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Hurwitz, Melissa. "Dispossessed Women| Female Homelessness in Romantic Literature." Thesis, Fordham University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10281988.
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“Dispossessed Women” examines the status of homeless women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, with special attention to both the cultural assumptions and aesthetic power that accrued to these figures. Across the Romantic era, vagrant women were ubiquitous not only in poetry, children’s fiction, novels, and non-fiction, but also on the streets of towns and cities as their population outnumbered that of vagrant males. Homeless women became the focus of debates over how to overhaul the nation’s Poor Laws, how to police the unhoused, and what the rising middle class owed the destitute in a rapidly industrializing Britain. Writers in the Romantic period began to treat these characters with increasing realism, rather than sentimentalism or satire. This dissertation tracks this understudied story through the writing of Mary Robinson, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Robert Southey, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
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MacIntyre, Christine Anne. "Turn-of-the-century Canadian women writers and the "New Woman"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/10372.
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This study examines the literature written by the generation of women who come between pioneering women writers such as Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie and contemporary women writers such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, literature which helps us to understand the tradition of New Woman writing present in Canada at the turn of the century. This thesis examines selected texts published between 1895 and 1910, a period of rapid urban and industrial expansion in Canada when women began seeing themselves and their roles in society in "new" ways. The first chapter of this thesis examines the concept of the "New Woman" in terms of its original connotations. The second chapter focuses on the representations of the "New Woman" in Lily Dougall's The Madonna of a Day. Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of Today is the subject of the third chapter. The final chapter examines short stories written by Canadian women journalists Kit Coleman, Ethelwyn Wetherald, and Jean Blewett. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Safran, Morri. ""Unsex'd" texts : history, hypertext and romantic women writers /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3026209.
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Mullally, Erin Eileen. "Giving gifts : women and exchange in Old English literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3061960.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-271). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Nichols, K. Madolyn. "The women who leave : Irish women writing on emigration." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2014. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66161/.
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This thesis explores the relationship between fin-de-siècle anti-emigration propaganda and fiction written by upper middle-class Irish women. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Catholic authors used the medium of fiction to propound an anti-emigration message analogous to that found in Catholic and nationalist press. Often at stake in their work is the degree to which the peasant female emigrant is to blame for the act of emigration, and the degree of agency she possesses in relation to the events or conditions that lead to this event. Class is a dominant determinant of agency in the depiction of the emigrants’ actions and decisions, as peasant and gentry emigrants are treated differently; the authors’ own class is also key in determining the stance they take on these decisions. In all of these treatments, the common themes throughout the study are the construction of Ireland as ‘Holy Ireland’, a haven of moral safety and spiritual regeneration, the ways in which the difference in authors’ political intent affects their treatment of the emigrant female, and the degree of realism with which the protagonist and her context are addressed. The authors under discussion, Mary Butler, Katharine Tynan, Rosa Mulholland, and Geraldine Cummins, though well-known in their time, have been almost completely forgotten, along with their literary and cultural contribution to Ireland’s history. Aside from contemporary criticism and reviews of their work, relatively little information exists about the authors under discussion. Consequently, this study seeks to initiate a conversation about the authors and the way their adaptation of Catholic nationalist discourse participated in emigration debates. This thesis is the first full-length study to examine the works of authors who adapted literary themes in order to create a discourse that actively discouraged young women from leaving Ireland during a period of female-dominated emigration.
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Hill, Alexandra Nicole. ""Bloudy tygrisses" murderous women in early modern English drama and popular literature /." Orlando, Fla. : University of Central Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002727.
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Honka, Agnes. "Writing an alternative Australia : women and national discourse in nineteenth-century literature." Master's thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2007. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1650/.
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In this thesis, I want to outline the emergence of the Australian national identity in colonial Australia. National identity is not a politically determined construct but culturally produced through discourse on literary works by female and male writers. The emergence of the dominant bushman myth exhibited enormous strength and influence on subsequent generations and infused the notion of “Australianness” with exclusively male characteristics. It provided a unique geographical space, the bush, on and against which the colonial subject could model his identity. Its dominance rendered non-male and non-bush experiences of Australia as “un-Australian.”
I will present a variety of contemporary voices – postcolonial, Aboriginal, feminist, cultural critics – which see the Australian identity as a prominent topic, not only in the academia but also in everyday culture and politics. Although positioned in different disciplines and influenced by varying histories, these voices share a similar view on Australian society: Australia is a plural society, it is home to millions of different people – women, men, and children, Aboriginal Australians and immigrants, newly arrived and descendents of the first settlers – with millions of different identities which make up one nation. One version of national identity does not account for the multitude of experiences; one version, if applied strictly, renders some voices unheard and oppressed.
After exemplifying how the literature of the 1890s and its subsequent criticism constructed the itinerant worker as “the” Australian, literary productions by women will be singled out to counteract the dominant version by presenting different opinions on the state of colonial Australia. The writers Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton, and Tasma are discussed with regard to their assessment of their mother country. These women did not only present a different picture, they were also gifted writers and lived the ideal of the “New Women:” they obtained divorces, remarried, were politically active, worked for their living and led independent lives. They paved the way for many Australian women to come.
In their literary works they allowed for a dual approach to the bush and the Australian nation. Louisa Lawson credited the bushwoman with heroic traits and described the bush as both cruel and full of opportunities not known to women in England. She understood women’s position in Australian society as oppressed and tried to change politics and culture through the writings in her feminist magazine the Dawn and her courageous campaign for women suffrage. Barbara Baynton painted a gloomy picture of the Australian bush and its inhabitants and offered one of the fiercest critiques of bush society. Although the woman is presented as the able and resourceful bushperson, she does not manage to survive in an environment which functions on male rules and only values the economic potential of the individual. Finally, Tasma does not present as outright a critique as Barbara Baynton, however, she also attests the colonies a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England. Tasma attests that the colonies had a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England and demonstrates how uncertainties and irritations emerged in the course of Australia’s nation formation.
These three women, as writers, commentators, and political activists, faced exclusion from the dominant literary discourses. Their assessment of colonial society remained unheard for a long time. Now, after much academic excavation, these voices speak to us from the past and remind us that people are diverse, thus nation is diverse. Dominant power structures, the institutions and individuals who decide who can contribute to the discourse on nation, have to be questioned and reassessed, for they mute voices which contribute to a wider, to the “full”, and maybe “real” picture of society.Das heutige Australien ist eine heterogene Gesellschaft, welche sich mit dem Vermächtnis der Vergangenheit – der Auslöschung und Unterdrückung der Ureinwohner – aber auch mit andauernden Immigrationswellen beschäftigen muss. Aktuelle Stimmen in den australischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Geschichtswissenschaften betonen die Prominenz der Identitätsdebatte und weisen auf die Notwendigkeit einer aufgeschlossenen und einschließenden Herangehensweise an das Thema. Vor diesem Hintergrund erinnern uns die Stimmen der drei in dieser Arbeit behandelten Schriftstellerinnen daran, dass es nicht nur eine Version von nationaler Identität gibt. Die Pluralität einer Gesellschaft spiegelt sich in ihren Texten wieder, dies war der Fall im neunzehnten Jahrhundert und ist es heute noch. So befasst sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit der Entstehung nationaler Identität im Australien des späten neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Es wird von der Prämisse ausgegangen, dass nationale Identität nicht durch politische Entscheidungen determiniert wird, sondern ein kulturelles Konstrukt, basierend auf textlichen Diskurs, darstellt. Dieser ist nicht einheitlich, sondern mannigfaltig, spiegelt somit verschiedene Auffassungen unterschiedlicher Urheber über nationale Identität wider. Ziel der Arbeit ist es anhand der Texte australischer Schriftstellerinnen aufzuzeigen, dass neben einer dominanten Version der australischen Identität, divergierende Versionen existierten, die eine flexiblere Einschätzung des australischen Charakters erlaubt, einen größeren Personenkreis in den Rang des „Australiers“ zugelassen und die dominante Version hinterfragt hätten. Die Zeitschrift Bulletin wurde in den 1890ern als Sprachrohr der radikalen Nationalisten etabliert. Diese forderten eine Loslösung der australischen Kolonien von deren Mutterland England und riefen dazu auf, Australien durch australische Augen zu beschreiben. Dem Aufruf folgten Schriftsteller, Maler und Künstler und konzentrierten ihren Blick auf die für sie typische australische Landschaft, den „Busch“. Schriftsteller, allen voran Henry Lawson, glorifizierten die Landschaft und ihre Bewohner; Pioniere und Siedler wurden zu Nationalhelden stilisiert. Der australische „bushman“ - unabhängig, kumpelhaft und losgelöst von häuslichen und familiären Verpflichtungen - wurde zum „typischen“ Australier. Die australische Nation wurde mit männlichen Charaktereigenschaften assoziiert und es entstand eine Version der zukünftigen Nation, die Frauen und die Australischen Ureinwohner als Nicht-Australisch propagierte, somit von dem Prozess der Nationsbildung ausschloss. Nichtsdestotrotz verfassten australische Schriftstellerinnen Essays, Romane und Kurzgeschichten, die alternative Versionen zur vorherrschenden und zukünftigen australischen Nation anboten. In dieser Arbeit finden Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton und Tasma Beachtung. Letztere ignoriert den australischen Busch und bietet einen Einblick in den urbanen Kosmos einer sich konsolidierenden Nation, die, obwohl tausende Meilen von ihrem Mutterland entfernt, nach Anerkennung und Vergleich mit diesem durstet. Lawson und Baynton, hingegen, präsentieren den Busch als einen rechtlosen Raum, der vor allem unter seinen weiblichen Bewohnern emotionale und physische Opfer fordert.
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Sheridan, Claire Louise. "Last men and women : surviving Romantic coteries." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2012. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/3133.
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This thesis is concerned with the trope of surviving the specially constituted social group. It considers how a loosely connected set of writers addressed this theme in works published between 1798 and 1878. The works – primarily biography and fiction, but also poetry and drama – respond to the era 1790 to 1832, demarcating what we usually term the Romantic period. The thesis begins by focusing on memoirs by William Godwin and Amelia Opie. These texts are read as responses to surviving personal and political relationships associated with radical London in the 1790s. The thesis goes on to consider some of William Godwin and Mary Shelley's novels in terms of their use of the sole survival motif, and the relationship between the idea of being last and the demands of moral and political reform. This brings the thesis into the 1830s, and a new association that arises between the survival of Romantic social networks and authorial self-interest. Texts by survivors of the Shelley circle are shown to exploit this connection, and are read against alternative responses to lastness that use comic and satirical methods to reject it. Finally, the thesis investigates the theme of surviving the coterie as it is treated in a melodrama first performed at the Surrey Theatre in 1833, and argues that this generic departure lends the idea a radically new significance. The changes that the idea of being last of the coterie undergoes, as it is passed between generations, genders, and genres, are seen in the context of wider cultural phenomena, including changing conceptions of reform and individualism. This thesis observes the shifting relationship that the idea of surviving sociability has to these matters.
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Ward, Lowery Nicholas J. L. "Patriarchal negotiations : women, writing and religion 1640-1660." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1994. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1682.
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Women were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of piety. They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation, however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies. In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence, by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers, Presbyterians and Quakers.
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Alshatti, Aishah. "Appropriations of the Gothic by Romantic-era women writers." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/232/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Gqola, Pumla Dineo. "Black woman, you are on your own : images of black women in Staffrider short stories, 1978-1982." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/19249.
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This dissertation examines the dominant images of Black women presented in the first five years of Staffrider magazine. It limits itself mainly to the analysis of short stories written in the English language. Since most of the contributors were men, many of the stories analysed here are by male Writers. A few poems by Black women have been analysed in addition to the short stories. The thesis focuses on and answers the question of whether 'positive' characterisation of Black people, seen as central to Black Consciousness writing, includes women or not. The analyses take into account race, class and gender and are informed by the theories of womanism and Black feminism(s). As much of the literature shows an overt bias in favour of the ideology of Black Consciousness, the first chapter serves an introductory function. It concentrates on an examination of the ideology of Black Consciousness and an interrogation of the literature to which it gave rise. Briefly sketching the development of BC, it examines the nature of BC literature. This entails both an study of the characteristics of the literature as well as an examination of the place of Black women in Black Consciousness discourse and literature.
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Collins, Margo. "Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2474/.
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.
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Harvey, Alison Dean. "Irish realism women, the novel, and national politics,1870-1922 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1417800181&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Bordoni, Silvia. "Imaginary homeland : romantic women writers and Italy." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2004. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13190/.
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The aim of this work is to investigate the importance of Italy, as a real and imaginary country, in British Romanticism, particularly in women's writings. Since the heyday of the Grand Tour, Italy has been approached as an alien and distant country, but also as a liberating and stimulating reality. Italy as an 'other country' constitutes an important element in the delineation of British Romanticism. The opposition between North and South, which was developed and consolidated by Romantic authors, constitutes the theoretical frame for this work. As part of southern Europe, Italy stands in opposition to Northern societies. North and South, however, are not simply in opposition; they merge and interconnect in the literary production of the time. Italy and Great Britain exemplify the dialogical connection between apparently irreconcilable opposites. In women's writings, Italy is exploited as an alternative imaginary setting onto which they can project their anxieties, their artistic ambitions and their dreams of literary success. The role of Italy in women's writings is important to demonstrate their participation in contemporary social, national and political issues. The work focuses first on travel reports and the real encounter with Italy. Then it analyses the imaginary figurations of Italy in Gothic literature and in poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of Italy as a morally liberating and artistically stimulating country is consolidated in the works of Stael and Byron. The representation of Italy as an ideal country for women artists makes their support of the Italian fight for independence particularly important. Since Italy represents a feminised and politically enslaved country, women associate its effort to gain freedom with their own struggle for political and social emancipation.
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Alwazzan, Aminah. "The Strong Voices of Black Women and Men in the Selected Poetry of Langston Hughes." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2019. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cauetds/161.
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This thesis discusses Langston Hughes’ poetry and details the African-American experience in a discriminatory society which was an essential theme of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement which enriched American life. Hughes’ body of work covers the entire range of the human experience, especially the experience of ordinary people. He believed that the role of the artist was to cover and illuminate every aspect of people’s lives. Part of this expansive philosophy towards art included giving a voice to African-American women and men who experienced both racist and patriarchal oppression.
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Hill, Alexandra. "BLOUDY TYGRISSES": MURDEROUS WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA AND POPULAR LITERATURE." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2009. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/2281.
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This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.M.A.
Department of Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Studies;
Interdisciplinary Studies MA
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Nordoff-Perusse, Teresa Kim. "Gender, texts and context in the Old English Exeter Book." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23346.
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An examination of historical and textual evidence supporting the thesis that the tenth-century Old English Exeter Book (Exeter Dean and Chapter MS. 3501) may have been compiled for, or even in, an Anglo-Saxon female monastic foundation or mixed-sex double house. The Exeter Book poems, many with female subjects, have been studied extensively, but rarely treated as components that unite to form a deliberately compiled, cohesive anthology. This study examines four main subjects: women's participation in both Latin and vernacular textual culture in the early Middle Ages in past and present scholarship; the history and structure of the codex; a summary of evidence indicating the possibility of the Exeter Book's production in or for a woman's monastic foundation or a double-house; a survey of the female figures in the Book and the effect of a "gendered" reading on the study of the codex as a unified document.
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Regan, Lisa. "'Men who are men and women who are women' : fascism, psychology and feminist resistance in the work of Winifred Holtby." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2005. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2459/.
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Winifred Holtby was a novelist, journalist and feminist, writing in the 1920s and 1930s. This thesis focuses on her feminist resistance to the fashion for sexual division in interwar Britain. She reads it as a social and political backlash against women’s equal rights that seeks to drive women out of the workplace and back into the home. In Holtby’s view, the popularisation of Freud and the growing appeal of fascism contribute to this backlash by stressing women’s primary role as wives and mothers. For Holtby, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, sums up this fashion for sexual division when he declares in 1932, ‘we want men who are men and women who are women’. Previous scholarship has focused on Holtby’s work in dialogue with her friend and fellow feminist, Vera Brittain. This thesis adopts a more panoramic perspective to consider Holtby’s work in the context of other feminist contemporaries and in the context of feminist intellectual history. Each chapter examines how Holtby draws inspiration from a figure in feminist history in order to challenge the influences of psychology and fascism on attitudes to women between the wars. Holtby declared that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the ‘bible of the woman’s movement’ and the first chapter examines Wollstonecraft’s influence on Holtby’s feminist thought. The second chapter considers Holtby’s defence of the spinster against interwar prejudice that castigated the spinster as sexually frustrated and psychological abnormal. By subverting Charlotte Brontë’s romance narratives for an interwar ‘feminine middlebrow’ readership, Holtby valorises women’s work in the community. The third chapter addresses the fascist veneration of motherhood, analysing how Holtby recognises and assimilates the feminist potential of Alfred Adler’s theory of Individual Psychology to her anti-fascist critique.
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Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
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Rahija, Robin L. "House of Women." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/43.
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Triplett, Janis Luzene. "Tennessee Williams' treatment of women in his major plays." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1988. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/1435.
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This thesis was undertaken to determine the Impact that the females In Tennessee Williams' family had on his portrayal of female characters n his major plays and to determine the extent that these characters were actually reflections of Williams himself.
Williams' female characters fall Into three categories: the Southern genteel lady, female aggressor/mother-figure, and the survivors of corrupt societies. Williams' depiction of the women In each of these categories reflected his association with the females in his family. Rose, his sister, represented the fragile* sexually repressed Southern genteel lady. On the other hand, Williams' mother Edwina could be placed In all three categories of Williams' women since she possessed characteristics common to each category. She represented the fragile, genteel lady who lived 1n her own Illusions despite the drastic alteration of her life-style when her family made the move from Mississippi to Missouri. Like Amanda W1ngf1eld, Edwina was determined to keep her family going by any available means, and this characteristic was exemplary of a mother figure. Lastly, we may think of Edwina as having been a survivor who knew that life had to go on despite the fact that her daughter had to have a lobotomy and later was Institutionalized.
The three categories of Williams1 women can also be said to be indicative of the phases of Williams1 homosexuality. The Southern genteel lady represented the early sexually repressed years of Williams' life. The female aggressor/mother-figure delineated his "coming out of the closet" or the public expression of his sexual preference despite criticism or ostracism. Lastly, the survivors in corrupt societies can be identified with Williams' final accomodation with the homosexual life-style.
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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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Singleton, Keir Elizabeth. "Personal experiences and adversities: the existential struggles of women in American women's literature." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2011. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/229.
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This is a study of women’s struggles in a system of patriarchy as portrayed in the works of Willa Cather, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. The selected works include: My Antonia, The Color Purple, and Sula. Most commonly, in a patriarchal society, masculinity is usually defined by aggression and dominance, whereas femininity is portrayed as symbolic of passivity and submission. The need for women to be submissive in a male-dominated society caused many of the women characters to begin to suffer from lack of individuality and self-expression. The idea that women often evolve into different personalities because of their life experiences and struggles is at the center of the works selected for this study. In these particular works, the writers demonstrate that in spite of ethnicities and family backgrounds, many women living under the system of patriarchy become strong and outspoken because of their personal experiences and life challenges, while some of them become casualties of their struggles but learn from the experiences in order to become agents of social change.
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Forbes, Joan S. "Women resisting romance : anti-romantic discourse in English courtship fiction, 1775-1820." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364368.
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Bertram, Vicki. "Muscling in : a study of contemporary women poets and English poetic tradition." Thesis, University of York, 1992. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2490/.
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Lambert, Amy Annie Ophelia. "Morgan Le Fay and other women : a study of the female phantasm in medieval literature." Thesis, University of Hull, 2015. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:13629.
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‘Morgan le Fay and Other Women’ is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to rationalise the various manifestations of a universal Other in medieval culture. Using Theresa Bane’s statement that ‘Morgan le F[a]y is a complicated figure in history and mythology; she has had many names and fulfilled many roles in religion and folklore’ as a focal argument, I present a methodology that identifies these ‘many names’ from what might be described as a primarily medieval perspective. Exploring the medieval notion of ‘character type’, this establishes a series of defining attributes that the culture of the period likely regarded as a ‘standard list’ for Morgan’s underlying identity: the Other Woman. Asserting that Morgan’s role in the medieval tradition is largely an attempt on to manifest this age-old concept in a variety of forms appropriate for different authors’ milieus and genres, this thesis suggests that medieval writers project onto the character a series of attributes recognised as Other from their own contexts. By applying this method, which has a basis in medieval semiotics and philosophy, to a range of characters, I propose that derivatives of the ‘Morganic’ persona might be found in a range of genres including medieval romance, drama, folklore, and, in my final chapter, the tradition of male outlaws.
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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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Fenwick, Andrew. "Girdles of iron, breast-plates of silk: Homeric women and Christian pity in Tolkien's Middle-Earth." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6804.
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Robertson, Lisa C. "New and novel homes : women writing London's housing, 1880-1918." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/91748/.
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This thesis investigates the relationship between women's writing and domestic architecture in London during the four decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It foregrounds novels written by women in order to investigate the ways in which this literature grapples with new forms of urban housing that emerged in order to accommodate economic, political and cultural changes in the city. This period of study is roughly framed by the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, legislation that allowed women to exist legally outside the family structure, and the end of WWI, which initiated a movement towards suburbanisation that was intended to alleviate the necessity of housing the city's labour forces locally. While scholarship to date has been attentive to the ways that women have been denied participation in the production of urban environments – through professional exclusion and social marginalisation – this thesis argues that their creative engagement with the city should be understood as an important contribution to its growth and development, imaginatively and materially. Central to this thesis is a consideration of the ways in which changing gender ideologies initiated new patterns for domestic architecture, but were also responses to the new social relationships that took shape as a result of their construction. It looks closely at women's literary engagement with domestic architecture in order to gain insight into the ways that the representative spaces of these texts interact with the city's built environment. In Chapter 1, I begin with an examination of the ways in which women's fiction engages with the political and legislative developments that initiated slum clearance and city improvement projects, and which led to the construction of model dwellings and early local authority housing. In Chapter 2, I trace the origins of purpose-built housing for women, or 'ladies' chambers', and consider its treatment in contemporaneous novels and journalism. In Chapter 3, I examine the ways in which the settlement movement challenged conventional notions of home and labour by studying its representation in two novels that construct these concerns within discussions of sexuality. I conclude this thesis with an investigation of the development of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and of the ways its design and representation sought to redress the social and political uncertainties that emerged in late nineteenth-century London and its literature.
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Žemaitytė, Erika. "The Image of Writing Women: the Comparative Aspect on Women’s Literature in English." Bachelor's thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2012. http://vddb.laba.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2012~D_20120831_092347-18443.
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The object of the research is the image of writing women of the two periods which is revealed in novels written by Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell as well as Virginia Woolf’s essay. In the novels written by the contemporary writers, the The novels written by Candace Bushnell and Helen Fielding reveal the contemporary cosmopolitan female writers. Each of the novels emphasizes sexual equality, freedom of choice and woman’s emancipation. Olivia is a fearless journalist who finds evil traces in every beauty topic that she covers. Moreover, writing is the essential matter for travelling and facing hazardous situations.Tyrimo tikslas yra atskleisti rašytojų moterų įvaizdį Candacės Bushnell ir Helenos Fielding romanuose ir palyginti jį su Virginijos Woolf pateiktu rašytojų moterų įvaizdžiu esė Savas Kambarys.Postfeministinė literatūros kritika taikyta siekiant apibūdinti moterų rašytojų situaciją dvidešimto amžiaus pradžioje. Feminizmo teorija naudota pabrėžti feminizmo kaip politinio judėjimo svarbą rašytojoms ir įvertinti moterų rašytojų įvaizdžius literatūros kūriniuose.Galima teigti, kad dvidešimtojo amžiaus pradžioje moterys rašytojos rašė literatūrinius kūrinius norėdamos skleisti švietimą tarp skaitytojų bei tuo pačiu praturtėti.
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Krontiris, Tina. "Oppositional voices : women as writers and translators of literature in the English Renaissance /." London : Routledge, 1992. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb35714999t.
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Schmidt, Bonnie Ann. "Print and protest: a study of the women's suffrage movement in nineteenth-century English periodical literature /." Burnaby B.C. : Simon Fraser University, 2005. http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/2409.
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Spencer, Lynda Gichanda. "Writing women in Uganda and South Africa : emerging writers from post-repressive regimes." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86251.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis examines how women writers from Uganda and South Africa simultaneously offer a critique of nationalist narratives and articulate a gendered nationalism. My focus will be on the new imaginings of women in and of the nation that are being produced through the narratives of emerging women writers in post-repressive nation-states. I explore the linkages in post-conflict writing by focusing on the literary representations of women and womanhood, while taking into account some of the differences in how these writers write women in these two post-repressive regimes. I read the narratives from these two countries together because, in the last fifty years, both Uganda and South Africa have been through prolonged periods of political repression and instability followed by negotiated transitions to new political dispensations. I use the phrase post-repressive to refer to the post-civil war era after 1986 in Uganda and the post-apartheid period subsequent to the 1994 first democratic elections in South Africa. From the late 1990s, there has been a steady increase in fiction written by emerging women writers in Uganda and South Africa. The term emerging women writers in the Ugandan literary context refers to the writers who have benefitted from the emergence of FEMRITE Publications, the publishing house of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association; in the South African setting, I use the term to define black women writers publishing for the first time in a liberated state. The current political climate in both countries has inaugurated a new era for women writers; cracks are widening for these new voices, creating more spaces that allow them to foreground, interrogate, engage and address wide-ranging topics which lacked more forms of expression in the past. This study explores how women writers from Uganda and South Africa attempt to capture women’s experiences in literary texts and seeks to find ways of interpreting how such constructs of female identity in the aftermath of different forms of oppression articulate various signs of rupture and continuation with earlier representations of female experience in these two nation states. There are three core chapters in this thesis. I approach the gendered experience as represented in the fictional narratives of emerging women writers through three different perspectives; namely, war and the aftermath, popular literary genres, and identity markers. In the process, I try to think through the following questions: How are writers reclaiming and re-evaluating women’s participation during the oppressive regimes of civil war in Uganda and apartheid in South Africa? How are women writers rethinking and repositioning the roles of women as they continue to live in patriarchal societies that marginalize and oppress them? To what extent have things changed for women in the aftermath of these oppressive regimes as represented in the texts? What new representations of women are emerging? For whom, and from what positions, are these women writing? Is literary representation a reiteration of political representation that ends up not being effective? What is the relation between literary and political representation? Do these narratives open up alternative avenues for writers to represent women’s interests? How do new female literary representations emerge in different novels such as chick lit and crime fiction?
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die wyses waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika krities kyk na nasionalisitiese narratiewe en tegelyk ook na ‘n gendered nasionalisme. Daar word gefokus op die nuwe uitbeeldinge van vroue in en van die nasies wat spruit uit die narratiewe van opkomende vroueskrywers in nasiestate in die post-onderdrukking-tydperk. Deur te fokus op die uitbeeldinge van vroue en vroulikheid word die verbande tussen post-konflik-skryfwerk ondersoek, en word ook rekening gehou met etlike verskille in die wyses waarop vroue deur sodanige skrywers in spesifieke post-onderdrukking-regimes uitgebeeld word. Die narratiewe uit die twee lande word saam gelees, want in die loop van die afgelope vyftig jaar ondervind sowel Uganda as Suid-Afrika langdurige politieke onderdrukking en onbestendigheid, gevolg deur onderhandelde oorgange na nuwe politieke bedelings. Die term post-onderdrukking verwys na die tydperk na 1986 na die burgeroorlog in Uganda en na die post-apartheid-era na afloop van die eerste demokratiese verkiesing in Suid-Afrika in 1994. Sedert die laat-1990’s was daar ‘n geleidelike toename in fiksie deur opkomende vroueskrywers in Uganda en Suid-Afrika. In die Ugandese letterkundige konteks verwys die term opkomende vroueskrywers na skrywers wat gebaat het by die totstandkoming van FEMRITE Publications, die uitgewery van die Ugandese vroueskrywersvereniging; in die Suid-Afrikaanse opset word die term gebruik om swart vroueskrywers te beskryf wat vir die eerste keer in ‘n bevryde land kon publiseer. Die huidige politieke klimaat in albei lande het vir vroueskrywers ‘n nuwe era ingelei; vir sulke vars stemme gaan daar breër barste oop wat hulle toelaat om al hoe meer ruimte te skep waarin wyduiteenlopende onderwerpe, wat in die verlede minder uitdrukkingsgeleenthede geniet het, vooropgestel, ondersoek, betrek en aangespreek kan word. Die proefskrif ondersoek die maniere waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika die vroulike ervaring in letterkundige geskrifte uitbeeld. Daar word gepoog om te vertolk hoe sodanige konstrukte vroulike identiteit verwoord in die nadraai van verskeie soorte onderdrukking en uiting gee aan verskillende tekens van beide die onderbreking in en die voortsetting van vroeëre uitbeeldinge van die vroulike ervaring in die twee nasiestate. Die proefskrif bevat drie kernhoofstukke. Die gendered ervaring word uit drie afsonderlike hoeke benader soos dit in die narratiewe verteenwoordig word, naamlik: oorlog en die nadraai daarvan; populêre letterkundige genres; en identiteitskenmerke. In die loop daarvan word getrag om die volgende vrae te deurdink: Hoe word vroue se deelname tydens die onderdrukkende regimes van die burgeroorlog in Uganda en apartheid in Suid-Afrika hereien en herwaardeer? Hoe herdink en herposisioneer vroueskrywers tans die rolle van vroue soos hulle steeds in patriargale samelewings voortleef waar hulle opsygeskuif en onderdruk word? In hoe ‘n mate het sake vir vroue verander in die nadraai van die onderdrukking, soos dit in die tekste uitgebeeld word? Watter vars representasies van vroue kom onder die nuwe bedeling tot stand? Vir wie, en uit watter posisies, skryf hierdie vroue tans? Is die letterkundige representasie bloot ‘n herhaling van die politieke representasie, wat dan op niks doeltreffends uitloop nie? Wat is die verhouding tussen politieke en letterkundige representasie? Baan hierdie narratiewe alternatiewe weë oop waar skrywers die belange van vroue kan verteenwoordig? Hoe kom nuwe vroulike letterkundige representasies in verskillende narratiewe vorms soos chick lit en misdaadfiksie voor?
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Kim, Rina. "Beyond mourning and melancholia : women and Ireland as Beckett's lost others." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4108/.
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Beckett's female characterization in his later works is, in marked contrast to his earlier work, broadly in sympathy with the notion of 'feminine' style and feminist concerns. Yet in his earlier texts, the female is grotesque, devouring, sexually provocative, and silenced. It can be argued that Beckett's representations of the female and Ireland intersect, and change as his relationship to Ireland and an Anglo-Irish tradition changes. Proposing that Beckett's self-imposed exile has influenced such changes, this thesis, using a psychoanalytic framework, traces discourses of mourning, melancholia and abjection in his works, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often the objects of loss in the psychoanalytic model. By exploring the correlations between the representations of Ireland and the female throughout Beckett's oeuvre, this thesis aims to shed new light on Beckett's literary practice as well as contributing to the fields of Irish and feminist studies.
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Scott, Francesca M. "The fuzzy theory and women writers in the late eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/50247/.
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'Fuzzy Theory and Women Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century' contends that women writers require more careful critical treatment, and suggests that critics are still bound by the outdated logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle. This law, first formulated by Aristotle, and developed by Gottfried Leibniz in the early eighteenth century, indicates that where there are two contradictory prepositions, one must be true and the other false; a female writer must, therefore, either be feminine or masculine, conservative or radical. The twentieth century concept of Fuzzy logic, however, helped mathematicians and engineers to manage reasoning that was only approximate, rather than exact. Borrowing from this, the thesis will employ the Fuzzy Set Theory, which permits the gradual assessment of elements in a set, rather than relying on elements that are assessed in binaric terms (the principle of bivalence, or, contradiction). Put simply, the Fuzzy Set Theory does away with binaries, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and the Law of Contradiction, allowing subjects to be imprecise, and changeable. Thus, each chapter will construct a Fuzzy Set by which a variety of eighteenth century debates, with which women writers engaged, can be examined. The thesis will show that all such concepts are subjective and unstable— changeable and open to personal interpretation, and will discuss such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, Hannah More and Joanna Southcott.
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Robson, Margaret. "Feeling women : an exploration of women's viewpoints in the Middle English Breton lay." Thesis, University of York, 1994. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10804/.
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Hodge, Anita Obermeier. "Handmaidens of God : the female figures Judith, Juliana, and Elene in Old English heroic poetry /." View online, 1985. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211130497875.pdf.
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Guth, Gwendolyn. ""A world for women": Fictions of the female artist in English-Canadian periodicals, 1840-1880." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/NQ45175.pdf.
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Hurst, Isobel. "The feminine of Homer : classical influences on women writers from Mary Shelley to Vera Brittain." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.275748.
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Barker, Carol. "To suffice to herself : female self-sufficiency in the work of women writers 1740-1814." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2002. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1417.
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This thesis takes as its focus the concept of self- sufficiency in the works of women writers 1740-1814, in order to re-evaluate the relationship between moral and economic modes of eighteenth-century female (in)dependence. This focus comprises two more refined aims: to formulate an appropriate methodology for using the term self-sufficiency within the project by establishing its definitions and applications, both contemporary and modern (addressing, in effect, whether it can be said to establish its own discourse); and to discuss a range of work by female writers whose thematic and strategic investigation of moral and economic issues positions the nature of female self-sufficiency amongst their concerns. As part of this, the thesis seeks a broader definition of female economic behaviour than has been the case in recent critical debates in order to reconsider women's presence as economic beings in the fiction of the period. Sarah Fielding's works are discussed in terms of her fascination with exchange motifs and how this is manifested in her management of narrative forms to structure moral and economic models of self-sufficiency. The work of Frances Brooke is used to explore the implications of self-sufficiency in a range of sexual and economic categories of femininity- the spinster, the widow, the coquette and the female writer. An investigation of Frances Sheridan's novels is concerned with the relationship between individual morality and the collective values, together with the processes of acculturation, structured by female education and conduct procedures. It evaluates how the self-sufficiency of the personal economy engages with wider economies - moral, domestic and political. A fourth chapter on Frances Burney examines her sustained preoccupation with the concept of female self-dependence, and with the nature of female employment. These investigations suggest that only by encompassing non-monetary economies can the nature and scope of eighteenth-century women's economic experiences be determined.
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Kuhlman, Laura Jane. "The beat goes on: women writers of the beat generation." Diss., University of Iowa, 2017. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5796.
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The Beats were one of the most influential communities of the 20th century, and this dissertation focuses on the critically underrepresented women who were part of their influence. Today, the Beats are largely celebrated for their literary legacy, popularizing a spontaneous poetic style as well as promoting an antimaterialist ethos and globe-trotting mystique in opposition to Cold War attitudes of confinement and consensus. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats were seen as harbingers of cultural disillusionment, taking to the road in search of God, championing the “beatific” nature of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the lowly across America. Today, the Beats are considered to be the progenitors of pacifist “hippie” culture and a revolutionary postwar spirit.
Despite this democratizing goal, a prevailing critical consensus holds that the Beat movement was primarily a “boy’s club,” in which the homosocial bonds between the key male figures fostered a system of literary mentorship that largely excluded women writers. Although the canon is frequently narrowed to give precedence to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and the male writers who joined their cadre, my project focuses on the many women writers who were part of the Beat community and the lasting impact of their work. My goal is to reconceptualize Beat aesthetics, themes, and communities in light of these women’s writing. The project entails close textual analysis of these writers’ work across multiple genres, including poetry, memoir, and fiction, as well as research toward historical and cultural contextualization, including interviews. Their writing emphasizes the centrality of the domestic sphere to Beat publishing and the utility of the road in seeking healing and empowerment, in addition to offering new perspectives on Beat spirituality and life writing.
In addition to bringing well-deserved attention to these marginalized writers, this research is valuable for American literary history in expanding knowledge of women’s writing at midcentury. More broadly, these writers are of significance to our understanding of modern feminism as well. The majority of these women worked to support their families at a time described by Betty Friedan as the age of the “feminine mystique,” and they pushed back against the rigid social conventions of their time by escaping into bohemian life. The Beat women wrote frankly about reproductive roulette, single motherhood, abortion, social stigma about being women who lived alone, and difficulty starting careers in a sexist culture. For their shared values of self-sufficiency and dedication to their work, these women could be seen as feminist forerunners to the major crest of second wave feminism. However, feminism is not a single, static, monolithic push, and my interrogation of Beat women’s texts complicates and enriches understandings of postwar gender conventions. These writers’ thought contributes to ongoing discussions in modern feminist thought, including shifting cultural attitudes toward domestic labor, the importance of women’s communities, and forms and contradictions of female leadership.
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Swank, Andrea H. "Virtually corporal : the polite articulation of the female body in the 18th century novel /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9841339.
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Schiller, Beate. "Between afrocentrism and universality : detective fiction by black women." Master's thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2004. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2005/547/.
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This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society.This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature.
With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader's ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers.
Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen die Detektivserien der afroamerikanischen Autorinnen Barbara Neely und Valerie Wilson Wesley. Die Blanche White Mysteries von Neely und die Tamara Hayle Mysteries von Wesley repräsentieren mit der Einführung der schwarzen Hausangestellten Blanche White als Amateurdetektivin und der schwarzen Privatdetektivin Tamara Hayle nicht nur hinsichtlich der innerhalb der letzten zwanzig Jahre erschienen Welle von Kriminalautorinnen mit weiblichen Detektiven eine Innovation, sondern auch bezüglich der mit diesen Hauptfiguren verbundenen Auseinandersetzungen mit Klassenstatus und Rassismus.
Die bisher erschienen Detektivromane beider Serien werden in dieser Arbeit im Hinblick auf ihre Präsentation der Erfahrungen der Afroamerikaner in den USA der 1990er Jahre untersucht. Da Detektivromane der Populärliteratur zugerechnet werden und entsprechend ihrer Befriedigung von Massenansprüchen "produziert" werden, war die Fragestellung, ob in den genannten Detektivserien diese Hinwendung zur Mainstreamkultur mit einer verringerten Darstellung der afroamerikanischen Probleme und Lebensweise verbunden ist. Bei der Analyse der Serien wurde deshalb der Entwicklung der Protagonistinnen als Detektivinnen und als schwarze Frauen sowie der Wirkung ihrer Erzählerstimme besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt.
Die beiden Serien repräsentieren die afroamerikanische Kultur auf unterschiedlichen Erfahrungsstufen, woran erkennbar ist, dass die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung in den USA keine homogene Gruppe darstellt. Ausschlaggebend für das Erreichen des Anspruchs der Afroamerikaner an ihre Literatur scheint die Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Identitätsfindung der schwarzen Protagonistinnen und der Beziehungen zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen zu sein. Den Autorinnen gelingt es in unterschiedlichem Maße den weißen und somit Mainstream-Lesern nicht nur einen Einblick in ihre Kultur zu vermitteln, sondern vielmehr, sie direkt mit ihrer Ignoranz gegenüber dieser schwarzen Kultur zu konfrontieren. Neelys und Wesleys große Leistung ist, dass die Stimmen ihrer Protagonistinnen sowohl ein zahlreiches schwarzes als auch ein wachsendes weißes Publikum erreichen.
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Waters, Claire. "Act your age : reading and performing Shakespeare's ageing women." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c649607e-96f3-4476-a4eb-13e7ecd2db02.
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This thesis provides the first study of the representation, performance, and reception of Shakespeare’s ageing women in early modern and present-day England. It contributes an exposition of the physiology and theory of early modern ageing, drawing on this original material to make an argument for the ageing woman as a source of anxiety within the plays as they were originally staged, and as they are performed and received today. It finds the old and ageing woman in Shakespeare’s drama to be represented as physically and verbally excessive; the thesis also identifies a corresponding urge in the plays and in their reception towards the ageing woman’s containment and control. This containment is exercised in the text, the rehearsal room, the theatre, and the public space of performance reviews. My introduction determines my methodology and establishes the terms of reference for the project. The first chapter defines early modern old age and delivers a study of the early modern literature and theory of the ageing body. Each of the four subsequent chapters explores an ageing female character or characters through the lens of a theme: magic, motherhood, sexuality, and memory. The characters studied are drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, King John, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Richard III. Some brief concluding remarks complete the thesis. The larger project of the thesis is a cultural study. Throughout, I am keen to learn how characters are talked about as well as written and performed. My effort to understand the work which Shakespeare’s older women are asked to carry out in the present day defines my methodology: I draw on prompt books, production recordings, reviews, costume, photographs, programmes, and interviews with actors and directors to aid my investigation, juxtaposing these with close study of the written plays and the early modern culture and knowledge which underpins them. The word count, exclusive of bibliography but inclusive of all footnotes and an appendix, is approximately 92,000.
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Henshall, Amanda Louise. "Talking books : teachers on teaching texts by women on A Level English literature courses." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.288979.
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Urbanowicz, Donna-Marie. "Representations of women in selected works of Herbert George De Lisser (1878-1944)." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2013. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/28108/.
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This thesis examines the intellectual significance of early Caribbean writer Herbert George de Lisser in his literary writings and as such is a work of recovery and criticism. Each chapter concentrates on a specific, predominantly European, literary genre and investigates how de Lisser experiments with these genres in order to not only support and recognise the emergence of a local national literature, but also to create a cultural national identity based upon the symbolic use of women to define Jamaica as a nation. Situating de Lisser within colonial discourse and the socio political arena of the British Empire, the introduction sets out the postcolonial theoretical framework and relocates de Lisser within the context of West Indian literature, debating his literary neglect alongside his need to be reclaimed. Chapter I debates the traditional notions of nationhood and examines the dislocation and (re)gendering of nation and nationhood through the lens of women as founders of a nation with the main emphasis on his novel "Anacanoa." Chapter II concentrates on de Lisser's "historical" novels and explores the representation of heroism and the search for a national identity in two of de Lisser's novels, Revenge and Psyche, written at the beginning and the end of his career. This chapter examines the way in which the novels' (re)negotiation of the representations of heroism is explored within individual characters. Chapter III examines women as a symbol of Jamaica through the lens of female independence and national identity. The focus of this chapter rests on de Lisser's literary works that have received a limited amount of literary investigation, namely Jane's Career and Susan Proudleigh, with a third novel "Myrtle and Money" which is not only a sequel to Jane's Career (although written some 30 years later), but also creates a trilogy of texts that serves to represent the political complexities of early twentieth century Jamaica. Chapters IV and V act as sister chapters and examine the representation of women through the (re)clamation and (re)creation of folk legends and the commodification of literature in the novels Morgan's Daughter and The White Witch of Rosehall. These chapters consider how de Lisser's appropriation of a legend encourages that legend to evolve into a symbol for nationalism and historical heritage. Experimenting with the genres of sentimental literature and gothic fiction respectively, de Lisser investigates the dichotomy of European and Jamaican cultures. Chapter VI focuses upon the general constructions of nationhood which are founded upon traditional hegemonic public and private spheres. With an in-depth investigation into his periodical Planters' Punch which was produced from 1920-1945, this chapter analyses how de Lisser continuously blurs these spherical boundaries by creating strong women who are capable of fulfilling the "role" of the male in civilised society and therefore relocates them into the public arena. Finally, the conclusion explores de Lisser's perception of women and highlights how by investigating his literary works through his representation of women, de Lisser is able to be reconciled within a more delineated and inclusive Caribbean literary canon.
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Frith, Gillian. "The intimacy which is knowledge : female friendship in the novels of women writers." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1988. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3658/.
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The thesis offers a historical account of the representation of friendship in the novels of English women writers from the nineteenth century to the present. Questioning the prevalent understanding of the history of women's friendship in terms of a single major rupture, from nineteenth-century 'innocence' to twentieth-century 'guilt', the thesis identifies narrative configurations which recur throughout this, period, and which define friendship as a formative learning experience integrally related to the acquisition of gendered identity. It concludes that there can be no final and 'perfect' representation of friendship, since the nature of the "knowledge' shared has continually shifted in relation to changing understandings of femininity. Chapter 1 identifies the origins and nature of the Victorian concept of the "second self", in which the friend acts as the mirror of, and means of access to, an idealised female subjectivity. Chapter 2 analyses the ways in which this concept informs the narrative patterns and rituals in Victorian fictions of friendship. Chapter 3 offers a new reading of novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, in which the conventions identified in Chapter 2 are adapted to question the existing boundaries of feminine identity. Chapter 4 examines the impact of changes in women's education upon the representation of friendship in turn-of-the-century feminist and anti-feminist novels, and in a new genre, the school story for girls. Chapter 5 shows that the scientific construct of lesbianism produced a new distinction between the 'healthy' and the 'unhealthy' relationship, but that the terms of this distinction were contested; in twentieth-century novels of the 'gyriaeceum', the tradition continues, but is newly eroticised. Chapter 6 looks at friendship as 'revision' in recent English and American novels, in which earlier configurations are redeployed in the light of contemporary feminist concern to recuperate and re-imagine the past.
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Martin-Joy, Susan Elizabeth. "Capturing Experience: Marlow's Narrative about Women in Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" and "Chance"." W&M ScholarWorks, 1997. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626124.
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Wax, Shelby T. "Reclaiming the Female Suicide Narrative: Rebirth, a Plunge, and the Absurd." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/822.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis looks at female suicide in literature from the 1890s to 1970s in the novels The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Looking at these female-penned novels in comparison the canon of Western literature, they all clearly indicate a change in the treatment of female protagonists suffering from loss. In The Awakening, suicide is represented as a rebirth. In Mrs. Dalloway, the protagonist suffers from a fragmentation of the self. In Play It As It Lays, the protagonist finds life through the Absurd.
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Wahlin, Leah Joy. "Minor Movements: (Re)locating the Travels of Early Modern English Women." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1196786416.
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