ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0002-7806-5598

Graduation Semester and Year

2018

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Cedrick May

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public role of women shifted dramatically. Women asserted themselves in politics, education, and work in a way foreign to their Victorian predecessors. Although these “New Women” altered the gender landscape and set in motion a new path for women that would continue even into the twenty-first century, their writing still goes largely unnoticed in the current study of the Modernist literary canon. This project makes a case for expanding the current Modernist literary canon to include more of these women, especially women of disenfranchised racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic groups. Writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Winifred Sanford, Jovita González, Sui Sin Far, E. Pauline Johnson, and Ada DeBlanc Simond add perspectives that reveal a more accurate depiction than their middle-class, Anglo, male contemporaries of what life was like for women and minority groups at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Gaston Bachelard’s concept of topoanalysis— “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”—this project analyzes one of the most intimate spaces in our lives—the bedroom—to see how Modernist women writers used the space to reflect the anxieties, oppression, redemption, and hope their characters’ experienced in their ever-changing world. This project uses the analysis of vulnerable spaces to illustrate the benefit expanding the current Modernist literary canon can have to twenty-first-century scholars; taking disenfranchised writers from their specialized anthologies and teaching them to scholars in general literature courses will broaden the literary landscape, showing a more collective voice that better represents the diversity indicative of North America at the turn of the twentieth century.

Keywords

Modernism, Topoanalysis, Vulnerability, Women, Minority, Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, American literature

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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