Women's fight for the franchise in both America and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by scrutiny of women's relationship to the State by those with varying perspectives on the suffrage battle. In the industrial, post-agricultural age, motherhood defined a woman's place in western society, as well as her rights under and service to the State; if the normative role of the male citizen was the soldier, the normative role for women was the mother. Yet for all of the ways an embrace of maternalism limited women's access to the public realm, it also laid the groundwork for the women's movement, and motherhood was often seen as a route to citizenship by those on both sides of the suffrage battle. As women began to re-imagine themselves as enfranchised citizens, many social theorists, politicians, and novelists continued to debate the rights and roles of women across the body of the mother; thinkers as varied as Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and Emma Goldman all wrote tracts about motherhood and the future of the nation. Rather than entering the old debates on the value or liability of maternalism for feminism, my dissertation will argue that the modernist period introduced a new and still-overlooked figure: the anarchic mother. In their essays and novels, Goldman, Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and Virginia Woolf turned away from the emblem of the Republican Mother and toward a radical new figure. Rather than sacrificing her individual needs to the Republic, the anarchic mother's individual pursuit of liberty challenged the authority of the State and its cultural institutions. An important group of modernist novels and essays employs the figure of the mother to represent not tradition and unity but rebellion, separatism, abstention, or statelessness. This undertheorized figure in modernist and feminist thought clarifies Virginia Woolf's call, in Three Guineas, for allegiance to no country. If Woolf and many other artists were ambivalent as they linked motherhood and anarchy, contemporary feminists inherited both the possibilities and contradictions of the anarchic mother as they reexamine women's relationship to citizenship in the 21st century.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Short stories and novel excerpt / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

abstract: Due to depletion of oil resources, increasing fuel prices and environmental issues associated with burning of fossil fuels, extensive research has been performed in biofuel production and dramatic progress has been made. But still problems exist in economically production of biofuels. One major problem is recovery of biofuels from fermentation broth with the relatively low product titer achieved. A lot of in situ product recovery techniques including liquid-liquid extraction, membrane extraction, pervaporation, gas stripping and adsorption have been developed and adsorption is shown to be the most promising one compared to other methods. Yet adsorption is not perfect due to defect in adsorbents and operation method used. So laurate adsorption using polymer resins was first investigated by doing adsorption isotherm, kinetic, breakthrough curve experiment and column adsorption of laurate from culture. The results indicate that polymer resins have good capacity for laurate with the highest capacity of 430 g/kg achieved by IRA-402 and can successfully recover laurate from culture without causing problem to Synechocystis sp.. Another research of this paper focused on a novel adsorbent: magnetic particles by doing adsorption equilibrium, kinetic and toxicity experiment. Preliminary results showed excellent performance on both adsorption capacity and kinetics. But further experiment revealed that magnetic particles were toxicity and inhibited growth of all kinds of cell tested severely, toxicity probably comes from Co (III) in magnetic particles. This problem might be solved by either using biocompatible coatings or immobilization of cells, which needs more investigation. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Chemical Engineering 2012

The connection between social change and marriage is of critical concern for nineteenth century English novelists, and the progression of both class shifts and alterations in marriage are discernable through these novelists' respective works. Due to the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, England's social hierarchy began to shift allowing for the rise of a middle class; with the professional class's ascension came the decline of the landed gentry. These social changes blurred class boundaries and created an increasing socially mobile society. Additionally, they coincided with changes to marriage framework, as matrimony was moving towards being based on love rather than the traditional socioeconomic foundation. As both class lines and the love-revolution took place around the same time historically, there was a key change in marriage suitability, making cross-class and love-based marriages more of a reality. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy are two of the most notable authors from the nineteenth century who chronicle this tension between marriage and class in their respective novels. This thesis focuses specifically on Austen's Persuasion and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, arguing that they both visualize a successful marriage that is predicated on both love and socioeconomic status. Their similar image of the sustainable marriage gives value to both the socioeconomic-based and love-based marriages, depicting a realistic conceptualization of marriage.

My dissertation charts the transatlantic nineteenth-century novel's subtle revisions to the traditional marriage plot, in terms of both narrative and form, identifying a gradual shift in the way marriage was fictionalized. I argue that incremental revisions to the marriage plot reconstruct positive representations of female marital experience into negative depictions that transform marriage into a form of institutionalization that leads to psychological and bodily trauma. I reveal the development of a collective trauma narrative that underscores the nineteenth-century woman's experience living inside society's oppressive marital culture. The novel serves as the body of cultural work that both represents and shapes women's marital experiences inside a society that legally forced them to surrender their identity, person, and property to their husband, as well as socially holding them to a much higher standard of propriety and obedience. In specific chapters, I create transatlantic pairings that trace the novel's troubled efforts to free itself and its heroines from the constraints of the marriage plot which reflect women's inability to do so in real life.

My dissertation interrogates Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s representation of African women in her literary oeuvre. I argue that her female characters bear witness to intersecting oppressions of African women portraying them as being extremely marginalized at home and lacking achievable alternate homes. This study also interrogates Adichie’s feminist philosophy and posits that she typically agitates for equality for all regardless of sex, gender, race, and/or other defining identities. Lastly, I argue that Adichie uses the practice of the African novel to rewrite the character of African women in African literature where her uniqueness hinges on her interrogation of the place of Africans in contemporary world culture, in turn, uses the novel to critique society’s hierarchies of privilege and oppression and of stereotypical representation of Africa and Africans in the world arena.

In FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED, unwilling refugees from an alternate universe find their place in our New York City, making peace with what they have lost.

Senchimentaru na tabi fuyu no tabi or Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, a photobook created and published by photographer Araki Nobuyoshi in 1991, documented two highly personal events of the photographer's life. The first section consists of twenty-two images of Araki's 1971 honeymoon with his wife Yōko Aoki, while the second section features ninety-one images and an essay documenting the last six months of Yōko's life in 1989-90. This thesis measures SJ/WJ against a Japanese literary tradition invoked by Araki in his opening manifesto: the shishōsetsu. A genre of writing from the early 1900's that read like a confessional or personal diary, the shishōsetsu was regarded as a `true' story insofar as it revealed a totally transparent `author' within a totally transparent `text.' Given these criteria, this thesis determines the success of Araki's SJ/WJ as a true-to-life autobiography.

My dissertation argues that the study of antebellum American religious novels is hindered by the secularization narrative, the widely held conviction that modernity entails the decline of religion. Because this narrative has been refuted by the growing field of secularization theory and because the novel is associated with modernity, the novel form must be reexamined. Specifically, I challenge the common definition of the novel as a secular form. By investigating novels by Lydia Maria Child, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hannah Bond, I show that religion and the novel form are not opposed. In fact, scholars' unexamined and unacknowledged definitions of religion and secularity cause imprecision. For example, the Marxist definition of religion as ideology causes misrepresentations of novels with evangelical purposes, such as Warner's <i>The Wide, Wide World</i> and Bond's <i>The Bondwoman's Narrative</i>. Both novels feature protagonists who submit--one to patriarchy and the other to slavery--a stance that appears masochistic to feminist scholars and critics of slave narratives, respectively. However, attending to the biblical allusions, divine interventions, and theological arguments that saturate these texts places them in another framework altogether and reveals that they are commenting not on one's relationship with other humans but with God. Likewise, unexamined definitions of the secular are problematic because critics often conflate two definitions: the etymological sense of "earthly" and the modern sense of "anti-religious." This slippage underlies the view that religious literature of the nineteenth century became less religious, when it simply became more grounded in daily life. Therefore, to label as "secular" an author like Stowe, who promoted an earthly, lived Christianity, is only accurate if one means "mundane." Finally, my dissertation demonstrates that literary criticism itself relies on the secularization narrative, perceiving itself as modern and progressive. This reliance obscures the role literature has played in constructing this narrative. For example, colonial novels like <i>Hobomok</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> rewrite American religious history to exclude Calvinism. Noting how our investment in secularity has delimited interpretive possibilities, this project opens the way for increased clarity in the study of religion in literature.