887 research outputs found
Sarah Fielding: Satire and Subversion in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
No full textThis study of Sarah Fielding (1710―68) is an original contribution to Fielding scholarship that has a dual purpose: to support those who are striving to re-introduce her to the modern literary landscape in an effort to restore her eighteenth-century literary standing, and to firmly establish Fielding as an early feminist writer. It is argued here that throughout her oeuvre Fielding challenged prevailing traditions that denied women a choice, particularly in education, employment and marriage. These themes are also considered in the political treatises of Mary Astell (1666―1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759―97), who are now widely recognised as feminist writers.
It is further argued that Fielding’s subversion in fiction of the English patriarchal system is underscored by her unorthodox performance in the literary arena. This is fully explored alongside her use of sentimentalism as a literary tool with which she challenges her seemingly inhumane society. Fielding’s interest in ‘the Labyrinths of the Mind’ (in modern terms, human psychology) will also be addressed as will her placement in the history of feminism and her placement in the sentimental novel tradition. Fielding’s performance as a literary critic will be compared with the few female authors who, like her, dared to publish literary criticism during her writing career. Accordingly, extracts from Fielding’s novels and her two critical pamphlets will be thoroughly examined.
An updated biography of Fielding that is also included here will provide evidence for a further claim, that her fiction is autobiographical in part. A comprehensive account of Fielding’s performance as a literary critic forms the final chapter of this work. It is the first full-length examination of her contribution to the genre and includes an appraisal of her recently unearthed critical pamphlet entitled A Comparison Between the Horace of Corneille and The Roman Father of Mr. Whitehead (1750) that is yet to be formerly attributed to her. Ultimately this study of Fielding will go far beyond what has previously been written about this remarkable eighteenth-century author, particularly regarding her feminist activity
The 'true use of reading' : Sarah Fielding and mid eighteenth-century literary strategies.
No full textPhDThe aim of this thesis is to explore, by examining her life and
works, how Sarah Fielding (1710-68) established her identity as an author.
The definition of her role involves her notions of the functions of
writing and reading.
Sarah Fielding attempts to invite readers to form a sense of ties
by tacit understanding of her messages. As she believes that a work
of literature is produced through collaboration between the writer and
the reader, it is an important task in her view to show her attentiveness
toward reading practice. In her consideration of reading, she has two
distinct, even opposite views of her audience: on the one hand a familiar
and limited circle of readers with shared moral and cultural values and
on the other potential readers among the unknown mass of people. The
dual targets direct her to devise various strategies. She tries to
appeal to those who can endorse and appreciate her moral values as well
as her learning. Her writings and letters testify that she is sensitive
to the demands of the literary market, trying to lead the taste of readers
by inventing new forms.
The thesis opens with an overview of Sarah Fielding's career,
followed by a consideration of her critical attention to the roles of
reading. I go on to examine the narrative structures and strategies
she deploys, with a particular emphasis on her use of the epistolary
method. The following chapter deals with her attention to the reading
of the moral message tangibly embodied in her educational writing. It
is followed by an analysis of the activity which earned her a reputation
as a learned woman. Various as the forms of her works are, they invariably
reflect her attempt to balance herself between the two demands of
inventiveness and familiarity
Depression and Gender: The Expression and Experience of Melancholy in the Eighteenth Century
No full textThis thesis investigates the life and work of six eighteenth-century writers, two male and four female. It explores their experience of depression through their letters and other autobiographical material, and examines the ways in which they represent melancholy in their poetry and prose. The subject of Chapter Two is Thomas Gray, whose real life persona as the lonely intellectual is also identifiable in his poetry. The Scottish poet Robert Fergusson is studied in Chapter Three. Fergusson’s lively and vigorous mind was shattered in the months leading up to his death, during which time some of his writing became darkly nihilistic. Chapter Four looks at Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, a lifelong depressive who often wrote about her feelings of despair in her poetry. Chapter Five explores Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was a courageous and controversial figure, but despite her resilience, on occasion in her letters she reveals her vulnerability and susceptibility to low spirits, a mood which is sometimes expressed in her creative writing. Sarah Scott, whose life and work have not yet been considered in relation to the subject of melancholy, is examined in Chapter Six. Her novel includes several low-spirited and depressed female characters who are continually seeking asylum from a hostile world. Chapter Seven analyses Charlotte Smith, a mother of twelve children whose unhappy marriage ended in separation. Smith wrote extensively about her depression in her letters, prefaces, poetry and novels.
This study shows that the women in particular use their writing on melancholy and depression to express their discontent with the confined way in which they are often expected to live out their lives
Surrounded by sound: the aesthetics of multichannel and hypersonic soundscapes and aural architectures
No full textThis article explores multichannel sound and hypersonic audio and investigates the impact that cinematic technologies have had on our sonic perception and appreciation. The core methodology of these explorations has been through practice, and the evolution of a 7.1 surround sound and hypersonic composition and installation: auditoryum (Sarah Atkinson and Marley Cole, 2010). Through reflection upon this practice, this article addresses the ways in which auditoryum has foregrounded and extended theories of the soundscape and aural architecture. It will also discuss the impact of audio-related technological developments on soundtrack and sound design aesthetics, principles and practice
Cwbr Author Interview: Through The Heart Of Dixie: Sherman\u27s March And American Memory
Get PDFInterview with Anne Sarah Rubin, Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Interviewed by Zach Isenhower
Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is excited to speak with Anne Sarah Rubin, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Professor Rubin previously authored, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. Today we get to discuss her most recent book, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman\u27s March and American Memory. Professor Rubin, thank you for joining us today.Anne Sarah Rubin (ASR): Thank you very much for having me
A critical analysis of the plays of Sarah Daniels.
Get PDFAs one of the forerunners of 'second wave' feminist playwriting, Sarah Daniels has for the
past fifteen years been one of Britain's most prolific writers for the stage. This thesis is the
first to offer a detailed critical analysis of all her published plays along with a developmental
account of her career. My approach throughout is text-based and non-prescriptive,
although I do at certain points indicate where Daniels reflects or voices differing feminist
perspectives. I also consider, beginning in Chapter Three, the critical reception and
'gendered' reviewing the playwright has received over the years.
The thesis is organised into five chapters with an Afterword. Chapter One, the
Introduction, offers an overview of Daniels' career as well as certain key characteristics of
her work. In Chapter Two I analyse the early plays, Ripen Our Darkness, The Devil's
Gateway and Neaptide, and consider in particular how they reflect, along with other
women's playwriting at the time, certain ideals of the Women's Liberation Movement.
Chapter Three is devoted entirely to Masterpieces, Daniels' most controversial and, on
many levels, successful play to date. Chapter Four is an analysis of the 'history plays',
Byrthrite and The Gut Girls. In addition to giving voice to women traditionally silenced in
and by history, these plays (especially Byrthrite) also echo particular strands of modern
feminist debate. Chapter Five examines Daniels' plays of the 1990s (Beside Herself, Head-
Rot Holiday and The Madness of Esme and Shaz) with their central theme of 'women and
madness'. This is also a fitting theme with which to conclude the thesis as it brings together
and expands on the most significant motif running throughout the playwright's work. In the
Afterword I consider the effect of Esme and Shaz's critical reception on Daniels, as well as
her current 'work in progress'. Finally, the two Appendices provide a chronological table of
Daniels' productions and a list of subsequent professional productions as well as awards
States of dispossession: violence, property, and the subject in American literary regionalism from 1880-1899.
No full textThis dissertation examines the ways in which American writers of regionalist fiction contended with the shifting political and economic landscape between 1880 and 1899. As the nation transitioned to a market-based economy after the Civil War, antebellum notions of property realigned to conform to an increasingly nationalizing and incorporating economy. Yet regionally-focused writers of the period demonstrate that pre-Civil War definitions of subject categories and rights shaped by local economic structures persisted. These writers resolve those conflicts instigated by the tensions between regional and nationally standardizing conceptions of property and ownership through violent formal tropes which function to metaphorically restructure their fictional subjects’ relationships to property within the region in question. By investigating three sets of literary works, each attuned to a region within the U.S., this dissertation identifies three regionally and economically distinct tropes of violence. In doing so, it also argues that each regionalist writer uses violence on the level of literary form to resolve the problem of wage labor’s effect on property rights after the Civil War, with each trope necessitating the regional subject’s confrontation with the marginalizing effects of economic stratification. The first chapter discusses Southern local fiction’s attention to the violence inherent in the persisting designation of the ex-slave body as property after the decline of the plantation economy. The second chapter examines urban literature’s stylistic declaration and resolution of the violence of immigrant labor exploitation within New York City’s industrialized economy. And the final chapter considers the structural function of symbolic violence within regional fiction of the male agrarian laborer in the West in light of those redefinitions of ownership precipitated by railroad speculation.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sarah Anne Stubaus Goldfar
A sojourn in Paris 1824-25: sex and sociability in the manuscript writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840)
Get PDFThis thesis examines the day to day practices that constituted Anne Lister's (1791-1840) sexuality and sociability within the range of her writings, as well as her society. Anne's writings were a detailed account, spanning her lifetime, of her own love and relationships with the 'fairer sex' (Whitbread 1988, 145). Anne's sociality, seen in her correspondence and plain handwritten journal entries, has been explored by Muriel Green in Miss Lister of Shibden Hall and Jill Liddington in Female Fortune and Nature's Domain (Green 1992; Liddington 1998; 2003). As a gentlewoman of adequate means, Anne has garnered some attention from women's historians interested in her agency within an early nineteenth century social and historical context. Anne's sexual identity has been extensively analysed over the past nearly twenty years by lesbian feminists, queer theorists, women's historians and historians of sexuality concerned with the history and development of modern Western female homosexuality and gender. The source for theorising Anne's sexuality has been the edited selections of the crypted journal entries, published by Helena Whitbread in I Know My Own Heart and No Priest but Love (Whitbread 1988; 1992). However, many analyses deal either with the theorisation of Anne's sexuality or her sociality; the theoretical difficulty with reconciling these categories has troubled the analysis of her complex subjectivity. Drawing upon the archival materials, I have used an interdisciplinary feminist approach to analyse the sexual and social processes of Anne's everyday interactions in her writings. Taking the seven month period of the sojourn to Paris in 1824-25, I have focused upon Anne's textual practices within her journal volume and letters during her residence in Paris, her social practices with the other guests at the guesthouse 24 Place Vendome and her sexual practices with her lover, the widow Mrs. Maria Barlow. The journal volumes and correspondence are a valuable historical record of one gentlewoman's engagement with early nineteenth century British culture
Gravity: Towards a Stereoscopic Poetics of Deep Space
No full textIn its analysis of both screenplay (by father and son, Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón) and film, this chapter extends considerations of a “new cinematic grammar” in 3D as already advanced by Atkinson 2011; Brown 2012; Elsaesser 2013; Klinger 2012, 2013; Purse 2013; Ross 2012a, b; Wood 2013, building particularly on Klinger’s “codified repertoire of visual elements that define 3D cinema” (2013, p. 424). Positioned along the continuum of stereoscopic 3D studies, a field which seeks to analyse a form during its continued evolution of directorial and techno- logical experimentation, this chapter specifically proposes that Gravity simultane- ously advances the cinematic 3D form
'F- F- Felt it': Breathing Feminist, Queer and Clown Thinking into the Practice and Study of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Blasted
No full textThis thesis uses studio practice, scholarly research, close reading of text, performance observation and conversation with practitioners to establish diverse readings of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. It includes original material from the 2012 productions of Cleansed in Japan (Kamome-za Fringe Theatre), and in Ireland (Bare Cheek Theatre). It notes practice on Cleansed in gallery spaces (Cast-Off Drama, UK). It offers a dramaturgical approach to workshopping the play from a feminist and queer position, informed by theories of gender and transgender, and the marginalised, loving and delinquent practice of clowning. The research discusses principles of breath, voice and sexuate difference drawing primarily on the philosophies of Luce Irigaray, on the voice practice of Cicely Berry and the clown teaching of Sue Morrison.
The work challenges the ‘in-yer-face’ theatre discourse on Kane arguing that it represents a McDonaldization of its subject matter, and an insidious trivialisation of her texts. It offers new thinking on the opening night of Blasted (1995), suggesting that the ‘furore’ was fuelled by collective male hysteria and superstition; its roots centred in mourning. Analysing Cleansed in relation to Edward Bond’s Saved and Lear, it explores tropes of ghosts, stitching and the silent scream, and argues that Kane militates for gynocentric time and becoming. It analyses the symbol of the perimeter fence as a feature of 1980s Britain, noting the strength of binary associations configured in it with reference to both English football hooliganism (male) and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (female). It argues that Kane sets up heteronormative binaries in Cleansed to debate and contest them.
A key conclusion of the thesis is that Cleansed politically addresses and dramatises issues of transgender experience presenting accounts of gender violence, mutability, transitioning, the sharp fractures and silences of gender dysphoria, but also, ultimately, queer desire, love and optimism
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