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This study explores the relationship between Christian education and the construction of female gentility in East Asia around the turn of the twentieth century. Because American missionary schools played an important role in the region, notions of female gentility were greatly influenced by the cultural values of the American middle class and, more specifically, American liberal arts colleges. The notion of the “new gentlewoman” helps to illuminate modern Protestant womanhood’s ambiguous relationship with feminism and nationalism. Recognizing that the Protestant notion of “female gentility” was internally racialized, in this study, I also pay attention to the question of race. While the scope of my research spans East Asia, in this paper, I examine Christian education in China, focusing specifically on Yenching Women’s College. I compare the college’s educational goals and curricula to the pedagogy at the male college of Yenching, the governmental women’s college, and other female colleges in Japan and Korea. In this study, I approach East Asia as a whole for several reasons: first, because a broader view of the region helps put the Chinese case into perspective; second, because the region was often dealt with together in missionary work; and lastly, because national differences cannot be assumed to be more substantial than other differences, such as those based on gender, class, generation, period, and province.

Daniel Defoe is often perceived as one of the most influential and prolific writers in the world literature as well as the inventor of the English novel. Among Daniel Defoe's various works, Moll Flanders (1722) is neither the most enduring nor the most popular one. But it is Defoe's first novel, also the first one in the history of English literature, with a woman protagonist from the lowest social class. By analyzing three women authors' works and three men authors' works in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Spivak proves the complicity between the ideology of writers, both male and female, and their class in their literary representation at certain social context though sometimes the ideology of their class is not the dominant culture power at society. This thesis aims at proving the heroine in Defoe's Moll Flanders-Moll Flanders' detour of identity and at interpreting this transformation of connotation of gentlewoman with the help of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's theoretic analysis of complicity relationship between author and his class and literary representation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The Syntax of Classexplores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the \"dangerous classes.\" At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of \"home\" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict. This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.

This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to-woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy. Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, \"Efforts of Affection,\" as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of \"Crusoe in England\" and \"In the Village,\" Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation.

On the writing process behind GENTLEWOMAN Bereola says he initially had reservations about writing the book because he knew penning a book about women can oftentimes be a controversial topic. [...]I'll know a musician or an athlete and I may not need them in terms of business but when another colleague is in town I would offer them tickets to a game or a show; I would extend my network.\"