The research focus of this thesis is an analysis of Angela Carter's writing as her means of exploring and renouncing traditional ideals of femininity and social roles prescribed to women. Two...Show moreThe research focus of this thesis is an analysis of Angela Carter's writing as her means of exploring and renouncing traditional ideals of femininity and social roles prescribed to women. Two recurrent themes from her canon - violence and madness, are juxtaposed and analysed in relation to widespread gender stereotypes surrounding masculinity and femininity. Through exploration of the influence of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, cultural and literary depictions of women, this thesis traces Carter's manner of offering critique and analyses her role of a feminist writer.Show less
At the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way...Show moreAt the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way of understanding these changes in society and consumption. Based on Herbert Spencer’s concept of the survival of the fittest, characters in novels by authors such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser are fiercely competing individuals who are determined to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Their behaviour is often described in terms of brutal nature, uncontrollable temperaments, and animal instincts. This comparison of human beings to animals - which in the case of naturalism is not merely metaphorical - is also at the core of what retail theory nowadays labels as impulse buying, a type of shopping behaviour without overt rational consideration and deliberation. According to retailers, lavish shop design was expected to provoke this new type of shopping behaviour, and, around the turn of the twentieth century, the naturalist novel tended to describe and explain this combination of manipulation and shopping behaviour.Show less
Steve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that...Show moreSteve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that McQueen chose to adapt this particular slave narrative, as Northup was a free-born man and his narrative and agency therefore differs from widely read and taught slave narratives of slave-born narrators. Agency is central in these narratives as the narrators decide to escape the limited conditions of slavery and rebel against their master in order to live a life in which they are free to make their own decisions. The representation of slaves’ agency in their narratives is influenced by the socio-political environment at the time and place of writing and publication of the narrative. The genre of the autobiographical slave narrative has influenced the literature about slavery that has followed it, as can be seen in the autobiographies of former slaves published after the emancipation of all slaves in 1865 and in the genre of the neo-slave narrative that appeared in the 1970s. As the times in which they are made differ, so does their representation of agency, as they are all influenced by the socio-political environment they were published in. Autobiographies of former slaves offer a softened version of slavery and an optimistic view of the future that can be achieved through hard work, neo-slave narratives emphasize the rebellious agency of slaves, and contemporary films dwell on the ways slavery limits slave agency which makes every act of rebellion heroic. This thesis will argue that the forms of agency that are represented in contemporary novels and film dealing with slavery differ from those in the nineteenth-century autobiographical narratives that have influenced them, as all are influenced by the socio-political environment of the narrator and/or author. In order to research the theme of agency, I will look at slave narratives and works from different periods, and show different forms of agency. The works used are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013).Show less
This thesis follows in the great popularity of first Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy and later Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” trilogy, both works of dystopian fiction aimed at young adults....Show moreThis thesis follows in the great popularity of first Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy and later Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” trilogy, both works of dystopian fiction aimed at young adults. This thesis will argue that the identities of the female protagonists of these trilogies are both formed, moulded, by their respective oppressive (dystopian) societies, but that they eventually take their own fates and that of their societies in their own hands in order to change it for the better, thus becoming active agents in their own lives. Although Katniss Everdeen remains a pawn of the system which requires her to perform various (gender) roles until the very end, her conclusion signifies that she has learned to discriminate between the real and the appearance of the real: she kills President Coin, the next evil dictator, and allows a peaceful and stable future for herself as well as for the entire nation. Similarly, Tris Prior is for a long time confined to thinking according to her society’s faction system, but she ultimately recognizes the fallibility of this system which only creates prejudice, social division, and limits identity formation. Tris is essential in taking down this faction system and allowing her society a chance to start afresh.Show less
