Department of English Literature Graduate Theses
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Item Subverting Female Intellect: The Feminization of Literacy and the Portrayal of the “Unreasonable” Mind in Victorian Novels (1850-1870)(2024-07-15) Tillotson, Donna; English Language and Literature; Cameron, BrookeDrawing on the framework of female identity and its relation to available education, this thesis explores the feminization of literacy in Victorian England and its effects on popular novels of the era. By exploring both the sociological and psychological dynamics of identity formation, it can be shown that societal norms reinforced segregated gender roles. By connecting this rigid sociological framework to the publishing advancements seen during the Victorian era, this thesis will show how literature became a powerful mirror to Victorian society, contributing to a broadening of access to literature and an enabling of women to engage in self-education. This analysis focuses on how popular sensational novels, such as The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret, and popular introspective novels, such as Villette and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, fostered an imaginative space for readers to explore the complexities of female anxieties and aspirations. Through these narratives, this thesis underscores the enduring struggle for female autonomy within restrictive societal frameworks, emphasizing the profound role of literature in both reflecting and shaping societal perceptions and its connection to the construction of female identity during the Victorian period.Item “God loves you but not enough to save you”: Patriarchal Authority and Feminine Punishment in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter(2024-07-09) Fattor, Sacha; English Language and Literature; Chatterjee, RonjauneeThis thesis draws upon critical feminist theory, autobiographical genres, and contemporary comparative analysis to examine gendered discourse and corporeal feminine punishment in The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath and Preacher’s Daughter (2022) by Ethel Cain. My research links confessional women’s writing and patriarchal authority to examine the oppressive nature exerted by patriarchal institutions over feminine subjects. I observe the characterization of feminine heroine within patriarchal landscapes in which Biblical ideas of damnation, punishment, and salvation serve as a trajectory that both maps patriarchal violence and, at times, offers a window through and out of it. My thesis aims to highlight the evolving female literary landscape of the mid-20th century, establish the patriarchal conventions that exist in women’s writing, and denote patriarchal subjects’ consistent allusion to Biblical functions as reasoning for their systematic torment.Item The Ballad of Benson: Creating Queer Young Adult Literature set in Eighteenth-Century London(2024-07-09) Galbraith, Isabella; English Language and Literature; Ritchie, Leslie; Humphreys, HelenThis thesis aims to explore queer normalization in the context of the eighteenth century and young adult novels. Specifically, I suggest that in both academic and creative spheres, there is a lack of queer normalization in young adult literature from or set in this period. I explore what value is added to academic and creative disciplines with the addition of these queer normative worlds. I also contend with the benefits and drawbacks of creating worlds wherein queerness is normalized, despite this not being historically accurate to the work’s temporal setting. In pursuit of exploring these questions, I employ a two-pronged approach. The first prong is a research essay in Chapter 1. In this first chapter, I conduct a temporal analysis of the genre of young adult fiction, considering eighteenth-century dynamics and modern dynamics. I then consider the topics of gender and sexuality as they relate to queerness in the eighteenth century. Throughout this essay, I refer to my own creative work, which makes up the second prong of this thesis. The second prong consists of the opening chapters from an original creative young adult work, The Ballad of Benson, that explores such a world wherein queerness is normalized.Item Female Ensembles: Lesbian Neo-Victorian Fiction, 1998-2023(2024-07-05) Friars, Rachel; English Language and Literature; Berg, MaggieFemale Ensembles is a study of lesbian historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. This project takes a reparative approach as Eve Sedgwick defines it (1997) to lesbian literary history through neo-Victorian novels, short fiction, and film from the last twenty-five years. Chapter one argues that this subgenre of writing attempts to revise the fragmented historical record of queer history, and these texts hope for a liberated queer future by envisioning fully realised lesbian subjectivities in the Victorian past. Chapter two argues that gender disruption functions as a mechanism of butch erotic power in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music (2011). Chapter three reads biofictions by Donoghue to posit that lesbian neo-Victorian biofiction of queer historical subjects crafts a lesbian genealogy that is not available in the historical record. The fourth chapter interrogates the uses of the lesbian Gothic in the neo-Victorian novel with a study of Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020). Danforth’s text evokes a queer sense of place alongside moments of abjection as both Julia Kristeva (1982) and Judith Butler (1996) define it to explore the complex subjectivities and fragmented selves of lesbian characters and the forces that attempt to expel them. Divided into two parts, chapter five analyses forms of lesbian authorship, including the fictionalised diary form in Waters’ Affinity (1999) and the film The World to Come (2020). Because diary fictions self-consciously draw attention to subjectivity and textual construction, they are intimately linked with the construction of the queer self. Part two uses Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) and Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads (2022) to posit that novels which depict the lesbian as the author of pornography actively reappropriate the objectification of such writing for lesbian subjectivity and desire. Chapter six is a reading of trauma in Sara Collins’ The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2017); the novel is a presentist text that is keenly aware of the absence of Black lesbian narratives in the archive; therefore, the novel is concerned with ideas around storytelling, memory, and trauma as a way of responding to or coping with these silences.Item (Other)worldly Encounters: Foreignness in Contemporary Travel Writing(2024-07-03) Carruthers, Robyn; English Language and Literature; Varadharajan, AshaThis dissertation proposes a new critical paradigm for understanding travel writing’s engagement with the foreign in the contemporary moment: (other)worldliness. The (other)worldly combines a preoccupation with the gritty, politically embedded, and anxiety-ridden reality of the global world (worldliness) with a spiritually inflected longing for some intangible sacred dimension to that reality (otherworldliness). It is a paradigm capable of illuminating the current dominance of what I refer to as two worldly imaginaries: globality and planetarity. Both imaginaries are concerned with the whole world—the former with the global flux and flow of late capitalism and the latter with earth-wide ecosystems, particularly as they are being affected by anthropogenic climate change. Foreignness, using this paradigm, operates as a threshold space, through which the traveler can interpret the world at the intersection of some manifestation of an otherworld. (Other)worldliness thus functions to explore how both worldliness and otherworldliness are constructed and operationalized in the ways travel writing, and its critique, read the world. This dissertation elaborates on (other)worldliness through an analysis of four exemplars of contemporary travel writing: Pico Iyer’s Sun After Dark, Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Each textual analysis builds on the previous one(s), to develop (other)worldliness as 1) entailing a devotional reading practice; 2) illuminating the (other)worldliness of nature; 3) elaborating the relations between the human and the natural; and 4) defining an aesthetic conjoined to the political. These analyses reveal that (other)worldliness responds to a need for renewed attention to the critical problem of how to be in the world but not of it: how to interpret the real-world embeddedness of cultural texts and events in secular human history, without allowing one’s own positionality to dominate or limit that interpretation. My advancement of (other)worldliness, furthermore, opens a critical passage between the typically postcolonial study of travel writing and the resurgent field of world literature. My argument thus elevates travel writing from its usual status as a minor literary genre to an indispensable participant in the necessary task of reshaping the material and non-material makeup of the world.