This study aims to take a closer look at how women in the Jewish tradition are portrayed in two Judith Plaskows books, Standing again at Sinai and The coming of Lilith: Essays on feminism, Judaism, and sexual ethics, 1972-2003. The way that Plaskow presents women in her books will be compared to Geraldine Brooks's book Nine parts of desire and Mohammad Fazlhashemis book Vems islam? and their portrayal of women in the Islamic culture. The study uses one of the interdisciplinary theories called intersectional theory to critically examine the chosen literature. The issues the study will try to answer are based upon the theory. The issues are: 1) how are women perceived in the Jewish and Muslim communities according to the different authors? 2) What aspects do the authors believe has affected the outcome of women's position within religious communities? 3) Do the authors mention men and if they have affected women's discourse? And if mentioned do they believe men's influence was/is positive or negative?

1 Abstract This Master's thesis presents the first look into the music of Scottish-Czech composer Geraldine Mucha (1917-2012) which has never been subject to academic study before. I characterize her compositional style and musical language, as well as their development over time, by analyzing four orchestral compositions written between the 1940s and 1980s - Overture to Tempest, Piano Concerto, Suite from the ballet Macbeth and John Webster Songs. In the thesis, I am also introducing the - in Czech musicological context entirely unknown - discourse on the issue of musical analysis of pieces written by women composers and I critically explore its different strands of thought. When possible, I examine the selected pieces by using Ellie M. Hisama's theoretical model which claims that in women's music, evidence may be found that provides information about their specific female experience in the patriarchal world.

The concept of the Victorian antitheatrical prejudice is both well-established and well-respected. This paper, however, examining the Victorian theatrical novel and the Victorian theater in terms of that prejudice, finds the ready assumption of the prejudice to be problematic at best. A close look at three novels that together span the early to mid-nineteenth century shows that, far from being ubiquitous and unilateral, antitheatricality was in many cases an anomaly; indeed, many of those novelistic elements that have long been assumed to be antitheatrical address different issues altogether. Employing close readings of the novels--Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters--along with an examination of historical documents, and utilizing as well current scholarship in Victorian theater and theatrical novels, I demonstrate that the Victorians were instead keen appreciators of theater, and that the Victorian "antitheatrical novel" was in many cases far more interested in the authenticity of human interplay than in the inauthenticity of staged role-play.

This thesis intervenes in current critical debates about space, place and landscape in late-twentieth and twenty-first century British and Irish poetry, by examining models of excavation in selected work by Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk and Alice Oswald. It argues that the influence of the spatial turn on literary criticism over the last thirty years has led to the deployment of a limited set of spatial tropes as analytical tools for interpreting the spaces and places of poetry. By deploying excavation as a critical method it seeks to challenge existing approaches that tend to privilege ideas of space over time, and socio-spatial practices over literary traditions of writing place. In doing so it develops a new model for reading contemporary poetries of place that asserts the importance of locating spatial criticism within temporal and literary-historical frameworks. The four poets examined in the thesis exhibit a common concern with unearthing the strata of language as well as material space. Starting from a premise that excavation always works over the ground of language as well as landscape it investigates the literary traditions of landscape writing in which each of these poets might be said to be embedded. After surveying the critical field the thesis sets out four principles of excavation that it argues are transformed and renewed by each of these poets: the relationship between past and present; recovery and interpretation of finds; processes of unearthing; exhumation of the dead. The subsequent chapters contend that these conventions are put into question by Geoffrey Hill’s sedimentary poetics, Ciaran Carson’s parodic stratigraphy, Geraldine Monk’s collaborations with the dead, and Alice Oswald’s geomorphology of a self-excavating earth. The critical method that underpins the discussion in each of the chapters is also excavatory in that it unearths both the historical and literary strata of specific sites (the Midlands, Belfast, East Lancashire, Dartmoor and the Severn estuary) and resonances in the work of earlier poetic excavators (Paul Celan, Edward Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Dante Alighieri and Homer). Through careful exegesis of these poets and their precursors this thesis demonstrates that by transforming existing forms of excavation, contemporary poetry is able to renew its deep dialogue with place and literary history.