Through examining the positionality of Hayashi Fumiko as well as the changing socio-political, economic and historical contexts in which she lived in, I look to better understand how Hayashi navigated through the patriarchal systems of society as a woman writer. This thesis includes a survey of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods as well as a comparative analysis of Hayashi's prewar, interwar and post-war works.

<p>At the community of Little Gidding from the late 1620s through the 1640s, in a special room known as the Concordance Chamber, Mary Ferrar, Anna Collett, and their sisters sliced apart printed Bibles and engravings, then pasted them back together into elaborate collages of text and image that harmonize the four gospels into a single narrative. They then bound these books between elaborate covers using a method taught to them by a bookbinder's daughter from Cambridge. The resulting volumes were so meticulously designed that one family member described the process as "a new kind of printing." Collectively, these books are known as the Little Gidding Harmonies, and they are the subject of Cut/Copy/Paste.</p><p>By close-reading the Little Gidding Harmonies, Cut/Copy/Paste illuminates a unique Caroline devotional aesthetic in which poets, designers, and printmakers collaboratively explored the capacity of the codex to harmonize sectarianism. Proceeding chronologically, I begin in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, when women writers like Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and a range of anonymous needleworkers laid the groundwork for the Harmonies' cut-up aesthetic by marrying the language of text-making to textile labor (Chapter 1). Situating women's authorship in the context of needlework restores an appreciation for the significance and centrality of ideologically gendered skills to the process of authoring the Harmonies. Building on this chapter's argument, I turn next to the earliest Harmony to show how the Ferrar and Collett women of Little Gidding, in conversation with their friend George Herbert, used cutting and pasting as a way of bypassing the stigma of print without giving up the validation that publication, as in making public, brings. This early volume attracted the attention of the court, and Little Gidding soon found itself patronized by King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and an elite coterie who saw in the women's cut-and-paste "handiwork" a mechanism for organizing religious dissention (Chapter 2). In response, Little Gidding developed ever more elaborate collages of text and image, transforming their writing practice into a full-fledged devotional aesthetic. This aesthetic came to define the poetry of an under-appreciated network of affiliated writers, from Frances Quarles and Edward Benlowes to Royalist expatriate John Quarles, Mary Ferrar at Little Gidding, and her close friend Richard Crashaw (Chapter 3). It fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, derided by Alexander Pope and others as derivative and populist; yet annotations and objects left in one Little Gidding Harmony during the nineteenth century witness how women, still denied full access to publishing in print, continued to engage with scissors and paste as tools of a proto-feminist editorial practice (Chapter 4). The second half of the last chapter and a digital supplement turn to the Harmonies today to argue for a reorientation of digital humanities, electronic editing, and "new media" studies around deeper histories of materialist or technical tropes of innovation, histories that do not always begin and end with the perpetual avant-gardism of modernity.</p><p>This project participates in what has been called the "material turn" in the humanities. As libraries digitize their collections, the material specificity of textual objects - the inlays, paste-downs, typesetting, and typography occluded by print editions - becomes newly visible through high-resolution facsimiles. Cut/Copy/Paste seizes this moment of mass remediation as an opportunity to rethink the categories, concepts, and relationships that define and delimit Renaissance literature. By reading early modern cultural production materially, I reveal the richness of the long-neglected Caroline period as a time of literary experimentation, when communities like Little Gidding and their affiliates developed a multimedia, multimodal aesthetic of devotion. Yet, even as this project mines electronic collections to situate canonical texts within a wider field of media objects and material writing practices, it also acknowledges that digital media obscure as much as they elucidate, flattening three-dimensional book objects to fit the space of the screen. In my close readings and digital supplement, I always return to the polyphonic dance of folds and openings in the Harmonies - to the page as a palimpsest, thickly layered with paper, ink, glue, annotations, and evidence of later readers' interactions with it. By attending to the emergent materiality of the Harmonies over the longue durée, Cut/Copy/Paste both deepens our knowledge of seventeenth-century devotional literature and widens the narrow lens of periodization to consider the role of Little Gidding's cut-up method in past, present, and future media ecologies.</p> / Dissertation

This essay examines Marian Keyes's views on love, happiness, setbacks and unfaithfulness which are common themes in her novels. These themes are discussed in Keyes's chick lit novels "Watermelon" and "Lucy Sullivan is getting married". Some background information about this genre is also presented. Finally, it becomes evident that Marian Keyes has used a lot of her own experiences when writing these novels, in terms of love, happiness and obstacles in finding love and happiness. / <p>Validerat; 20101217 (root)</p>

The relationship between modernist fiction and visual culture has received substantial critical attention in recent years. However, many of the studies on this intermediality focus primarily on the drama, poetry, and novels of male authors, with Virginia Woolf being the only significant exception to this rule. I propose that this engagement with the visual in modernist fiction has a different social and cultural significance in the works of women writers. With reference to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, I will explore the attempt to establish a female literary voice in what was perhaps the greatest transitory period for the role of women in the Western world. Although studies exist that consider the relationship between Mansfield’s writing and modern art and cinema, this thesis will provide a wider context for this period of cultural history. I take a variety of technological advancements into account, examining they ways in which they collectively provided the inspiration behind modernist literature’s new subjectivity of vision. As well as film, I will discuss the arts that developed prior to or alongside it, from the magic lantern to photography, and the impact they had on literature as writers sought new forms of representation. Furthermore, I believe that I will be able to examine this shift in cultural consciousness in a unique way through my focus on Mansfield, an author whose experimental work has received far less critical attention in terms of its engagement with other media than that of her contemporaries. Through reference to the visual arts, Mansfield was able to subjectively focalise her short stories through the eyes of her characters, presenting the ways in which women see and are seen in early twentieth-century society.

The Beats were one of the most influential communities of the 20th century, and this dissertation focuses on the critically underrepresented women who were part of their influence. Today, the Beats are largely celebrated for their literary legacy, popularizing a spontaneous poetic style as well as promoting an antimaterialist ethos and globe-trotting mystique in opposition to Cold War attitudes of confinement and consensus. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats were seen as harbingers of cultural disillusionment, taking to the road in search of God, championing the “beatific” nature of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the lowly across America. Today, the Beats are considered to be the progenitors of pacifist “hippie” culture and a revolutionary postwar spirit. Despite this democratizing goal, a prevailing critical consensus holds that the Beat movement was primarily a “boy’s club,” in which the homosocial bonds between the key male figures fostered a system of literary mentorship that largely excluded women writers. Although the canon is frequently narrowed to give precedence to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and the male writers who joined their cadre, my project focuses on the many women writers who were part of the Beat community and the lasting impact of their work. My goal is to reconceptualize Beat aesthetics, themes, and communities in light of these women’s writing. The project entails close textual analysis of these writers’ work across multiple genres, including poetry, memoir, and fiction, as well as research toward historical and cultural contextualization, including interviews. Their writing emphasizes the centrality of the domestic sphere to Beat publishing and the utility of the road in seeking healing and empowerment, in addition to offering new perspectives on Beat spirituality and life writing. In addition to bringing well-deserved attention to these marginalized writers, this research is valuable for American literary history in expanding knowledge of women’s writing at midcentury. More broadly, these writers are of significance to our understanding of modern feminism as well. The majority of these women worked to support their families at a time described by Betty Friedan as the age of the “feminine mystique,” and they pushed back against the rigid social conventions of their time by escaping into bohemian life. The Beat women wrote frankly about reproductive roulette, single motherhood, abortion, social stigma about being women who lived alone, and difficulty starting careers in a sexist culture. For their shared values of self-sufficiency and dedication to their work, these women could be seen as feminist forerunners to the major crest of second wave feminism. However, feminism is not a single, static, monolithic push, and my interrogation of Beat women’s texts complicates and enriches understandings of postwar gender conventions. These writers’ thought contributes to ongoing discussions in modern feminist thought, including shifting cultural attitudes toward domestic labor, the importance of women’s communities, and forms and contradictions of female leadership.

The topic of this thesis is the life and journalistic work of the premier Italian journalist and writer Matilde Serao. The first chapter is dedicated to the brief overview of the Italian journalism in the turn of the 20th century. Following chapter is focused on the personal and working life of Matilde Serao and also her work itself is put into the basic context and is briefly described. After that, six chosen journalistic publications are thoroughly analyzed in six subsequent chapters. These publications are: Il Ventre di Napoli, Il paese di Cuccagna, Nel paese di Gesù. Ricordi di un viaggio in Palestina, San Gennaro nella leggenda e nella vita, Evviva la guerra! a Parla una donna. Based on these analyzes, variables and constants of the Matilde Serao's work, qualitative differences and aesthetics added to journalistic texts are evaluated in the final chapter of the thesis.

Recent decades have seen an increase in feminist critiques of the works of Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), and a growing awareness that these deal with contemporary issues around the social roles of women. This study builds on exsiting feminist-themed examinations of Grillparzer's works to show more fully how they fit into the context of calls for women's rights in nineteenth-century Austria. New interpretations of Grillparzer's heroines are made possible by considering the full spectrum of the author's intellectual interests and examining his dramas through the lenses suggested by his reading. Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen is seen in the context of the Enlightenment, and Sappho and Libussa are analysed with reference to social contract theory. Contemporary feminist approaches are combined with Schiller's thought on stadial history, and with Grillparzer's analysis of Shakespeare's Macbeth, to give new insight into Das goldene Vließ and Die Jüdin von Toledo respectively. Consideration of the lives and works of Grillparzer's female friends provides the context for my analysis, and helps define the original nature of this thesis. While several earlier studies have argued for the influence of Grillparzer's romantic interests on the construction of his heroines, sufficient attention has not been given to these heroines in the context of the intellectual women Grillparzer knew. While I do not argue that Grillparzer's heroines were influenced by the authors and other prominent women he knew, examination of the lives and works of Caroline Pichler, Betty Paoli, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Sophie Schröder and others shows that Grillparzer was on friendly terms with intellectual women throughout his career, and that all of these women were to some degree critical of the contemporary social situation of women.

The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho tells the story of Mariela Valdes, who discovered she was clairvoyant in her teens, but renounced her gift when she failed to foresee her mother’s fatal illness. When her lover is found dead mere yards from her front door, she embarks on a quest to solve the mystery of his death, regain her gift for knowing, and free herself of the fear that has kept her from “seeing” her way to happiness. Though the novel contains a murder and several mysteries, it is not primarily a murder mystery. Instead, as in the novels of Dame Muriel Spark, crime is just the catalyst for the unraveling of the motivations, secrets, and true characters of a small community. As Mariela conquers her fear of seeing, she discovers the importance of sisterhood among women and comes to a new definition of marriage, infidelity, and forgiveness.

No description available.

This dissertation is a study of antebellum literature about the home and the post-Revolutionary conceptualization of domesticity as political participation. Analyzing texts that take the construction, management, and pursuit of a home as central concerns, I trace a cultural preoccupation with isolation in the idealization of the home. The cult of domesticity that emerged and was reflected in these texts was a troubled, conflicting response to the ideology of Republican Motherhood, which defined a woman's political contribution as raising good citizen sons and patriotic daughters. By taking a previously private role and turning it into a public duty, the mother became a highly visible and symbolically loaded figure. It also made her sphere of action, the home, a highly charged political space, subject to government intervention and social control. In conduct manuals, magazines, memoirs, and fiction, women writing about the home represent it as vulnerable to unwelcome intrusion, invasion, and influences, giving both power and critique to the ideal of home as isolated and pure, and, ultimately, attempting to reveal a domestic ideology that was at odds with Republican Motherhood and notions of liberal privacy that held the home to be a completely private, independent space. Tracing this tension in canonical and popular literature, I construct comparisons of texts not frequently put into conversation with each other, drawing provocative parallels and important distinctions between them and opening up scholarly understandings of domesticity with discussions of isolation and purity. Beginning with an analysis of domestic manuals by Catharine Beecher and Lydia Maria Child, I read these texts side by side with manuals on the construction of the asylum and penitentiary, which along with the home were built on models of isolation. These prescriptive texts attend obsessively to air purity and proper ventilation, and the figure of the nation's "inmate" emerges: a version of subjecthood in which self-development and redemption rely on an environment protected from all external influences (physical, political, economic, and social). Following this version of the ideal home as it plays out in the most popular women's magazine of the period, Godey's Lady's Book, I next examine how the figure of the child becomes a powerful symbol for vulnerability and freedom, unpacking the ways that sentimental rhetoric both served and failed the American homebuilding project. In the last two chapters, I analyze the female authors Caroline Kirkland and Fanny Fern and their attempts to transplant the American home to the West and the urban center, respectively. In A New Home, Who'll Follow?, Kirkland's "hut in the wilderness" becomes the best embodiment of the American Myth. Finally, in the autobiographical novel Ruth Hall and in her newspaper writings, Fanny Fern places her heroines "beyond the pale of female jurisdiction," rejecting the bonds of womanhood, but also revealing fears for the isolated woman and her potential for desolation and madness. Contextualizing Fern within the written output of maternal associations, I conclude with a consideration of the home as complex and multivalent: it is imagined as a space to work and a space free from work, a woman's empire and her prison, a place one desperately hopes to find and a place one wants to escape; the home is where one is free to be herself and where one is cut off and confined. / English