the Victorians identified themselves with slavery’s abolition and either denied their past involvement with slavery or imagined that slave past as insurmountably distant. “Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery” argues, however, that colonial slavery survived in the Victorian novel in a paradoxical form that I term “willing slavery.” A wide range of Victorian novelists grappled with memories of Britain’s slave past in ways difficult for modern readers to recognize because their fiction represented slaves as figures whose bondage might seem, counterintuitively, self-willed.
Nineteenth-century Britons produced fictions of “willing slavery” to work through the contradictions inherent to nineteenth-century individualism. As a fictional subject imagined to take pleasure in her own subjection, the willing slave represented a paradoxical figure whose most willful act was to give up her individuality in order to maintain cherished emotional bonds. This figure should strike modern readers as a contradiction in terms, at odds with the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. But for many significant Victorian writers, willing slavery was a way of bypassing contradictions still familiar to us today: the Victorian individualist was meant to be atomistic yet sympathetic, possessive yet sheltered from market exchange, a monad most at home within the collective unit of the family. By contrast, writers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot located willing slavery in a pre-Victorian history where social life revolved, they imagined, around obligation and familial attachments rather than individual freedom. Rooted in this fictive past, the willing slave had no individual autonomy or self-possession, but was defined instead by a different set of contradictions: a radical dependency and helpless emotional bondage that could nonetheless appear willing and willful, turning this fictional enslavement itself into an expression of the will. For Dickens, willing slavery provided an image of social interdependency that might heal the ills of the modern world by offering what one All the Year Round author described as “a better slavery than loveless freedom.” For novelists such as Brontë and Eliot who were no less critical of Victorian individualism, however, fantasies of willing slavery became the very fiction that their work aimed to dissolve.
Chapter One argues that Frances Trollope’s groundbreaking antislavery fiction mirrors West Indian slave narratives in describing the slave plantation as coldly mechanical, and then extends this vision to portray early industrial England as an emotionally deprived social world similarly in need of repair. In the second chapter, I argue that Dickens responds to that emotional deprivation, and the replacement of traditional family bonds with what he describes as the “social contract of matrimony,” by producing a nostalgic account of willing slavery’s dependencies that draws on discourses of slavery found in British case law, where attorneys could exhort the slaveholder to “attach [slaves] to himself by the ties of affection.” The last two chapters argue that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ironize this earlier nostalgia through female characters who grapple with the archetype of the willing slave. As their characters adopt and then discard the theatrical pose of willing subjection embodied by melodramatic heroines such as Dion Boucicault’s “octoroon” Zoe, Brontë and Eliot draw attention to the contradictions inherent to willing slavery, reframing it as a fantasy enjoyed exclusively by white Britons intent on shoring up the familial intimacies that helped preserve their social and economic dominance. These ironic reframings reveal a final paradox: though willing slavery helped create an analogy between African chattel slaves and British family members in fiction, this trope ultimately highlights the differences between the chattel slavery of Africans abroad, where the disruption of kinship bonds was a crucial method for exploitation and domination, and the imagined household subjection of English characters, rooted in the putatively binding qualities of family feeling.
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Ангеловская, М. В., та M. V. Angelovskaya. "Критика гендерных стереотипов в женском романе воспитания (на материале романов Дж. Элиот «Мельница на Флоссе» и Э. Гаскелл «Жены и дочери») : магистерская диссертация". Master's thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10995/54401.
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В данной работе мы рассматриваем различный характер критики гендерных стереотипов в женской викторианской литературе на материале романов «Мельница на Флоссе» Джордж Элиот и «Жены и дочери» Элизабет Гаскелл.
В первой части работы мы рассматриваем жанр романа воспитания, вопросы его генезиса и эволюции, а также подробно описываем женский роман воспитания как одну из его разновидностей. Кроме того, в теоретической главе мы также выявляем особенности репрезентации гендера в литературе (в частности, мы обращаем особое внимание на феномены женского письма и женского чтения) и рассматриваем гендер как социокультурное явление в викторианском обществе. Заключительные параграфы первой части освещают историко-культурный и социальный контекст творчества Дж. Элиот и Э. Гаскелл.
Вторая часть нашей работы посвящена непосредственному анализу романов «Жены и дочери» и «Мельница на Флоссе». В ней последовательно рассматриваются такие аспекты текстов, как объектная и субъектная организация, нарративная структура и стилевые особенности. Большое внимание уделяется выделению собственно женской парадигмы становления в романах. Жанровый анализ произведений включает также выявление черт «двойного» романа воспитания в данных текстах. Две параллельные линии становления героя и героини составляют структурную основу данной разновидности жанра и играют важную роль в определении специфики критики гендерных стереотипов, так как в «двойных» романах воспитания можно увидеть четкое сопоставление мужской и женской парадигм становления и выявить различия между ними.
Сравнительный анализ двух романов с привлечением изученного теоретического материала позволяет заключить, что ключом к пониманию специфики критики гендерных стереотипов в данных произведениях является роль общества как неотъемлемлемого фактора формирования личности и как контролирующей инстанции, которая предписывает нормы поведения для мужчин и женщин.<br>In this paper, we examine the different approaches to gender stereotypes criticism in Victorian novel on “The Mill on the Floss” by George Eliot and “Wives and Daughters” by Elizabeth Gaskell.
The first part of the work is devoted to the genre of formation novel, the problems of its genesis and evolution, and also describe the female educational novel as one of its varieties. Additionally, the theoretical chapter also covers gender representation in literature (namely, we pay special attention to the phenomena of women’s writing and women’s reading) and consider gender as a sociocultural phenomenon in Victorian society. The concluding paragraphs of the first part cover the historical, cultural and social context of J. Eliot’s and E. Gaskell’s novel.
The second part of our work provides an analysis of the novels "”Wives and Daughters"” and “Mill on the Floss”. It consistently deals with such aspects of a literary work as image and narrative structure, and features of style. Much attention is paid to the female characters development in the given novels. Genre analysis of works also includes revealing the features of the “double” educational novel in these texts. Two parallel lines of the male and female characters development form the structural basis of this genre and play an important role in rendering gender stereotypes criticism, as in the “double” educational novels one can see a clear juxtaposition of the male and female paradigms of self-fulfillment and reveal the differences between them.
A comparative analysis of the two novels with the use of the studied theoretical material allows us to conclude that the key to understanding the nature of gender stereotypes in these works is the role of society as an integral factor in the formation of personality and as a controlling authority that prescribes norms of behavior for men and women.
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Coleman, Rosemary G. "Explosive intimacies: Family and gender roles in Dickens's early novels." Thesis, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/16432.
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Charles Dickens's early novels are engendered by what David Copperfield calls an "old unhappy want or loss of something," and the "something" wanted is the paradigmatic mother, providing perfect love, plenitude, and unity, while avoiding the female threats of desire and domination. Dickens's almost obsessive need to construct nurturing mothers from wives, sisters, daughters, and aunts, combined with his refusal to acknowledge his heroes' passivity, creates photographic double exposures in which a "happy family" overlays an isolated young mother/madonna and her adult male child, a domestic text half hides subtextual layers, and incestuous desires are disguised by returns to childhood innocence. When we read each narrative as if it were a palimpsest, using a three-layered psychoanalytic model, his representations of family and gender roles are startlingly different from accepted Victorian paradigms.
The topmost layer of meaning, the manifest content, is that in which the realistic world of the novel is represented: family structures are created here, and family roles and relationships form the patterns of meaning. The second layer is comprised of primitive fantasies, wherein male fantasies of need for the nurturing breast, desire for the erotic breast, and fear of the smothering bad breast, pull the surface meanings into new designs. Here, gender roles and relationships form the crucial patterns. The third layer may be likened to dream work: meaning is encoded in representations of the body, its illnesses, and its metonymies. Each of the layers glosses and subverts the others, creating stories of crippled, ill bodies, mythic female roles, and narratival ambivalence.
Oliver Twist constructs the paradigmatic hero who finds a mother after the mutilation of both male and female bodies. Nicholas Nickleby's hero avoids adult sexual stains by a return to his childhood and his sister. The Old Curiosity Shop offers serial primal fantasies wherein the heroine's body becomes increasingly dangerous and must be constrained. Finally, Dombey and Son constructs a heroine who becomes a mythic madonna and a hero who returns to passive infancy. The early novels thus enact a meta-narrative in which both male and female bodies are controlled by illness and disfigurement.
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Spivey, Robbie E. "The Gendered Soul: Victorian Women Autobiographers and the Novel." 2010. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/914.
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This project considers ways mid-Victorian fictional autobiographies created new models for women's spiritual formation, testing Nancy Armstrong's theory that novels are antecedent to the cultural conditions they describe. I pair three mid-Victorian fictional texts Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Mill on the Floss with three later non-fictional autobiographies written by women near the end of the Victorian Era: Annie Besant (1847- 1933), Mary Anne Hearn (1834-1909) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). These women came to spiritual maturity during the same time period in which the fictional heroines Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and Maggie Tulliver became prominent in the popular imagination and informed the cultural dialogue about women's roles and spirituality. With the advantage of hindsight, Besant, Hearn and Cobbe are able to offer perspective on cultural and religious trends that these novelists predicted, and they are also able to show how the models presented in novels did or did not correspond with the realities of women's spiritual lives in Victorian England. To draw attention to ways that both the fictional and non-fictional autobiographies use the genre to convert readers to new beliefs about how and what women believe, I focus on the persuasive elements of the conversion narrative and read these texts through the lens of classical rhetorical appeals. By identifying the conversion experience as the common denominator in these diverse texts, I bring these examples of fictional and non-fictional autobiographies onto a level playing and demonstrate both the flexibility of the conversion narrative and the artistry of the non-fictional autobiographers in revising it. I find that the fictional autobiographers employ models of private introspection and substitute scenes of domestic reconciliation for traditional reconciliation with God; however, the three real-life autobiographers must reconcile their personal spiritual transformations with their public personae. Hence they replace the novels' domestic allegories of reconciliation with accounts appropriate to their own new spiritual identities, ranging from Evangelical Christian, to Theist, to Theosophist.
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Sears, Albert C. "Sensational resistance : a study of generic instability and value in the mid-Victorian novel /." Diss., 2001. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3010427.
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McGuigan, Fiona. "Gendered geographies and the politics of place : a comparative reading of the novels of Mariama Bâ and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/11226.
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This thesis is concerned with inscriptions of gender and space in the novels of two African women writers, Mariama Bâ and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, particularly Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981) and Scarlet Song (1986) and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The exploration of representations of gendered identity is thus integrated with an awareness of space/place. By exploring the demarcation and enunciation of space within my chosen texts, I hope to provide new perspectives on the question of gendered identities and relations. The theorizing of gender identities and relations thus gains a new orientation from its application in relation to the theorizing of space and spatiality. As many theorists have argued, space is an important aspect to consider because it is not a neutral site: it becomes invested with meanings and encodes particular values and relations of power which can be contested and negotiated. This is particularly evident when looking at questions of gender identity, roles and relations. ‘Geographies of gender’ are established not only in the coding of spaces as ‘masculine’ and feminine’ but also in the kinds of sociality which they encourage and the power-relations they encode. If space is central to masculinist power, it is also important in the development of feminine resistance. Drawing on a range of theorists, I endeavour to pursue a gendered analysis of space/place through a reading of particular locations (the home, the street, the village) as expressive of power relations, gender identities and roles. I also consider how space/place is differently experienced and inhabited by men and women as well as how dominant constructions of space/place, which are also invested with meaning and power relations, come to be negotiated or contested.
In all four novels explored in this thesis, the home is revealed as a dominant site of inscription, a space which tends to reflect and reinforce dominant social identities and roles. In this sense, the home is often figured as a site of patriarchal and gendered oppression, a central domain in which normative definitions of gender are established and reinforced. What is also clear, however, is that way in which the home also becomes a site for the contestation and renegotiation of gender identities and roles, a place where conventional identities can be challenged and new identities explored. In this sense, the home is revealed as a major site of contestation in which the tensions between different experiences and interpretations of space based on contrasting cultural definitions of power relations, gender identities and roles are played out. If the ordering of space is an important means of securing dominant gender relations, it also provides the means for negotiation and resistance. This is reflected not only the alternative
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examples of home explored in these novels but also in liberating spaces such as the school, the beach and the university. In the destabilisation and destruction of the home, the links between self and place becomes apparent as new identities are formed and conventional roles are redefined.
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Xaba, Andile. "Temporality and the past: recollections of apartheid in selected South African novels in English." Diss., 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/19242.
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The study provides a theoretical account for the representation of apartheid in South African fiction. Narrative strategies employed in the post-apartheid novels The innocence of roast chicken (Richards, 1996), The smell of apples (Behr, 1996), All we have left unsaid (Case, 2006) and Thirteen cents (Duiker, 2011) reveal that depictions of the past contribute to narrative structure and the production of meaning. Genettean temporal relations, namely narrative order, duration and frequency are a systematic method to analyse the selected novels, since it enables a contrast between the narrative past as the histoire, and the narrative present as the récit. Retrospective events are constructed as memories, thereby are complemented by Bergson’s psychological and philosophical theory in the analysis and interpretation of the dualistic interaction between the apartheid and post-apartheid temporal centres adopted within the novels. The representation of apartheid may be seen as sub-themes and time as configurations of temporal zones.<br>Afrikaans & Theory of Literature<br>M.A. (Theory of Literature)
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Beauvais, Jennifer. "Between the spheres : male characters and the performance of femininity in four victorian novels, 1849-1886." Thèse, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/3609.
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“Between the Spheres: Male Characters and the Performance of Femininity in Four Victorian Novels, 1849-1886” définit le célibataire domestique, analyse les effets de l’érosion des frontières entre les domaines public et privé et retrace l’évolution du discours public au sujet de la masculinité dans quatre œuvres: Shirley écrit par Charlotte Brontë, Lady Audley’s Secret de Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Daniel Deronda par George Eliot, et The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde de Robert Louis Stevenson. En identifiant le célibataire domestique comme personnage récurrent à la dernière moitié du dixneuvième siècle, cette dissertation démontre comment ce personnage arrive à représenter l’incertitude face aux questions de sexualité, non seulement dans des rôles féminins mais aussi dans les positions de l’homme dans la société et la remise en question du concept de la masculinité. Tout comme il y eu de femmes à l’affût de la liberté au-delà du domaine privé, des hommes aussi cherchèrent leur liberté au sein du domaine domestique par des performances féminines. Le célibataire domestique rapporte sur le concept New Woman de cette période par sa tendance de promouvoir de nouvelles définitions de la masculinité victorienne et les limites entre sexes. Le célibataire domestique passe du domaine public, plutôt masculin, vers le domaine privé, plutôt féminin en participitant dans le discours féminin, tel que les sujets de le domesticité, la chastité, la moralité, le mariage, et l’amour.
En s’inspirant de l’analyse des domaines public et privé par Jürgen Habermas, cette dissertation revoit les rôles de ces domaines et leur élasticité dans les quatre œuvres en question ainsi que le sort des célibataires domestiques. L’assignation de sexe à ces domaines mena à la recherche de nouveaux formes de masculinité, produisant une définition de mâle liée au statut de la femme dans le domaine privé. Le célibataire domestique se déplace facilement entre ces domaines sans souffrir d’accusations de tendances effeminées ou d’aliénation sociale, à l’encontre des conséquences qu’ont souffert les personnages femelles pour leur comportement inhabituel. Chaque chapitre de cette dissertation considère les changements dans le discours de la sexualité afin de suivre la migration du célibataire domestique du domaine féminin au milieu du dixneuvième siècle jusqu’un nouveau domaine à la fin de siècle qui estompe la distinction rigide crue être en place tout au long de la période victorienne.<br>“Between the Spheres: Male Characters and the Performance of Femininity in Four Victorian Novels, 1849-1886” defines the domesticated bachelor, examines the effects of the blurring of the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and traces the evolution of the public discourse on masculinity in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By identifying the domestic man as a recurrent figure in the second half of the nineteenth century, this dissertation proves how he comes to represent the uncertainty surrounding issues of gender, not only concerning women’s roles, but also men’s positions in society and the re-defining of masculinity. Just as there were women seeking freedom by moving beyond the domestic sphere, there were men seeking a similar liberty by moving from the public into the private sphere by performing femininity. This bachelor is equally significant to the New Woman of this period based on his tendency to open up for discussion new definitions of Victorian masculinity and gender boundaries. The domesticated man moves from the “masculinized” public sphere into the “feminized” private sphere, by engaging in feminine discourse including issues of domesticity, chastity, morality, marriage, and love.
Drawing upon Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of public and private spheres, this dissertation re-examines the roles of the spheres, their fluidity in the four works under consideration, and the fate of the domesticated male characters. The gendering of the spheres resulted in the search for new forms of masculinity; this new definition of maleness was extremely dependent on the status of women in the private sphere. The bachelor moves between the spheres without necessarily suffering consequences such as effeminacy and social estrangement, as opposed to “masculine” female characters that did suffer from social stigma resulting from their uncharacteristic behavior. Each chapter considers changes in the discourse of sexuality to account for a re-positioning of the domesticated man from a feminine sphere of activity into a new sphere which, by the end of the century, blurs the rigid distinction thought to be in place throughout the Victorian period.
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Morguson, Alisun. "All the Pieces Matter: Fragmentation-as-Agency in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3218.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)<br>The fragmented bodies and lives of postcolonial Caribbean women examined in Caribbean literature beget struggle and psychological ruin. The characters portrayed in novels by postcolonial Caribbean writers Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo are marginalized as “Other” by a Western patriarchal discourse that works to silence them because of their gender, color, class, and sexuality. Marginalization participates in the act of fragmentation of these characters because it challenges their sense of identity. Fragmentation means fractured; in terms of these fictive characters, fragmentation results from multiple traumas, each trauma causing another break in their wholeness. Postcolonial scholars have identified the causes and effects of fragmentation on the postcolonial subject, and they argue one’s need to heal because of it. Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo prove that wholeness is not possible for the postcolonial Caribbean woman, so rather than ruminate on that truth, they examine the journey of the postcolonial Caribbean woman as a way of making meaning of the pieces of her life. This project contends that fragmentation – and the fracture it produces – does not bind these women to negative existences; in fact, the female subjects of Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo locate power in their fragmentation. The texts studied include Danticat’s "Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994) and "The Farming of Bones" (1999), Cliff’s "Abeng" (1984) and "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), and Mootoo’s "Cereus Blooms at Night" (1996) and "He Drown She in the Sea" (2005).