<p> The Marquis de Sade became famous, or infamous depending on one's perspective, for the ferocious depictions of sexual predation which are found throughout his literary works, and consequently, the character of the sexual predator is indispensable to understanding the author's philosophical standpoint. For Sade, the laws of nature determine the sex of the individual, but they also require him or her to satisfy a set of physical needs which reject the masculine/feminine binary as often as they embrace it. This blurring of the lines between masculinity and femininity is thus characteristic of the Sadian sexual predator who must constantly seek satisfaction for his needs regardless of social and religious constraints on his behavior and on the sex of his victim. When examining the myriad variations on this character in Sade's work, it becomes clear that he has transferred the natural law of &ldquo;survival of the fittest&rdquo; from a purely physical to a highly intellectual concept and, in so doing, has created a predator who uses mental as well as physical strength to dominate his victim. I, therefore, propose that masculinity mixes fluidly with femininity when examined through the lens of the predator and that by investigating the hierarchy of predator versus prey, the mutability of gender at both extremes of the predatory relationship, and the description of specific acts of predation, it is possible to deconstruct the gender differences through the strict adherence to the laws of nature observed by Sade's sexual predators.</p>

<p> The post-apocalyptic narrative has been imagined time and again in American literature and popular culture. More often than not, it is presented as a dystopian future in which all signs of humanity and the world as we know it are lost. Through an examination of nature and environment, humanity, and time and futurity within two post-apocalyptic texts&mdash;Cormac McCarthy's novel <i>The Road</i> and Robert Kirkman's graphic novel <i> The Walking Dead</i>&mdash;this thesis explores the manner in which heteronormativity is presented and, more importantly, the ways in which this type of dominant order can be and are disrupted. Reading against the grain, I explore definitions "normative" and "nonnormative," "human" and "monstrous" within the post-apocalyptic narrative in an effort to suggest that these definitions are complicated in an attempt to present the post-apocalyptic future as a space for multiple potentialities and possibilities of living.</p>

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Amardeep Singh.

<p>The poem <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> has been translated hundreds of times, in part or in whole. In past decades translators such as Howell Chickering and E. Talbot Donaldson firmly adhered to formal equivalency, following the original text line-by-line if not word-by-word. Such translations are useful for Anglo-Saxon students but cannot reach a larger audience because they are unwieldy and often incomprehensible. In the past fifty years, though, a group of translators with different philosophies has taken up the task of translating the poem with greater success. Translators such as Marc Hudson, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney used dynamic equivalency for their versions, eschewing strict grammatical accuracy and literal diction in order to recreate the sense and experience of the poem for a modern audience. How two translators, E. Talbot Donaldson and Seamus Heaney, treat the queens in the poem as revealed by a close textual analysis proves to be an excellent example of the two methodologies; formal equivalence translators do not endow their female characters with the agency and respect present in the original text, while dynamic equivalence translators take liberties with the language to give their readers a strong sense of the powerful but tragic queen figures. Harold Bloom&rsquo;s theory of the development of poets in <i>The Anxiety of Influence</i> can help explain this shift from formal equivalency to dynamic equivalency. Translators of <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> necessarily react against their predecessors, and since translators usually explain their process and philosophy in forwards or introductions, their motivations for &ldquo;swerving away&rdquo; are clear. Formal equivalence translators misrepresented the original text by devaluing the literary merit of the original poem and dynamic equivalence translators seek to remedy the misrepresentation by elaborating and expanding the language of the original to reach a wider audience. Each generation must continue to translate against the grain of its predecessors in order to keep the poem alive for a larger audience so that the poem will continue to be enjoyed by future audiences. </p>

<p> This thesis explores Julia Ward Howe's unfinished manuscript, <i> The Hermaphrodite</i> (2004). In order to establish a foundation, this thesis begins by approaching <i>The Hermaphrodite</i> through lenses that connect to Howe's life and times. The biographical, feminist, and gothic approaches analyze the effects of personal conflicts, gender concerns, and setting nuances on the manuscript. The analysis of previous treatment of hermaphrodites provides background on ambiguous protagonists. Ultimately, this thesis expands upon and diverges from preceding scholarship, and it establishes a new perspective through which to view the hermaphroditic protagonist, Laurence. This thesis argues that Howe's Laurence can be read as are-visioned Christ figure. His/her physical description is strikingly reminiscent of the accounts of Jesus's appearance. Both Jesus and Laurence are entwined with pious symbols. Laurence is intrinsically connected to the purity of the cross. Most importantly, Laurence and Jesus both gallantly endure burdens and selflessly sacrifice themselves for others while transiently inhabiting earth before returning to heaven. Laurence is an unexpected and reinvented savior.</p>

<p> One need not strain to find examples of male sentimentality in contemporary US popular culture: From frequent news stories on "Weeper of the House" John Boehner, to the success of Judd Apatow's poignant "bromance" movies, to last year's film adaptation of Stephen Chbosky's celebrated adolescent novel, <i> The Perks of Being a Wallflower</i> (1999), the man of feeling seems more present and popular than ever. With an unsettling display of excessive emotion emanating from the male body, each iteration provokes in viewers, listeners, and cultural critics any one of several disparate responses: Whether committed to the transgressive potential of a male who <i>feels</i> different because he offers vulnerability where others offer hardened restraint, or whether insistent in the claim that these texts simply add to what Gail Bederman would call the "remaking" of a continually complex normative subject, we find in the man of feeling an ambivalent subject for the public sphere. The initial question for readers, listeners, or viewers is often a simple one: is male sentimentality transformative and progressive, or is it pathetic and self-serving? But the presumption that we must answer one way or another belies the historical and cultural complexity of the man of feeling, and merely reinforces a kind of political approach to reading that simply replicates our own attitudes and relation to normativity and its privileges. This dissertation&mdash;under the impulse of recent work in queer theory and affect to reach closer to, rather than further from, normativity&mdash;takes up the counterintuitive position that we might draw this unlikely subject of the wallflower out from the sidelines and use him to interrogate normativity not from outside, but rather <i>beside,</i> its unsteady borders. It asks a central question&mdash;What does it mean for a critique of normativity to come from the normative subject?&mdash;and argues that the "peripheral" reading of normativity he helps enable might serve to render the logics of normativity in different ways than we can with more traditionally oppositional forms of critique.</p>

<p><i>Bone Garden</i> is a collection of poetry that inspects interpersonal communication and an often misguided sense of connection with others. Through investigations of memory, disaster, aging, and gender, the collection depicts a world in which many of us fruitlessly search for empathy and a sense of solidarity. Leading this investigation is a narrator whose frustrations with isolation often result in passive aggressive behavior or violence that furthers her separation from others. <i>Bone Garden</i> proposes solidarity as a salted plot and despair as the bitter fruit harvested by those who believe in it. </p>

Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance Giselle Gos Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract Female subjectivity remains a theoretical question in medieval romance, a genre in which the feminine and the female have often been found to exist primarily as foils for the production of masculinity and male identity, the Other against which the masculine hero is defined. Woman’s agency and subjectivity are observed by critics most often in moments of transgression, subversion and resistance: as objects exchanged between men and signs of masculine prestige, female characters carve out their subjectivity, agency and identity in spite of, rather than with the support of, the ideological formations of romance. The following study makes a case for the existence of a female subject in medieval romance, analogous to the oft-examined male subject, a subject in both senses of the term: subjected to the dominant ideology, the subject is also enabled in its agency and authority by that ideology. I combine a feminist poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis with a comparative methodology, juxtaposing related romance texts in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish under the premise that stress-points in ideological structures must be renegotiated when stories are revised and recast for new audiences. The principal texts considered are Roman de Horn, King Horn, Horn Childe and the Maiden Rimnild; Gamair’s Haveloc episode, Lai d’Haveloc, Havelok the Dane; Gui de Warewic, Guy of Warwick, The Irish Lives of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; The Adventures of Art, Son of Conn, Mongán’s Love for Dubh Lacha. Through close attention to textual change over time, a profound shift can be seen in the emergence of female characters which cease to be symbols, signs and objects but through a variety of discourses and narrative strategies are established as subjects in their own right.

Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance Giselle Gos Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract Female subjectivity remains a theoretical question in medieval romance, a genre in which the feminine and the female have often been found to exist primarily as foils for the production of masculinity and male identity, the Other against which the masculine hero is defined. Woman’s agency and subjectivity are observed by critics most often in moments of transgression, subversion and resistance: as objects exchanged between men and signs of masculine prestige, female characters carve out their subjectivity, agency and identity in spite of, rather than with the support of, the ideological formations of romance. The following study makes a case for the existence of a female subject in medieval romance, analogous to the oft-examined male subject, a subject in both senses of the term: subjected to the dominant ideology, the subject is also enabled in its agency and authority by that ideology. I combine a feminist poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis with a comparative methodology, juxtaposing related romance texts in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish under the premise that stress-points in ideological structures must be renegotiated when stories are revised and recast for new audiences. The principal texts considered are Roman de Horn, King Horn, Horn Childe and the Maiden Rimnild; Gamair’s Haveloc episode, Lai d’Haveloc, Havelok the Dane; Gui de Warewic, Guy of Warwick, The Irish Lives of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; The Adventures of Art, Son of Conn, Mongán’s Love for Dubh Lacha. Through close attention to textual change over time, a profound shift can be seen in the emergence of female characters which cease to be symbols, signs and objects but through a variety of discourses and narrative strategies are established as subjects in their own right.