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Articles on Feminism

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'Indelible Impressions': Gender and Language in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Examines the book 'Frankenstein,' by Mary Shelly, which focuses on the ability of language to empower and form its subject. Concept of the book; Types of gendered sphere in the society; Issues concerning feminine identity.
Achebe's Fiction and the Changing Generation of Nigerian Women - Towards a Paradigm Shift in Leadership. his essay teases out how Achebe represents the empowerment of women through self-discovery (Aristotelian anagnorisis) producing a paradigm shift - the latter a marker of change in radicalizing established canonical practices. This shift is central in re-mapping Africa's male-female dichotomy as well as a potent force in changing African politics.
Gender in the monster: Dr. Frankenstein as a mother This study will, therefore, present how gender roles of Victoria deconstruct the established pattern of the tale and reconstruct it under new terms of gender, and how this influences the gender formation of the monster.
Gender stratification in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. African Literature highlights the existence of a reasonable gender balance in Igbo Society before colonization. The same will be explained through the literary text namely, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe that offers a detailed view of gender stratification of the Igbo Society as existed before colonization and reveals astonishing arrangements existed in the apparently illiterate Igbo Society to maintain a gender harmony.
Home is Where Mamma Is: Reframing the Science Question in Frankenstein The article analyzes the use of science and technology in the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, specifically focusing on the ways the novel possibly aims to subvert gender hierarchies inherent in the study of modern science. The author presents a brief analysis of previous feminist interpretations of the novel.
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the World of Western Women This essay analyzes the treatment by the character of Charlie Marlow of the Western women in the short story "Heart of Darkness," by Joseph Conrad. It describes the attitude of Marlow toward women and those of the sepulchral city who believe the universe to be rational and safe. It also shows the important role of women in the psychological and ontological survival of Marlow, in affording him a sanctuary for his mind as well as refuge from the chaos and indifference of the universe.
Women as Epic Sites/Sights and Traces in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness The article discusses the portrayal of women as epic sites, sights and traces in Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness." It focuses on the role of the female figures, who despite creating both the door of Darkness and the narrative itself, are sentenced to either erasure or monsterization. It adds that in all their resilience, the women keep coming back within the traces they leave behind.

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'They ... Should Be Out of It': The Women of Heart of Darkness In the following essay, Bode asserts that "a close focus on the females in Heart of Darkness suggests that the extent and nature of their power are formidable."
A black Athena in the Heart of Darkness, or Conrad's baffling oxymorons In Conrad's creation of the African woman, we have tried to show that he kept his pen under control and wrote a carefully weighed portrait, based on strict oxymorons and instinct with meaningful implications.
The bride and her afterlife: female Frankenstein monsters on page and screen My analysis of the female Frankenstein monster and her various textual appearances has sought to demonstrate that adaptation is not just about telling (or retelling) a story; it is also about deploying characters in new ways.
Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations of Gender and Tradition in "Things Fall Apart" African writer Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" explores the masculine authority system and cultural tradition of a fictionalized African community. The novel exists in political and literary boundaries, and describes a time when a community is passing through historical boundaries. The tensions between opposing political and social forces are described as the community responds to the encroachment of white colonizers.
Outsider, insider, doorkeeper: female characters in Heart of Darkness In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad arranges the distinctive female characters in the story in symmetry in the panorama of the colonial movement, in the position as outsider, insider and doorkeeper. Among them, the outsiders are cheated victims of the colonial movement; the insiders are the predictors and the witnesses of the failure of colonialism; the doorkeepers can see the panorama of colonialism thanks to their transitional function in the whole process.
‘A World of Their Own’: Narrative Distortion and Fictive Exemplification in the Portrayal of Women in Heart of Darkness In the following essay, Sedlak argues that the women in Heart of Darkness are not just stereotypes or symbols of Conrad’s fears, and if they appear so it is because of the nature of Marlow’s narrative. Sedlak assesses the characters by the words they speak and finds that they are in “tension with, if not in contradiction to,” Marlow’s perceptions.

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"Passages" in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein": Toward a Feminist Figure of Humanity? In this paper I wish to draw upon several ideas of "passages" in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to compare masculine and female creation in terms of conventions, ideals and practices.
Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart On the one hand, difference can be necessary to national self-confidence, but , on the other, it can stir destructive tribal or national pride. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart represents the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-confidence, but at the same time he refers them to universal principles which vitiate their destructive potential.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity The spectacle of masculinity haunts late-19th-century Shelleyan iconography and informs the gendered narratives and biographical reconstructions of Frankenstein and its author. Given this history, a feminist critique can profit from a reading of Frankenstein's insistent exhibition of masculinity, for the male spectacle unfixes gender hierarchies, illuminating the fractures and contradictions underlying masculine authority.
Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse "The single, brief mention of Okonkow's mother is extraordinarily suggestive both for reading Okonkwo's particular brand of misogyny and neurotic masculinist personality and for analyzing larger questions of the author's construction of male subjectivity and identity in the novel.

Articles on Post-Colonialism

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Post-Colonial Analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness I approach Conrad's Heart of Darkness from post-colonial perspective by taking European imperialism and colonialism over Africa into consideration in order to clarify how Conrad has deconstructed binary oppositions of colonialism by subverting the general idea of the Europeans towards Africa in the 19th century.
Where is the Text?: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart This essay examines how Things Fall Apart has been received by Nigerian students as part of the curriculum of various English departments. It also critiques current responses to the novel. Applying postcolonial theory, the article insists on establishing a link between the divisions of Négritude and Soyinka's 'tigritude'.

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Achebe and Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Reassesment of African Postcolonialism in the Era of the African Renaissance In the following essay, Ramogale considers the implications for contemporary postcolonialism of Achebe’s critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as racist toward Africans. He notes that “while it may be argued that African postcolonialism needs the soldierly approach exemplified by Achebe, it can also be asserted that it needs the sobering influence of a Marlow-like self-introspection.”
Body politics: Conrad's anatomy of empire in Heart of Darkness In Heart of Darkness, Conrad develops this insight by focusing on the enigmatic opacity of the body, which retains its mystery even when the surface of the skin is penetrated by the X-ray vision of the narrator. Rontgen's invention provided Conrad with concrete images to articulate his anguished disillusionment with the humanist notion of an essential, inner sell as well as his critique of "heartless modernism" (Coroneos 39) to borrow Con Coroneos's felicitous phrase.
The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness Singh explores the connotations of the metaphor “heart of darkness.” She argues that, although Conrad intended to indict the colonial enterprise, the metaphor ultimately reproduces an ethnocentric worldview, which sees Africans as a morally inferior and doomed people.
Colonizers, Cannibals, and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness In the following essay, Kaplan explores Conrad's treatment of race, gender, and colonialism in Heart of Darkness.
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness In the following essay, originally published in the winter issue of the Massachusetts Review in 1977, Achebe asserts that Joseph Conrad was a racist and that his novel Heart of Darkness celebrates the dehumanization of Africans. Achebe also notes that white critics have not commented on this type of racism, which, he asserts, was and is the dominant perception of Africa in the Western imagination.
Imperial Monstrosities: 'Frankenstein,' the West Indies, and V. S. Naipaul Ball identifies the complementary themes of West Indian colonialism in A Flag on the Island and slavery in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Furthermore, Ball deems Naipaul's short story an ironic diminishment of Shelley's grandiose slavery metaphors and views the character of H. J. Blackwhite as a neo-imperialist version of Frankenstein's monster.
Okonkwo, textual closure, colonial conquest The paper proposes an intertextual reading of narrative and performance closure in four Nigerian end-of-era stories about colonial conquest (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa's Efuru, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman), focusing mainly on the meaning of the use of suicide, or the resolution of its threat, as a strategy of ending conflicts created directly by the enforcement of colonial rule or indirectly by the effect of such new rule.
The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart Snyder provides an alternative to anthropological readings of Things Fall Apart, seeking to prove that the novel is also a highly literary text with a complex narrative voice.
Pre-Colonial History and Anticolonial Politics in Achebe's Things Fall Apart Wehrs disputes critiques of Things Fall Apart that see localized mimicry of Western models as the only possible future for the Igbo; according to Wehrs, the Igbo philosophy contains internal correctives that, in conjunction with their acquaintance with European values, made possible "modernization from indigenous roots."
‘The Great Demoralization of the Land’: Postcolonial Ecology in Heart of Darkness Winston argues that political and environmental issues in Heart of Darkness have become as compelling to readers as the personal regression of Kurtz. He argues that a burgeoning alliance between postcolonial and ecocritical studies sheds light on “imperial subjugation and ecological degradation.”

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Bound in "Blackwood's": The Imperialism of "The Heart of Darkness" in Its Immediate Context An essay in literary archaeology: some suggestions on how the immediate context of the "The Heart of Darkness" -- the February, March, and April 1899 issue of Blackwood's -- would have influenced what its first readers made of it.
Frankenstein's Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain The thesis developed here is that Shelley's portrayal of her monster drew upon contemporary attitudes towards non-whites, in particular on fears and hopes of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, as well as on middle-class apprehension of a Luddite proletariat or Mary Shelley's "birthing trauma."
Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse "The single, brief mention of Okonkow's mother is extraordinarily suggestive both for reading Okonkwo's particular brand of misogyny and neurotic masculinist personality and for analyzing larger questions of the author's construction of male subjectivity and identity in the novel.
What Was Postcolonialism? Said noted, correctly let us add, the links between postmodernism and postcolonialism, but was quick to point out that in the hands of the early postcolonial scholars and artists (Chinua Achebe, CLR James, and Frantz Fanon among them) the historical imperative, or a grand narrative of postcolonial regeneration and completion, is always present.

ENGL C101 Guide for Laura Vasquez: Articles

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Articles on Feminism

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Articles on Post-Colonialism

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