In this thesis, I use modern concepts of feminism, gender performativity, and psychoanalysis as a means to understand female characters and authors of Renaissance England in a new way. In my first article, I analyze various texts and performances of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as texts of Renaissance female...
This research examines the literary and philosophical dimensions of the African American Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the historical milieu of the early twentieth century. A social movement that became known as Uplift and the so-called Cabaret Movement emerged as important, competing literary and social ideologies within the Renaissance. W.E.B. Du...
This thesis explores the artistic imperatives and internal struggles of women painters in two novels, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). I identify Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as painters who exhibit Impressionist strains, both in how they paint and how they...
The protagonists in the fiction of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni
Morrison illuminate American cultural perceptions of black women and illustrate how the
creators of these characters hope to change those perceptions. I studied Paule Marshall's
Daughters, Alice Walker's Meridian and The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison's The
Bluest...
In this thesis I examine the ideological mechanisms that work to constitute, construct, and maintain subject identity. Such mechanisms include repetition, performativity, identification, and interpellation. I incorporate structuralist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic theories as a means to discuss the ways in which gender, sexuality, and identity are performative masquerades. Furthermore, these...
Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers
implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities
involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both...
In his Nick Adams stories, Ernest Hemingway traces the life of a single man as he moves from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood to fatherhood. From the beginning of Nick Adams life, it is clear that he does not fit into the role of the traditional hero. In addition, Nick...
Research studies indicated that teachers' sense of self-efficacy is a multidimensional construct related to teachers' beliefs about teaching, their ability to teach, and their students' ability to learn. This study described the change in a cohort of graduate preservice elementary teachers' sense of efficacy as they progressed through a four...
This thesis explores the gendered histories of slavery through the concept of haunting in two neo-slave narrative novels: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I offer readings of these texts through slavery’s geographic and temporal implications, in order to argue that the logics of antiblackness remain a fundamental...
In this thesis, I read the teachers in four mid-century Victorian novels--Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854), Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Charlotte Brontё's Villette (1853)-- within the context of mid-century English educational debate in an effort to explicate the ways in which these characters...