Browsing by Subject "Women authors"
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Item Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland(2011-05) Bacon, Catherine M.; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Eastman, Caroline; Garrity, JaneMy dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.Item Images of men: male characters in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie", Caroline Kirkland's "A New Home", "Who'll follow?", Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall", and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "The Story of Avis"(Texas Tech University, 1998-08) Peel, Sylvia Roach TerrillIn the past thirty years, long forgotten volumes of nineteenth-century woman's fiction have been exhumed, revived and examined. The primary focus of the examinations has been on the women who wrote them, the women who filled their pages, and the women who read them. Until now, the men who inhabit these works have received only cursory notice. The purpose of this study is to explore the male characters in nineteenth-century American woman's fiction, to unveil men as women saw them, as they created them, and as they wanted them to be. The works selected for this study are Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie", a historical romance, set in the Colonial period, depicting two unconventional heroines; Caroline Kirkland's "A New Home". "Who'll Follow?", a book of sketches portraying the life and the people on the Michigan frontier; Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall", a bitter sweet story of a woman's quest for success; and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "The Story of Avis", the story of a promising woman artist, who sacrifices her career for the love of a man. Prototypes used as a basis for the examination of the male characters include the patriarchal male, the poseur, the valiant male, and the new man. The patriarchal system prevailed in the nineteenth century, and although all of the male characters are part of that system, the predominant male character type in woman's literature is the patriarchal male. A more malignant male is the poseur, who ranges from a mere dandy to a despicable miscreant. The valiant male performs heroic acts, some nominal and some profound, for the heroine. He may admire her, but he has no marital aspirations for her. The new man is the beau ideal of these novelists. This character seeks equality in a marriage relationship, and he promotes independence in women. Though eagerly sought, the new man proves elusive. Sedgwick, Kirkland, Fern, and Phelps, through their male characters, condemn the oppression of the patriarchal system, indict the poseur, valorize the nobility of the heroic in men, and give birth to the concept of the new man. The task of developing the new man into maturity, they bestow on the next generation.Item Narrative salvage(2016-05) Shapland, Jennifer Ann; Houser, Heather; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Bennett, Chad; Lewis, RandolphNarrative Salvage brings together contemporary writing and film of what I call wastescapes: places made expendable—wasted—under late capitalism. In hybrid works of the 2000s by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Agnes Varda, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Longfellow, Rebecca Solnit, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Eileen Myles, I analyze tactile and emotional representations of everyday life in the wastescape. Each of the four chapters examines a particular wastescape featured by these writers and filmmakers: the postindustrial junkyard, the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, the nuclear waste strewn Nevada desert, and the melting Arctic tundra. Within these spaces, I track practices of repurposing that occur in the inhabitants’ everyday lives and analyze the potential for writing and film to reclaim and transform place through representation. I argue that waste is a crucial site of trans-corporeal experience, which in Stacy Alaimo's words constitutes a "literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature." The trans-corporeal wastescape affects ecosystems, human communities, and material objects; however, the representation of waste has not been a primary focus in environmental criticism. Narrative Salvage addresses this gap by approaching waste interdisciplinarily, drawing on the critical tools of environmental studies, sociology, and material culture studies. Practices of repurposing in the works I study dismantle the ideologies that create wastescapes by calling into question the production of value and rejection of waste that undergird capitalist and patriarchal enterprise. In the deviant ethics of the wastescape, the telos of progress loses its hold, making way for makeshift epistemologies and queer temporalities of continuous making do and regeneration. These experimental contemporary works' alinear, fragmented, and polyvocal forms embrace the vital ongoingness of decay and contamination. In Narrative Salvage, adamantly personal literatures and films of the wastescape urge audiences to rethink waste by seeing it anew, by defamiliarizing it, and in so doing help to rethink the human's relationship to—immersion within—place and environment.Item Travel literature reconsidered : mobility and subjectivity in Passenger to Teheran(2011-05) Hyslop, Brianna Elizabeth; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Carter, Mia E.The critical attention that has been given to Vita Sackville-West’s travel literature has primarily focused on the relationships between these texts and the novels of Virginia Woolf on account of the intimate relationship that existed between the two writers. I argue in this paper that Sackville-West’s travel accounts are worthy of study in and of themselves. This report explores the ways that the genre of travel literature was changing in the early twentieth century through Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926). Critics such as Marie Louise Pratt have noted that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British travel accounts had been used as a way to transmit technical knowledge of, and authority over, the East. Sackville-West’s text throws this tradition of the genre into question through its focus on the traveler’s subjectivity. Working from Michel de Certeau’s ideas regarding railway travel and incarceration, I want to demonstrate that the traveler’s subjectivity is augmented by her position as a passenger in various modes of mobility. Ultimately I argue that the privileging of imagination and subjectivity over scientific knowledge found in Passenger to Teheran unravels the traditional epistemology of travel writing which positions the traveler as an authority figure on the East, and instead positions Sackville-West as a traveler-aesthete. This shift in the role of the travel writer reveals that while Pratt’s description characterizes some travel writing, Sackville-West’s travel project is more concerned with discovering the creative potential that travel can stimulate in the mind rather than purporting to reveal facts about the outside world.Item Women, violoence, and twentieth-century American literature(Texas Tech University, 2003-08) Good, SallyViolence in American literature is commonplace and has been the topic of considerable study. A more thorough explorafion of women and violence in twentieth-century American literature, however, with an emphasis on an evolutionary/scientific approach, is my focus, with consideration of authors' perspectives and readers' perceptions in addition to textual readings and character analyses. In this project, I seek to illustrate through literature evolutionary explanations to questions such as "Why are men more violent than women?" and "Why has violence against women been allowed to continue for so long?" The research for this study involves and entire century's sampling of American fiction, as I have sought to observe changes in perspectives of violence and women—and to pursue answers to such questions as "Have women traditionally invited violence from males?" and "Is the number of violent women on the increase?" Some of the works analyzed are Faulkner's Sanctuary, Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Morrison's Beloved, and Walker's The Color Purple. Chapter focuses include violence theories, rape, the violent and "crazy" American female, sexual violence, and violence ion fiction by minority women.