Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the top ten best-selling children's picture books of 2006 reveals that these books contain elements of systematic privilege and oppression. Dominant group members are numerically overrepresented in the sample. Major emergent themes are the normalization of racism and white privilege, the stereotypical portrayal of the...
As the embodiment of the religiously unsettled Victorian Era in which she lived,
George Eliot sought to discover a system of belief that would allow her to reaffirm and
maintain her feelings of faith and morality. She believed that the subjective nature of
traditional Christianity needed to be replaced with...
The eighteenth-century female of sensibility was characterized by delicate nerves that allowed her to feel her surroundings and enabled her to choose virtue over vice more consistently than males. While females were considered virtuous, their "innate" delicacy or weakness became their dominant trait and the true focus of male admiration....
The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship between love and hate, especially the connection between kindness and violence. In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness, his desire...
Nineteenth-century England witnessed burgeoning urban growth and the resultant struggle of the poor to find adequate shelter. Against this backdrop, Charles Dickens was a fierce advocate for the rights of the street people of London to have sanitary and adequate housing, earning him the title of radical. By combining sentimentality...
The relationship between literature and nation-building has been one of the most
crucial issues in postcolonial studies. The novel in particular is regarded as a means by which writers forge national consciousness among the colonized during the time of colonization. Many African writers themselves, for example, conceive of their work...
This thesis is a study of the shifting philosophical trends in the works of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut as representations of a greater shift from modernism to postmodernism. I have chosen to explore Beckett's plays Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, Barthelme's short stories "Nothing: A...
In Nazi Germany, 1938, Der Stürmer publishing house, under the control of Julius Striecher, published Der Giftpilz or The Poisonous Mushroom; an anti-Semitic children's book. Disseminated in the thousands, Der Giftpilz became infamously known as a children's book so grotesque it could be, and in fact was, admitted as evidence...
At first glance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's wildly popular romantic fantasy novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist science fiction-utopian novel, Herland (1915), with its dystopian companion, With Her in Ourland (1916), may appear to have little in common. Tarzan celebrates the human connection with wild nature...
The present study considers the mid-nineteenth century origins of the term “sexual inversion,” as it became applied to a variety of nonnormative subjects and sexual practices. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) has long been recognized as a discursive space wherein socially constructed notions of sexuality and gender are interrogated. A key...