The Hercules myth has had a long and distinguished literary history, to which this study will add another footnote. In these pages following we shall pursue the figure of Hercules from Greece to Rome to the Middle Ages and ...

The myth of the disobedient woman, along with patriarchal myths of virginity, provide writers with what appears to be a natural alliance between womanhood and fiction. This alliance, not natural but artificial, is between ...

Despite the tremendous linguistic particularities and cultural differences, Chinese poetry shares some formal and technical similarity with Anglo-American poetry. Through an effective use of the couplet-based verse form ...

Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, born just five days apart in 1830, wrote similarly on love, restriction, identity, and death. Their similarities arose not because one poet influenced the other, but because both ...

The dynamics between "American" constructions of ethnicity and the aspiration for and resistance to "American" identity are central to this study of several novels marked by their subjects' diverse racial, ethnic, gendered, ...

The story of Philomela and Procne has long been a figure of violence in literature. However, male mythologizers write Philomela out of existence, whereas women writers use the myth as a metaphor for female oppression and ...

Literary utopianism and naturalism present apparently polar views regarding the possibilities and limitations of human agency: the former portrays humanity as having created a communal society based upon rationality, while ...

The dissertation investigates whether there is a place of refuge for women characters within and/or beyond American literary texts written by men around the turn of the twentieth century. Besides major and minor texts of ...

Through readings of a variety of literary and historical narratives from throughout the Americas dating from the 16th century to the present, I show that miscegenation, its sudden and disrupting revelation in these narratives ...