1,720,966 research outputs found
'You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever': Sapphic desire, vampires, and constructing kinship
No full textThis thesis explores the figure of the sapphic vampire in Carmilla (1872) by J. Sheridan Le
Fanu, The Blood of the Vampire (1897) by Florence Marryat, The Gilda Stories (1991) by
Jewelle Gomez, and Fledgling (2005) by Octavia Butler. I argue that these texts present the
sapphic vampire as the embodiment of the death drive and display ambiguous familial/sexual
relationships in order to challenge heteronormative constructs of family. I utilise Lee
Edelman’s arguments from No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive to analyse
vampiric, queer kinship as a future that does not focus on the child, and Kath Weston’s
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship to unpack the concept of the chosen family
and its value for queer people who desire kin, examining the way familial structures are
broken down and biological ties rendered secondary to chosen ones. In Chapter One I analyse
the scenes in which the vampire feeds, unpacking the use of breastfeeding imagery to show
the tension between maternal roles and sapphic relationships inherent in the texts. I show how
the narratives respond to idea of love and lust, as well as their troubled relationship with post-
menopausal women. Chapter Two considers how, lacking a biological family of her own, the
sapphic vampire creates familial bonds through recruitment or reproduction. Given the
correlation these texts create between queerness and vampirism, I argue that the family
building within these narratives presents alternatives to heteronormative constructs of
kinship. Throughout I compare the contemporary texts to their Victorian counterparts, tracing
the ways in which the depictions of queer kinship that the Victorian texts had to eradicate
could be celebrated in those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. I will explain
the significance of what has or has not changed, and how this affects or is representative of
shifts in attitude towards queer people and the families that they choose. This thesis
demonstrates the power of the desire that the literary sapphic vampire feels, and the value of
the family she chooses
Jean Rhys writing back from 'The Other Side, Always'
Full text linkIn her postcolonial masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys declared that ‘There is always the other side, always’. Published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea wrote back to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by rewriting the character of Bertha Mason. As the mad Creole antagonist trapped in Rochester’s attic, Brontë’s depiction of Bertha was filled with descriptions of savagery and bestial lunacy. Bertha was pushed to the margins of Jane Eyre, completely voiceless within the narrative of her racialised, sexualised madness. Born in Dominica in 1890, Rhys felt a deep sympathy for Brontë’s madwoman from her first reading of Jane Eyre as a child. Her life as a Creole outsider in England strengthened this connection, as Rhys became more and more like Bertha through her own experiences as a similarly isolated, racialised woman, whilst writing Quartet (1928), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In this thesis I argue that Rhys drew from her experiences of marginalisation, precarity and prejudice to illustrate a possible ‘other side’ of the colonial and patriarchal attitudes that formed Brontë’s madwoman, and that she did so long before the 1960s.
Previously, Rhys’s writing back to Brontë has been examined solely within the connections between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. Because of this limited scope of analysis, it is widely thought by academics and Rhys’s biographers that Brontë’s influence upon Rhys began and ended with Wide Sargasso Sea. However, this resistive act of writing back in fact began far sooner than previously recognised. My thesis argues that Rhys began her postcolonial and feminist criticism of Brontë and Brontë’s representation of the West Indies, in her earliest modernist works.
Analysing a selection of Rhys’s fiction, this thesis reads the Rhysian woman as a modern manifestation of Bertha. Tracing Rhys’s postcolonial inversion of Brontë’s Eurocentric gothic, this thesis also examines the gothic modes and motifs within Rhys’s modernist fiction. The echo of two of Brontë’s other marginalised women, Céline Varens and Ginevra Fanshawe of Jane Eyre and Villette, are also read within Rhys’s female characters. Like Bertha, these minor protagonists closely resembled Rhys’s experiences as a mistress and demi-mondaine, and she was able to rewrite Brontë’s contemptuous representation of Céline and Ginevra with the same lens of sympathy that she applied to the Creole lunatic. With attention to both textual evidence and the author’s contextual experiences, this thesis traces how Rhys was continually motivated and influenced by Brontë’s representations to write back from the ‘other side, always’
The inherent liminality of lesbian detectives: Shifting spaces and lesbian crime fiction 1984-2022
Full text linkThis thesis studies lesbian detective fiction and specifically considers this genre in its early decades (1980s-1990s) from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. This thesis postulates that out of a sample pool of a hundred novels, there are recurring patterns of behaviours and attitudes among the protagonists of this genre within certain physical and metaphorical spaces. These patterns demonstrate a destabilised identity, as the lesbian sleuth never ceases to explore and test the boundaries of her authority as an enforcer of law and order and of her suppressed spatiality as a member of a sexual minority. This causes her to live in a perpetual state of Insider/Outsider liminality and it causes queer trauma to be a fundamental aspect of her character. This thesis considers this concept as the result of long-standing, systemic homophobia and heterosexist normativity, and utilises the notion of queer trauma to interpret the way the lesbian sleuth is inescapably stuck between a sense of duty and justice and a yearning for belonging and self-affirmation. The interpretive process is supported by an extensive and in-depth theoretical research into the fields of history, culture, geography, feminist criticism, gender, and sexuality studies for the selected subject matter. The spaces selected and analysed in this thesis are the queer closet, the medical establishment, domestic settings, and the gay bar. These spaces have been chosen for the significant, emblematic ways in which the lesbian detectives interact with them and have been analysed in order of their importance for the protagonists’ characterisation. The introduction includes introductory statements and the theoretical framework, the first chapter overviews major detectives in the history of crime literature from a spatial perspective; the second chapter discusses the queer closet; the third chapter considers the space of the clinic and the topics of queer trauma and of the pathologisation of homosexuality; the fourth chapter analyses the domestic settings of the protagonists; the fifth chapter examines the context of the gay bar and its history; finally, the conclusion offers closing statements about the focus and originality of this thesis. The originality of this thesis lies in its focus on spaces and on the relationship between the protagonist and society, law and order, and Self and Other. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of queer literature by specifically considering the unescapable liminality of the lesbian/Outsider detective/Insider
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Exhausted men: Making fatigue visible in The Metamorphosis and At Swim-Two-Birds
Full text linkThough not always immediately recognizable, fatigue and tiredness play a central role in modernist literature. As society placed increasing value on productive, strong, energetic bodies, the growing presence of bodies tired from the effects of overwork, rapid social progress, illness and post-war malaise posed a threat both to society and ideas of the
able-bodied self. Recumbent bodies challenge expectations of productivity; they remindus of our own bodily fallibility and blur the line between life and death as a visual
representation of our own mortality. Further, the fatigued body at rest is predominantly associated with the feminine, as has been reflected in much prior academic engagement
with neurasthenic women in modernist literature. What then are the implications for fatigued men? This thesis traces the previously overlooked depictions and uses of fatigue in two texts that have been the subject of significant analysis: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien. Though neither of these texts are inherently medical in nature, I show how fatigue nonetheless plays a central role in each, albeit in quite different ways. By unpacking these contrasting engagements with fatigue and the simultaneous lack of critical interest in fatigue in these texts, I uncover stigmatizing social perceptions of fatigue as deviant, burdensome, and indicative of emasculating weakness. Further, such depictions seem to go unquestioned, suggesting that these beliefs are largely naturalized within Western society. In the current time of pandemic, as society is again increasingly confronted with very visible exhaustion in the form of Long Covid amongst other fatiguing conditions, modernist fiction from the early-twentieth century offers valuable insights into how we engage with fatigue
Hegemony, marginalisation, and hierarchies: Masculinities in contemporary Pakistani anglophone fiction
Full text linkBy being empowered as subjects, authors of Pakistani anglophone fiction present a more nuanced, layered, and complex picture of Pakistan than the Western hegemonic discursive construction of the country as a hub of terror. Contemporary Pakistani anglophone fiction provides an insight into the collisions of culture, modernity, and religion in Pakistan. This literature also offers a way of understanding gender dynamics in contemporary Pakistani society. Scholarship on the representation of men and masculinities in South Asian anglophone literature, especially Pakistani anglophone fiction, is sparse. My study seeks to fill this lacuna and focuses on fiction by four male authors, namely, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Muhammad Hanif, and Daniyal Mueenuddin. My research highlights the potentially powerful existence of male narratives exposing, critiquing, and resisting misogyny, male violence, and gendered oppression. This research explores how these authors fashion the narrative of Pakistani masculinity and how these representations are shaped by wider societal, cultural, political, economic, and religious contexts. I draw on theories of performativity, intersectionality, and a range of scholarship about masculinities for my analysis.
Examining texts which bear the imprint of socio-cultural practices offers a tool to understand the social, cultural, and religious pressures that shape patriarchy, dictate men’s actions, and control masculine perceptions of identity and self-worth. Each chapter explores a different aspect of Pakistani masculinity, ranging from the depiction of the feudal and capitalist masculinities in rural Pakistan in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders to representations of toxic and hostile masculinities among working-class and lower-class men in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti and the clash between urban middle-class and elite Pakistani masculinities in Moth Smoke. The final two chapters reach beyond the geographic borders of the nation to focus on the depiction of the impact of honour culture, male entitlement, and racial marginalisation on diasporic Pakistani masculinities in Maps for Lost Lovers and the impact of global and political shifts on hegemonic masculine ideals and transnational business masculinity in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This research maps a range of representations of the diversity, complexity, and unequal power dynamics of Pakistani masculinities. This study also explores the formation and representations of female identity and femininities in negotiations with masculinities in the selected fiction, for example, emphasized femininity in Maps for Lost Lovers, rural femininity in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and enlightened femininity in Moth Smoke. Through this study, I hope to widen the critical discourse about gender in relation to Pakistani anglophone fiction and contribute towards an expansion of scholarship seeking to interrogate and interpret Pakistani masculinities
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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