This dissertation examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels that use forced marriage as a plot structure to expose and subvert the oppression of women in British society. Each of the novels studied at length re-writes the forced marriage plot of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa,...
Much critical scholarship has considered the ways in which gender and gender expression contribute to Willa Cather’s novels. Much work has also considered Cather’s regionalism and its relationship to national literature and the values of the American middle west. My work in this paper brings...
In contemporary American culture, race, has multiple and contradictory meanings. In current American cultural discourses, race often brings to mind people who are not white, while whiteness remains unmarked and serves as a benchmark category—as if white is not a race. The second feature in...
The introduction to this collection of multimedia essays
on Maqbool and The Banquet argues that close examination of the films through
a truly global array of appropriative strategies and cultural contexts can
help combat the tendency to report on rather than analyze non-Western works
and...
Homer’s Iliad has always held a fascination for me in the drama of its central heroes, particularly when it comes to Achilles. The original Greek text holds little back in its depictions of its heroes; Achilles wails as he rips off his clothes and in other moments of heroic redemption drags a...
This project seeks to develop a literary theory of trans discourse that better allows for the study of transgender prior to the coinage of identity terminology in the 20th century. By examining transgender as an array of genres of embodiment (based on Sandy Stone's genre theory from the...
Given the increased public enthusiasm for the genres of Horror and Science Fiction, as well as the renewed and ever-evolving interest in indie horror films (propelling them into the mainstream), there is a noticeable increase of public eagerness to consume films that toy with the ideas of anxiety...
This dissertation relies on scholarship on Saudi Arabia, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory, to explore how representations of Saudi women are constructed and deployed in the political sphere in both Saudi Arabia and the United States. It argues that these representations form the basis...