Susanna Centlivre, active in the post Restoration Theater, wrote nineteen plays from 1700 to 1723. A few of her plays were popular until 1900, but thereafter fell into limbo. By studying three of her plays, The Perjur’d Husband, The Busy Body, and The Wonder, A Woman Keeps a Secret, one can decide whether she can receive the classification of a protofeminist. This topic is important in helping to trace the evolution of women’s writing, and their movement toward the development in the novel. One must understand the issues involved for women writers as they struggled for recognition in the field of literature. Centlivre’s history prior to 1700 remains shadowy. Her early life is oft repeated with little or no substantiation of the facts. The study of situations and characters in her plays reveal attitudes of the interactions between men and women. The ideas about forced marriages and paternal attitudes toward children reveal themselves through both comedy and sorrow. Though Centlivre married three times no children came from those marriages; the plays she wrote reflected the manners of those times. Assigning the arbitrary label of protofeminist or feminist to Centlivre at this time might place her into a genre from which she could not escape. She should receive the same treatment as any male writer: a fair and balanced approach to her words based on equality between the sexes. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English.

This thesis is concerned with an important persone of the first half of the 19th century, French writer George Sand. The main purpose of the thesis is to reveal whether the writer is one of the key authors of French romanticism in Czech schools and whether the Czech schoolchild has an opportunity to acquaint themselves with her rural novels. The thesis contains a theoretical and a practical part. The practical part briefly mentions her biography, gives an overview of the main periods of her work and is subsequently closely concerned with George Sand's rural novels. Since Sand creates an image of an ideal human being in her rural novels, in our analysis of these novels we focused on the characteristics of the main characters and on the realistic and idealistic elements present in the novels. In the end of the theoretical part we dealt with Sand's influence on Czech writers of the 19th century, especially on Božena Němcová and Karolína Světlá. The practical part is based on a research, which was conducted in selected Czech schools (in Pilsen area and Prague). The aim of this research was, as has been mentioned before, to chart the standing of George Sand in the curriculum of world literature. We found out that Sand no longer ranks among the canonical authors, to whom is the teaching of world...

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The woman has always been an invisible individual behind the act of ’Great men’ in the Roman society. The woman’s gender role has forever been specified where the woman is a submissive, quiet and an unintelligent individual who wants to do everything for her man. Even though this gender role is created by authors that are men and is about how they consider a woman should behave, what about the women’s view on this matter? By means of getting an answer to this question, we can get a fuller perspective and an understanding about the Roman woman and as a woman writer in a patriarchal society. The purpose with this essay will therefore be to give a fuller perspective about the Roman society and its woman writers. In order to fulfill this purpose, I have asked the following questions: How did men react when women published their literary work and is it possible to investigate how the women thought about themselves through analyzing their work. And how was it possible for a woman to publish her texts in a society where women had no rights and a small chance to publish her work for the public? In order to have been able for doing this examination I have delimit myself and investigate three women, Cornelia, Hortensia and Sulpicia. Cornelia wrote letters, Hortensia wrote and delivered a speech and Sulpicia wrote poems. I have used the ancient sources Appian, Nepos, Tibullus to get the quotes of the women’s texts. I have also used other ancient sources like Aelian, Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Pliny, Quintilian and Valerius Maximus for other valuable information about the three women and their literature. They contribute with comments about the women and about women’s possibilities to get an education. I have a gender role and feminist view through the entire essay as the main focus is the three roman women writers. I have done this by analyzing the women’s texts and investigated what men thought about them and high educated women generally. And how the society encounters this texts. Through all this we have got a better understanding about how the attitude was towards the Roman woman and how she looked upon herself – and with that a fuller perspective on the Roman woman in general instead of the androcentric view we had before. There are a lot of variables that contribute to whether the woman can publish her work which is status, wealth, her loyalty to Rome and contacts with important people. Through all these men were relative positive about the three women’s texts and the women themselves were relative positive to themselves.