In her famous novel My ntonia, Willa Cather explores and develops issues of identity in a variety of ways. As well as illustrating the divide between various ethnic groups, Cather raises questions of gender identity and attempts to redefine Ameri

Explore some of the ways American Writers have raised and developed questions of identity (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual etc.) Refer in detail to any ONE OR MORE texts. In her famous novel "My Ántonia", Willa Cather explores and develops issues of identity in a variety of ways. As well as illustrating the divide between various ethnic groups, Cather raises questions of gender identity and attempts to redefine American social norms regarding these identities. A strong underlying theme of the novel is the struggle to define gender identities. Gelfant (1971) described the novel as a "drama of distorted sexuality". Throughout the novel, Jim seems to battle somewhat between what he considers to be the socially normal way for men and women to act within society, and the reality that exists. As Cather made clear in her early essays, as an author she was highly aware of the way our culture assigns roles or positions to respective sexes. With this in mind, it can be said that she incorporates these assumptions into her work, resulting in heightened tension within "My Ántonia". Her idea seems to point strongly towards the idea of men as "subject" and women as "object". In the novel, Jim Burden seems to convey traditional male attitudes. He moves outward, engages in change and writes possessively about "his" Ántonia. The conventional pattern of development further

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Novels of the 1890s are different in so many ways from the novels of the rest of the Nineteenth-Century that they seem almost to belong to a different genre. To what extent would you agree with this claim?

TMA 06 W6186059 Sean Delahoy Option A 'Novels of the 1890's are different in so many ways from the novels of the rest of the Nineteenth-Century that they seem almost to belong to a different genre.' To what extent would you agree with this claim? Written in 1897, Stoker's Dracula exists as more than just a part of the Nineteenth-Century; it belongs to the period known as the fin de siécle, a French term used to describe the period between the end of one era and the beginning of another and the consequent anxieties and expectations that marked this change. In this period the Nineteenth-Century novel transgressed, adopting less secure, traditional methods to epitomise the instability of its time. The conventional styles and rules of realist fiction that had been developed throughout the century were being changed by novels such as Dracula in order to incorporate and emulate the turbulence that existed for Victorian society at the end of the century. Illuminating the fear and social apprehension of the unknown future in unrealistic, unconventional ways helped to capture the trepidation of what the turn of the century would bring from home and abroad. This removal of the rules that clarified the genre of the Nineteenth-Century novel makes the novels of the fin de siécle seem to belong to a

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Explain the ways in which Gothic is about reading and misreading

Explain the ways in which Gothic is about reading and misreading. Charming as were all Miss Radcliffe's works, and charming, even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.1 Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is, for the largest part, based entirely around that which is real and that imagined, dreams, and reality, perhaps. Life is shown to be separate from, and not representative of, art, and the novel allows us to follow Catherine Morland's journey from child-like imagination to a more lifelike and perhaps cynical view of the world around her. References to books and reading are frequently found in Northanger Abbey, as Catherine is working her way through the gothic novels of the time. Austen allows Catherine to read novels, and accuses her contemporaries of some hypocrisy- for, she says she will not: Adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performance, to the number of which they themselves are adding- joining with their enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.2 Indeed, this view is common: In The Monk,

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Female Narrator. Within Daniel Defoes novel Moll Flanders, he expertly produces the voice of a woman. His ability to make the narrative one that is effortlessly female is aided by numerous factors.

Dr. Nigel Joseph English 2500 E 4 October 2008 Realism and Emotion: Creating the Female Narrator Within Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders, he expertly produces the voice of a woman. His ability to make the narrative one that is effortlessly female is aided by numerous factors. The realism of the text, the factuality of the prose, and the uncensored emotions of the narrator lend a feminine persona to Defoe's protagonist. Despite having no direct experience, Defoe masterfully ventriloquizes the voice of a woman and thus makes the character of Moll Flanders believable and limitlessly interesting. Through his own personal experiences within seventeenth and eighteenth century England, Defoe acquires the necessary tools to create a believable female character and thus makes Moll Flanders an example of novel that brilliantly captures the emotions and experiences of a woman. Within Moll Flanders, the female voice becomes realistic because of the experiences of the author, Daniel Defoe. It is not what Moll, the protagonist, thinks or does that makes her a relatable character for all women. Rather, it is how she thinks and why she does what she does that makes her realistic. Defoe grew up in seventeenth and eighteenth century England within a lower class than many of his fellow writers did. His education was not extravagant and he had many aspirations to rise in the social

  • Word count: 1479
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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