Reading List

Key Terms

  1. Gender
  2. Feminism
  3. Power

Primary Sources

  1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  2. The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
  3. One of Ours by Willa Cather
  4. Passing by Nella Larsen
  5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  6. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Secondary Sources

  1. Layder, Derek. Intimacy and Power: the dynamics of personal relationships in modern society. Macmillan, 2009.
  2. Hodgson, Dorothy Louise. The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader. Oxford UP, 2016.
  3. Krekula, Clary. “The Intersection of Age and Gender: Reworking Gender Theory and Social Gerontology.” Current Sociology, 55, no. 2, 2007, pp. 155-71.
  4. Wisker, Gina. “Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier Rebecca: shaking the foundations of the romance of privilege, partying and place.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003.
  5. Giles, Judy. “‘A Little Strain with Servants’: Gender, Modernity, and Domesticity in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Celia Fremlin’s The Seven Chairs of Chelsea.” Literature and History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003, pp. 36-50.
  6. Westkaemper, Emily. Selling Women’s History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture. Rutgers UP, 2017.
  7. Green, Barbara. “Recovering Feminist Criticism: Modern Women Writers and Feminist Periodical Studies.” Literature Compass, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 53-60.

Academic Journal

  • Sexualities, Evolution, & Gender. Vol, 1, no. 1-3, 1999.
  • Modernism/Modernity. Vol 6, no. 1-3, 1999.

Essay

I have chosen to focus my thesis research on gender, feminism, and power as these areas have been long interests of mine throughout my academic career.  I am interested in questioning our understanding of gender and identity and the way that these institutions impact every facet of life.  Literature has a particularly rich way of offering truths about gender and identity through different characterizations, which often prove the ways that different identities imbalance power and impact one’s actions and beliefs.  Often, it highlights the priorities of a society or community as well.  I have not narrowed down a specific author or time period, but I am interested in more modern literature, particularly in the 20thcentury.  I am leaning toward working with one author and analyzing multiple of their works, but I am really open to any area that sparks my curiosity.  Since I have taken multiple classes with her that have focused on this time period, I plan to meet with Professor Seiler, and probably Professor Phillips, to talk through ways to narrow my interests more.  Since I don’t have a super specific text or author selected yet, the sources I have found focus mostly on gender and power in a more abstract way, such as in personal relationships or alongside age analysis.  With more wide-spread sources, luckily, I will be able to apply this knowledge to any text I end up with.

Update:

I have added a bunch of primary sources to my reading list that I am thinking about for my thesis.  I have previously read two of them and I really connected with them, so I think they deserve another read and reevaluation.  The others on my list were recommended to me by professors based on my thematic interests, so I will slowly begin sifting through those and figure out how I may rank them amongst each other.  I changed my academic journal and added a few more secondary sources that I felt were a bit more literary or literature-based and those that provided some historical context.  I had a lot of sociology sources in the first submission of the reading list, and so I needed to move back to research rooted in literature.