May Fourth society encouraged the female writers to progress and requested them to play the role of "an understanding wife and loving mother". This conflicting expectation made "the love and marriage" a major trial for the educated female at that time. The May Fourth women's liberation movement had this characteristic: women were utilized as a tool rather than liberated human beings. Sharing a common background, the May Fourth female writers tried to find a family of ¡¨her¡¨ own besides the father's family and the husband's family. This dissertation tries to study and compare ¡§the love and marriage issue¡¨ in the novels of the May Fourth female writers such as Chen Hengzhe¡]³¯¿Å­õ¡^¡BLu Yin¡]ÃfÁô¡^¡BSu Xue-Lin¡]Ĭ³·ªL¡^¡BBing Xing¡]¦B¤ß¡^¡BLin Shu-hua¡]­â¨ûµØ¡^¡BFeng Yuan-Jun¡]¶¾¨J§g¡^Shi Ping-Mei¡]¥Ûµû±ö¡^.It is this author¡¦s hope that through this study we can understand more what these female writers thought on the issue of gender subjectivity.

Love and Suffering in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s workThis study asks how love and suffering are expressed in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Light ofthe Flowing Godhead, with an emphasis on how the two are connected. What do the two termsmean and how do they influence each other and Mechthild’s understanding of them? Empirically,this study is based on Mechthild’s book, which was composed between about 1250 and 1283 inseven parts and distributed even while Mechthild was still working on later parts. The study alsodraws upon modern research to explain the wider religious contexts in which Mechthild wasworking, such as the clerical understanding of suffering as a means of contrition, and the use ofromantic and erotic metaphors to express a relation to God. In accordance with this, both love andsuffering are found to have shifting meanings depending on their respective contexts. Both havethe ability to bring humans closer to God, but, if used for the wrong purpose, can separate thehuman entirely from God. However, a shift in focus can be found over time. While the concept oflove becomes less allegorical and more abstract, the concept of suffering becomes more prevalentand central for Mechthild’s understanding of life and spirituality. At the same time, Mechthild’spositive relation to her faith and its power remains mostly unchanged.This study shows how Mechthild understands and interprets the themes of love and sufferingas a lay sister, woman and human being. Using Barbara Rosenwein’s term “emotionalcommunity”, Mechthild is found to be part of such a community, tying together academic religiousunderstandings of suffering and female mystics’ understandings of love. By examining one thinkerand drawing possible connections to a bigger, as of yet mostly unexplored, community, itcontributes to the overall picture of medieval mysticism.

The starting point of this essay is an attempt to establish if Marika Stjernstedt was present in the French press at the beginning of the XXIth century. If this is the case, how did the newspaper journalists of this period described her personality? Is that in positive or negative terms? What were the main subjects they wrote about? Which of her books or articles have aroused a lot of interest? How did they introduce her and her culture quite unknown at this epoch in France? Have these journalists conveyed the same stereotyped pictures of the North and the Northerners? Or did they replace them with accurate ones?  The analysis is based on eighty-five articles released in the French press between 1914 and 1954. Our principal aim is to show if a famous female Swedish journalist and writer could become a well-known person in a foreign country, using the French language. Because of the sexism we are tempted to think that women were kept out of the celebrity. We assume that some of them were published but their publications were smaller in numbers if we compare them to men’s publications.