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Title: Planning utopia: Control over women and nature in Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", William Morris's "News from Nowhere" and M. P. Shiel's "The Purple Cloud".
Contributors: David Gamble (author), Kristen Guest (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: Nineteenth-century utopian British literature often articulates the ideal of a society of equals, but it also evinces the problem of control over women and nature. In order to deal with this contradiction, I examine three novels from key moments in the development of utopian fiction. As case studies, I have chosen Mary Shelley's The Last Man, William Morris's News From Nowhere, and M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud because each novel evaluates utopian potential as occurring through revolution and enacted by social and city planning. I analyze their representations of prophecy, control over women, and control over nature. While these utopian novels imagine utopia as an alternative to capitalism, I find that capitalist impulses remain in the novels, undermining their articulations of utopia. --P.ii.
Discipline: Interdisciplinary Studies
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:04:38.754Z

Title: The representation of sexuality and gender in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Contributors: Dolores Duke (author), Maryna Romanets (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: No abstract available.
Discipline: Gender Studies
Date added: 2017-04-10T22:12:44.507Z

Title: "'How should I eat these?' With your mouth, asshole": First Nations women's literature responds to colonial discourse.
Contributors: Jennifer Payson (author), Dee Horne (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: No abstract available.
Discipline: Gender Studies
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:01:41.046Z

Title: Writing missing links: Rewriting women's history through literature.
Contributors: Brenda Koller (author), Maryna Romanets (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: Throughout history, women's achievements and struggles often went unnoticed and underrepresented by literature and historiography. Writing Missing Links: Rewriting Women's History through Literature' discusses ways in which contemporary women novelists revise and rewrite histories by providing counter-narratives to established mainstream historical and political discourses. These creative projects of dismantling and questioning history, truth, and objectivity unearth women's history occluded by patriarchal Master Narratives. Three historical novels that redefine literature and history from a woman-centred perspective frame this thesis: Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, My Dream of You (2001) by Nuala O'Faolain, and The Sealed Letter (2008) by Emma Donoghue. My theoretical approach focuses on the feminist concept of narrative voice that asserts a women-centered point of view, as well as feminist criticism's relationship to other critical discourses such as postmodernism, historiography, (post-)colonialism, and new-Victorian studies. --Leaf iii.
Discipline: English
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:12:46.665Z

Title: Scripts for Misfits: A creative thesis comprised of short fiction.
Contributors: Carly Stewart (author), Robert Budde (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: Scripts for Misfits is a creative thesis comprised of three short stories set in Prince George. Thematically, 'Crazy Old Birds,' '1957 Taylor Dr.' and 'The Box-Shaped Man' are linked in their separate explorations of the positive and negative impacts that popular texts (cinematic or literary) can have on female characters. Ultimately, my thesis pushes the reader to examine how these fictional women come to not only navigate the largely negative sociopolitical ideologies that popular culture prescribes as appropriate gender roles, but also, Scripts for Misfits illustrates how individuals can work toward self-actualization by deconstructing the messages that have previously worked to contain them. --P. ii.
Discipline: English
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:07:39.561Z

Title: Unbalancing Binaries: Re-thinking Lilith and Eve in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel," Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," and George MacDonald's "Lilith".
Contributors: Heather Rolufs (author), Kristen Guest (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: In the nineteenth century, religion, or rather, religious figures played an important role in determining appropriate societal roles for women. Two particular religious figurations - Lilith and Eve - began to emerge more frequently in Victorian literary works as a way to illustrate, discuss, and critique the binary formulation of the angel in the house and the fallen woman. This thesis examines three works that utilize the symbolic representations of these religious female figures in order comment on the fallen woman and angel in the house binary, as well as the place of women within the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century. I argue that by incorporating the Lilith and Eve typology, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel,' (1816), Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market,' (1862), and George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), exemplify and discuss the tensions surrounding the formulation of set female roles within Victorian society. Thus, it is though problematizing the rigid binaries of the angel in the house and fallen woman within these three texts that I illuminate the cracks within the dichotomy. --P. ii.
Discipline: English
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:09:30.413Z

Title: Hags, frogs, diamonds, and fairies
Contributors: Alauna Brown (author), Jacqueline Holler (thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia College of Arts, Social, and Health Sciences (Degree granting institution), Dana Wessell Lightfoot (committee member), Virginia Lettinga (committee member), Kristen Guest (committee member)
Abstract: This project examines how representations of the main female characters from a select group of fairy tales from the seventeenth century change over time. The tales studied are significant stories classified as tales of Magical Reward and Punishment for Good and Bad Girls. Instead of a single snapshot of a fairy tale re-imagined, my project captures an evolution of female representation by historically analyzing the fairy tales and reproducing the changes witnessed across the tales in the form of three original paintings. The artwork produced in my study creates new forms of knowledge that explore the validity and complexity of the fairy tale genre, reveal the underestimated power of gender representation, and challenge the audience to think critically about fairy tales not just as stories for children, but as important historical sources.
Discipline: History
Date added: 2019-04-15T20:32:03.557Z

Title: Noise reduction for face identification in videos
Contributors: Negar Hassanpour (author), Liang Chen (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: The wealth of information extracted from a sequence of frames in a video provides samples of the subject in different illuminations, head poses, and facial expressions. However, various sources can impose noise on data (e.g., occlusion, low resolution, and face detection failures). In this thesis, a novel framework is proposed that employs the well-studied concepts in quantum probability theory to design a representation structure capable of making inferences with multiple sources of uncertainty. The dual extension of this framework is aimed at reducing the effect of noisy frames in a video. It is also used to guide the sampling process in a novel learning scheme, called specialization generalization, which is designed to support efficient learning, as well as neutralizing the effect of noisy samples in the identification process. The contributions of this thesis are not method-specific and can be utilized for enhancement of other face identification approaches in the literature. --Leaf i.
Discipline: Computer Science
Date added: 2017-03-29T17:27:42.559Z

Title: Women, thy Name is Womb: Marginalization of voluntary childfree women in feminist performance literature.
Contributors: Zarrah Robin Holvick (author), Blanca Schorcht (Thesis advisor), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: This thesis examines voluntary childfree women's lack of representation in modern feminist theatre. Pronatalist ideology within North American cultural feminism is explored in the context of childfree marginalization, and is applied to performance literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In order to counteract discordance between mother and non-mother narratives, and directly address some of the associate stigmas of childfree women, an original theatrical script accompanies the research components as a conceptual application of this research. The script highlights the reproductive complexity of female voices, breaking down the notions of universalism and binary schema that sustain cultural feminism's essentialist arguments. Illustrating the interconnected gap between ideology, experience, and representation gives voluntary childfree women a subject position, and highlights the importance of inclusion within the realm of feminist ideology. Without the representation of a growing demographic of childfree women, feminism cannot hope to expand the definition of female identity and expression. --Leaf ii.
Discipline: English
Date added: 2017-03-30T17:13:46.015Z

Title: ‘The passions of a woman’ : rereading the disabled female body in Wilkie Collins’s novels
Contributors: Maryssa Grayer (author), Kristen Guest (thesis advisor), Jacqueline Holler (committee member), Kevin Hutchings (committee member), University of Northern British Columbia (Degree granting institution)
Abstract: This thesis explores how Wilkie Collins’s portrayal of disabled female bodies disrupts the Victorian opposition between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies, and, in doing so, offers an alternative to the prevailing contemporary ideal of femininity, as passive, pure, and spiritualized. In Hide and Seek (1861), The Moonstone (1868), and Poor Miss Finch (1872), I argue Collins reconfigures traditional readings of both disabled and able-bodied women. Drawing on theories in disability and gender studies, my thesis examines how prevalent understandings of the disabled body offer insight into how we think about the human body in general, and how in Collins’s novels the disabled body is used to question gendered norms placed upon all members of society.
Discipline: English
Date added: 2020-05-28T21:10:24.398Z