• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2018

Although acclaimed as George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) has been attacked by feminists since shortly after it was serialized. The main cause of feminist criticism is that she portrays her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, in an androcentric viewpoint and describes her lived experiences through male discourses. In order to identify what such feminist criticism originates in, this article places the novel in the sociopolitical contexts where Dorothea lived while authoring herself, and then analyzes it with M. M. Bakhtin's two important concepts, self-authoring and architectonics. As a result, Middlemarch has many shortcomings in the phases of the heroine's self-authoring and eventually the architectonics. In case of self-authoring, Eliot does not fully explain Dorothea's responses to her first husband and egoistic priest Edward Casaubon, and then her second husband and English-Polish dilettante Will Ladislaw until she reaches her ultimate marriage conclusions. Incessant authorial intervention obstructs the heroine's smooth interactions with her two husbands. In addition, the novel does not provide any sufficient comments about Dorothea's responses to Middlemarchers' opinions even if handling their opinions in the heroine's self-authoring influences the novel's persuasiveness. Dorothea's story has proved its own limitations by its frequent omissions and authorial intrusions. In Bakhtin's terminology, Middlemarch does not properly contain I-formyself, the-other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. It can be said that these shortcomings resulting from Eliot's cross-dressing narrative have caused attacks by feminists.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.321-328
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• 2016

This study seeks the applicable value for contemporary multiculturalism based on the women (Hagar, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, A great woman who lives in Shunem, A nameless servant girl) of the Old Testament who experienced migration. The article critiques uses of scripture that emphasize the roles of the women in the household. It provides a new interpretation through the perspective of feminist criticism, narrative criticism, and reader-response criticism. The article introduces the examples of six migrant women who created peace with people around them through their positive roles despite the fact that women had limited function under patriarchal society at that time. It suggests, while recognizing the difference regarding race, gender, and class between migrants and non-migrants, women and men, that they should not be used as the tools of discrimination. Furthermore, through these women from the Bible, the reader may find role models of independent women who are working for peace and social justice.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.363-389
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• 2011

Modern Chinese Literature, the so-called 'feminist' is a very modern and the traditional criticism and took an important position in the double action. Because a woman's freedom from the bondage of traditional ethics of restoring the social status equal to men but to women does not give, that compared to men and women just the dimension of the problem of isolation is not just. It is dominated by yugajeok worldview by streamlining the whole Chinese society to build a modern society and the country was a critical task. However, multi-cultural life of Lin, Hui-yin and Ling, Shu-hua in the history of the world's attention to the shrine was worried attention to soils, rather than East-West dualism law by taking a mixture of both women in modern Chinese literature and Western literature from the center of efforts to overcome the traditional point hayeotdaneun feminist literature that may be different. Lin, Hui-yin and Ling, Shu-hua to overcome the Western-oriented culture really the true dream of China's globalization and localization could be regarded. She naesewotdeon the banner of feminist literature in the traditional 'anti feudal', 'free personality' silcheondoen under such slogans as well as women's liberation from traditional, male-oriented perspective away from the women's unique experiences and new understanding of the value of the superiority the concept of a woman, and was to create. In particular, the femininity of these women who traditionally associated with women and the unique culture - the creation of a new consciousness, a re-evaluation of traditional feminine skills and talents was to try to.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.31
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• pp.7-33
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• 2013

The ultimate goal of women's studies and feminist critics is to improve the understanding on women and recognize women's values. When we examine the Korean women's history on the viewpoint of gender, we can find that the gender role is not fixed. We do not have any proofs that there are any kinds of gaps between women and men in ability and temperament. All of women's identity and subjectivity in status and activities was not insignificant. Especially women's subjectivity in high social standing was superior. The women's activities in economic area were energetically. The productive activities were lively, too. The patrilineal decent is usual in Chana though China is in the same Confucianism cultural area. But patrilineal and matrilineal decent were popular used until the early days in Chosun Dynasty. Only sons can be inherited father's estate in China but it's not in our country. Also the patriarch had the economic power in family in China but the housewives had the power in ours. The feminism has been making efforts for the equality of sexes and the dismantling of the patriarchal sex role for a long time. Every feminist activities included feminist theory and cultural criticism has the goal to increase women's liberty and equality and change the world. This study to understand the historical substance of Korean women is on the way, too.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.71-87
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• 2022

This article explores how women's voices are constructed in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (The Sorrow of War) by Bảo Ninh. Specifically, this article approaches presentations of women's personalities and positions in the two novels that do not have obvious historical and geographical connections. The women's voices in the two novels, as this article suggests, are characterized by women's desire for self-determination, where they are able to free themselves from domination, and even influence men's psychology and actions. In comparing the characteristics of women's voices in the two works, the article aims to highlight different ways in which women assert their agency. The article affirms the potential contribution of cultural contexts in examining feminist voices and understanding how female figures are made to overcome default passivity and submission to male domination.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.3-35
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• 2012

This paper attempts to examine complicated relations which the nineteenth-century English novel of female development has with the Bildungsroman genre, and to discuss that the story of female development effectively realizes the potential dynamics of the genre. It looks into the history of discussions on the Bildungsroman which began at the end of the nineteenth-century in Germany and developed among twentieth-century Anglo-American critics, and those on the female development which didn't start until feminist criticism ventured out at the end of 1970s, and have developed into various perspectives ever since in accordance to the progress of feminist criticism. In general, Bildungsroman criticism considers that it portrays the process how the protagonist develops self and achieves an accommodation with society. However, this paper points out that the Bildungsroman is the narrative form which represents conflicts between self and society caused by idealizing the infinitive possibility of self-determination while simultaneously presenting the limited goal of social integration. It argues that the subversive dynamics of the genre can give full play to its potential when it reveals contradictions and tensions between individual subjectivity and integration into society and connects them with criticism of political and social structures. It is the stories of female Bildungshelds depicted by nineteenth-century female writers that exquisitely embody the subversive potential of the Bildungsroman. They acutely experience alienation from society where independency or autonomy is fundamentally impossible because the ideology of separate spheres does not allow them to live a meaningful life economically and sociologically outside the marriage. An example of a female Bildungsheld whose conflicts between development of self and integration with society are doubled by gender is Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a representative Bildungsroman with subversive dynamics, which tells the story of female development but splits itself through various techniques inserting contradictory and opposite meanings, thus resignifying female development and questioning social and political structures.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1199-1212
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• 2011

This paper is to scrutinize Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through a Marxist criticism. While critics were industriously excavating discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and racism in the novel, they tended to regard the Marxist attribute as supplementary material and to diminish the significance not considering as an independent subject to be examined. However, the novel, in which all the major relationships are based on capital, exemplifies class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Marx and Engels believe that the foundation of our society is capital and that society evolves through class conflict to obtain more capital, and thus they assert people's relations are the product of the commodification of individuals. Furthering their study, Louis Althusser specifies the power system through the (repressive) state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. With the theories of the thinkers' above, this paper analyzes the relationship between Annette and Mason, Antoinette and her nameless husband, allegedly Rochester, Rochester and Amelie, and Rochester and Daniel Cosway. This paper offers an alternative reading of a classical feminist and post-colonial text.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.40
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• pp.61-90
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• 2015

The imagery of Ophelia appeared in Russian literature in the middle of the $19^{th}$ century. In contrast with Hamlet, whose name had been always in the center of the most intense debates through centuries, Ophelia had been understood relatively monotonously and simply associated with the images of a chaste maiden, a tragic heroine and a devoted lover. Only after the feminist literary criticism shed new light on the complicated inner world of the young girl, the imagery of Ophelia radically changed, and now it is not difficult to encounter various Ophelias on the contemporary stages and culture. In this paper we study the remarkable changes of the imagery of Ophelia in Russian modernism poetry, analysing A. Blok, A, Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva's Ophelia poems. Ophelia in Russian modernism, on the one hand, succeeding to the traditional view on Ophelia in $19^{th}$ century, assumes interesting new aspects, sometimes preempting feminist point of view.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.126
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• pp.159-190
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• 2013

Feminist critics have criticized Aristotle as a sexist, misogynist, male chauvinist or masculinist, or, at least, their chief spokesman. Indeed, he says in the Politics that the male is by nature superior to the female and, also, that women possess the same deliberative part of the soul as men, but without authority, etc. In the Generation of Animals, he claims that the male supplies the form and the efficient cause, whereas the female supplies the material cause only in reproduction and describes the female as a mutilated being. When these remarks of Aristotle are read without considering their overall context, it hardly seems possible for him to escape from such severe criticism and condemnation. On the contrary, in what follows, I shall claim that the criticism and condemnation that has been ascribed to him is unfair. Although it is undeniable that Aristotle has made such remarks, it does not immediately follow that he was a sexist. In particular, I shall show his view on the status of men and women by analysing the value of matter and form ascribed in two of his main philosophical theories, the theories of hylomorphism and four causes. In consequence, we shall arrive at the conclusion that, since the theories do not imply the significance or necessity of either form or matter alone, but of both, there is no sign of sexism or misogyny or male chauvinism in Aristotle.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.