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...
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...
Empirical studies and theory have identified many early predictors of children's academic achievement and externalizing problems. Moreover, research shows that children's early cognitive abilities and behavioral problems are strong predictors of later academic achievement and externalizing problems. The current dissertation studies extend previous work and unpack how early predictors relate...
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...
Self-regulation skills lay the foundation for short- and long-term school success, and strengthening these skills in early childhood can have significant implications for immediate and future life outcomes (e.g., Blair & Diamond, 2008; McClelland, Acock, Piccinin, Rhea, & Stallings, 2013). A large body of literature has investigated how characteristics of...
Background: Early childhood is filled with incredible growth in all areas of development and offers a critical period for optimal learning (Lerner, 2002). During this critical period both motor skills (Bouffard, Watkinson, Thompson, Causgrove Dunn, & Romanow, 1996; Clark & Metcalfe, 2002; Lubans, Morgan, Cliff, Barnett, & Okely, 2010; Stodden...
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...