Gibson, Mary Ellis

UNCG

There are 13 item/s.

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Ponder and believe: interpretive experiments in Victorian literary fantasies 2009 4281 This dissertation examines experimental Victorian fantasy novels in order to provide an alternate history for the Victorian era, one traditionally associated with the realist novel. Texts are discussed using fantasy theory, reader-response criticism,...
From postmodern to post bildungsroman from the ashes: an alternative reading of Murakami Haruki and postwar Japanese culture 2009 15322 My dissertation explores how postcolonial discourse offers an alternative theoretical framework for the literary works produced in contemporary Japan. I read the works of Murakami Haruki as cultural ethnographies of postwar Japan and apply postcoloni...
The impulse to tell and to know: the rhetoric and ethics of sympathy in the Nineteenth-century British novel. 2010 6016 My dissertation examines how some nineteenth-century British novels offer a critique of the dominant narrative of sympathy by suggesting that the most ethical encounter will preserve distance between self and other while retaining the ability to exch...
Oceans apart: women readers in the Nineteenth-century British and American novel 2011 4563 This dissertation provides a transatlantic, historical approach to women's reading, analyzing within that context representations of fictional women readers, bearing in mind the cultural anxiety surrounding "the reading habit." These fictional reader...
Genres of work: working identities and the factory girl in Victorian literature 2013 5059 The idea of Victorian womanhood typically summons images of Coventry Patmore's "angel in the house," the domestic saint who formed the moral center of the middle-class family. My dissertation examines another kind of Victorian woman: the factory girl...
Probing the interior : style and gender in the fiction of Reynolds Price 1994 467 The purpose of this dissertation is to examine elements of interiority in the fiction of Reynolds Price, using feminist theory, gender studies, and distinctions between masculine and feminine style. Included are all of the novels dealing with male/fe...
Honesty admits discourse : lying in the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell 1994 871 Variously deemed a motif, an image or a puzzling preoccupation, lying links all of Elizabeth Gaskell's works, and its political implications are far more important than critics have recognized. Lying, this dissertation argues, is the key that opens u...
Womanist intellectuals : developing a tradition 1996 601 This study traces a womanist intellectual tradition, beginning in early Victorian England and ending in late twentieth-century America. Prominent studies on the public intellectual have excluded women from their discussions, and in recent years there...
"Men call me chaste" : a feminine redefinition of androcentric chastity in medieval, Renaissance, and nineteenth century British texts 1994 417 Nearly all the ideas, concepts, perspectives, and definitions that have been constructed, appropriated, and authorized in western history are androcentric. The concept of chastity is just one among the many, and this dissertation explores how women w...
Euphemism's usefulness: elusive eros in the novels of Charlotte Brontë 2011 6755 In this project, I examine the uses of euphemistic language and concealed erotic content in Charlotte Brontë's novels Villette and Jane Eyre with additional support from Shirley. Based on historicize...
Fashioning femininities: sartorial literacy in english domestic fiction, 1740-1853 2011 4965 In this dissertation I argue that by using, adhering to, or subverting cultural conventions and tacit sumptuary laws, heroines of English domestic novels take advantage of society's scopic nature, exploiting the gaze in order to control and author th...
Four essays on excess and fragmentation in modernism 2011 3903 In these essays, the object of inquiry is the multifaceted interplay of part and whole, especially with reference to the individual's relationship to society. The first section, on Algernon Charles Swinburne, is centered on Julia Kristeva's concept o...
The Rhetoric of Prostitution in Victorian England 2011 13210 This dissertation interrogates the network of social ideas and agents that rhetorically constructed the female prostitute through configurations of space and identity while participating in rhetorics of professionalization. While considering genre as...