Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Women's Studies|Literature, English'

The primary objective of this thesis project is to investigate Woolf's narrative construction of consciousness and its enactment of resistance against the clinical model of cognitive normativity, using Mrs. Dalloway. This objective is part of an effort to identify the ways in which Woolf's writing can be used, foundationally, to challenge the contemporary language of clinical diagnosis, as it functions to maintain power imbalances and serves as a mechanism of the rigid policing of normativity. It is also intended to support the suggestion that Woolf's novels and essays make a valuable contribution, when advanced by theory—including disability theory, to scientific conversations on the mind. One major benefit is that doing so encourages border-crossing between disciplines and views. More specifically, this project examines the ways in which Mrs. Dalloway resists the compulsory practice of categorizing and dividing the mind. The novel, I assert, supports an alternative narrative treatment, not of the mind but, of the normative social forces that police it. It allows and encourages readers to reframe stigmatizing, divisive, and power-based categories of cognitive difference and to resist the scientific tendency to dismiss pertinent philosophical and theoretical treatments of consciousness that are viable in literature. The critical portion of the project is concerned with the way in which Mrs. Dalloway addresses consciousness and challenges medical authority. Its implications urge the formation of an investigative alliance between Woolf's work and psychology that will undermine the power differential, call attention to and dismantle the stigma of "mental illness," and propel clinical treatment into new diagnostic practices.

My dissertation “Seventy Years of Swearing upon Eric the Skull: Genre and Gender in Selected Works by Detection Club Writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie” shows how the texts produced by Detection Club members Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie challenge assumptions about the value and role of popular genre fiction and demonstrate how the detective novel engages pressing social issues related to gender in modern Great Britain. Sayers and Christie addressed serious concerns of gender in relation to topics including war and an emerging market economy in inter-war Britain; however, because they were doing so in genre fiction, their insights have not been fully explored. The popularity of detective fiction, according to critics, has resulted in a lack of criticism and a distrust of the popular. Christie, more so than Sayers, has been ignored by critics because of her popularity and the formulaic nature of her fiction. Glenwood Irons claims that Christie's popularity is responsible for the “general ignorance of the sheer volume of detective fiction written by women” (xi), while Alison Light theorizes that the dearth of Christie criticism, because of her popularity, is “an absence which the growth of 'genre' studies of popular fiction has yet to address” (64). My goal is to understand how Sayers and Christie responded to modern issues through their writing and to set their writing in context with contemporary concerns in inter-war Britain. I advocate for a reexamination of Sayers and Christie that goes beyond their popularity as writers of genre fiction and analyzes the ways in which their fiction incorporates modern concerns.

The effect that fiction has on readers has been continuously debated since at least the fourth century B.C.E. In this dissertation, I first analyze historic arguments of philosophers and critics who have participated significantly in the debate. I organize their critical judgments about reading’s effects into three categories—useful, detrimental and nonaffective. The useful fiction claim is that reading fiction influences readers toward beneficial change. The opposite claim is that reading produces a variety of detrimental effects—it deceives, inflames, coerces or develops false expectations. At the root of this argument is the idea that fiction appeals to the emotions, therefore, reason and good judgment are suppressed. The third broad category of argument suggests that literature is simply art and has only an aesthetic effect. I explore only the useful and detrimental possibilities in this research. I apply Joshua Landy’s critical perspective that novels are primarily formative rather than informative to interrogate ideas about private reading that British women authors explore in their novels from the mid-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. During that period, the idea that novels might be formative—beneficial and educational—is argued within the narratives and dialog of their novels. I evaluate and describe the critical interrogative work that Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quixote), Maria Edgeworth (Belinda), Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) and Sarah Green (Scotch Novel Reading) perform using their novels as a platform to consider ideas about women, education and particularly, the potentially positive effects of novel reading. Drawing on threads of theory as ancient as Plato’s and Quintilian’s and ideas about novels as recent as Huet’s and Johnson’s, I analyze how these authors use their novels to discuss reader maturation and character development. In their novels, they weave reader development, critical analysis and social critique into narratives about complex characters. I examine in new ways the questions of fiction’s effect, reader response and authorial influence. I conclude that novel reading has primarily a positive, formative effect. Consequently, there is potential to use novel reading with university students to help improve decision making and point to issues of character development.

Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role gender has played in the development of sovereignty.

My project addresses this ideological and historical gap by examining how sovereignty was being discussed, challenged, and appropriated by literary figures from 1588-1688. In the years leading up to and spanning the Interregnum, sovereignty splintered and became available to formerly disenfranchised individuals, especially women writers. Such women not only appropriated and challenged traditional sovereignty in their texts, but also influenced contemporary and future understandings of power, politics, and gender. Each of my four chapters serves as a test cases of a woman writer engaging with and transforming sovereignty.

I first examine Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry (1612); I then move on to Mary Wroth’s epic romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part 1 (1621) and Part 2 (completed and circulated in manuscript 1629). In the third chapter, I examine Katherine Philips’ Poems, circulated in manuscript during the Interregnum, and published posthumously in 1667; my final chapter then moves to Margaret Cavendish’s utopian fiction and work of natural philosophy, The Blazing World. These women challenged traditional notions of body and power, offering their own new understandings of sovereign agency; they enable us to more fully the genealogical progression of sovereignty and to incorporate the category of gender into twenty-first century understandings of biopolitics.

This research looks at the production of Hamlet by Thomas Ostermeier, the director of the Schaubühne Berlin. The production presents two female characters with a single female performer, and persents the concept that coporeality is an impossible exteriority. This research uses the playscript of Ostermeier's production of Hamlet as reference, and Judith Butler's book Bodies that Matter for its theoretical method, as well as contemporary critics of feminist study on the gendered body, to interpret the role of female characters in Ostermeier's production of Hamlet. The focus will clarify how Ostermeier cultivates Butler's theory of body performativity as the source for portraying his understanding of the female identity, and as the decoder for the conventional sexgender culture. The research shows how Ostermeier's presentation of Gertrude and Ophelia reflects the contemporary concern for the deconstruction of the normative concept of woman.

As a struggling single mother separated from her dissolute husband, the poet Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) began writing novels as a way to make money for her family. The exploding book market of late eighteenth-century Britain teemed with booksellers and publishers—some anxious to hustle works to press, some seeking quality works to build their reputation—and Smith entered this male-centric realm with naïveté, shaky confidence, and growing desperation. Guided by a literary mentor to the reputable London publishing firm of Thomas Cadell, Sr., Smith entered a business relationship that would see her through the publication and later editions of two translated novels, three original novels, the two-volume poem The Emigrants, and a subscription and an expanded edition of her celebrated poetry and essay collection, Elegiac Sonnets. Most of the letters Smith wrote to Cadell have never been published; the majority of them were discovered just as Judith Phillips Stanton was taking her Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (2003) to press. This scholarly edition includes every known letter that Smith wrote to Cadell before his retirement, when his son and assistant redubbed it Cadell & Davies. Compiled from university, public, and private libraries in Britain, the U.S., and New Zealand, these annotated letters offer an intimate portrait of Smith as entrepreneurial author, desperate businesswoman, and careworn single mother of nine children in an era of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) fervor, Empire building.