Starting with “'The Son of Royal Langbirth'” in 1904 and concluding with “Mrs. Thrale” in 1941, Virginia Woolf wrote literary journalism over the course of her career. In her reviews and articles in periodicals as well as in her novels and essays, she expressed her uneasy feelings and thoughts on the increasing commodification of print culture, the practices of editors and publishers, and journalistic professionalism of her time. While she appreciated the genre of the essay as she contributed reviews and essays to both mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass-circulating women's magazines, Woolf also elaborated a strong critique on the popular essayists' profession as well as the mass-readership of modern print culture. This paper aims to examine Woolf's attitudes as a professional essayist toward mass print culture, toward the aesthetics and politics of the essay form in literary marketplace, and above all, toward the relationships between the writer and the reader. Resituating her essaystic practice in the context of the writers' battles on browism in the 1920s and 30s emphasizes Woolf's continuous engagement in intellectual contentions of the time and foregrounds her concept of the common reader that creates a democratic mode of literacy in which reading, thinking and writing take place both in private and public spheres.

This paper aims to explore how Carol Ann Duffy's poetry actively envisions lesbian desire and love, a social and cultural taboo under the Thatcherite government. Duffy refuses the prevailing view of sexual normalcy; all desire is presumed to be heterosexual and masculine. She views Adrienne Rich's term “lesbian existence” as a reality and a source of knowledge and power available to women, resisting the patriarchal ideology of “compulsory heterosexuality.” Her love poems, “Girlfriends” and “Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer” describe luxurious female orgasmic pleasure through lesbian tropes. Duffy stresses that the speaker's sexual pleasure arises from acknowledging her lesbian identity. Furthermore, this paper examines how Duffy's poems question the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Through “from Mrs. Tiresias,” Duffy suggests that all gender is, as Judith Butler argues, “an act” and “a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.” Drawing a parallel between the two women('Tiresis''s masquerading femininity versus 'Mrs. Tiresis's lesbian lover), Duffy shatters the fixed notion of gender identity in order to criticize Thatcherite conservatism about sexuality, emphasizing that gender identity is not dependent on anatomy, but rather on “the notion of an interior essence.”

In this paper, I argue that in Coleridge's “Christabel,” Christabel's silence conceals repressed lesbian sexual desires and fear of patriarchal authority and that Geraldine, a lesbian vampire, leads Christabel to confront the causes of her silence. Geraldine represents Mother Nature as opposed to the Law of the Father, a product of Sir Leoline's hysteria and impulsive rage. While Geraldine liberates Christabel's lesbian sexual desires, her temptation triggers Sir Leoline's estrangement from his daughter, frees him from his mourning for his dead wife, and restores libido to his sterile life. As Christabel's surrogate mother, Geraldine reveals that repressive patriarchal laws have brought about her silence and paves the way for her breaking it. Since Geraldine is implied to be Christabel's alter ego and claims to be a daughter of Lord Roland, a brotherly figure to Sir Leoline, she is implicitly Sir Leoline's daughter and niece. Thus Geraldine's unorthodox sexual relationships with Christabel and Sir Leoline violate patriarchal order. Geraldine's role as the principle of eros and her threat to orthodox sexuality and patriarchal order are consistent with the theme of vampire literature which became popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage has been widely accepted as a critique on Virgil's perpetuation of Roman imperial ideology. Marlowe's extensive characterization of Dido as a female victim of Aeneas' imperial mission has been considered anti-Virgilian and following instead the Ovidian tradition. Most scholarly discussions of Marlowe's Dido have focused their comparisons of the play with Book 1, 2, and 4 of The Aeneid, because Dido dies in Book 4. However, I revisit the later half of The Aeneid, highlighting Aeneas' peculiar emotional attachment to Pallas in the funeral, as expressed by his gesture of covering Pallas' dead body with Dido's robe. Reading Pallas as Dido's double, I will show that Aeneas' private passion for Dido, which has been subdued by his imperial mission, finds a way to be released and contained by his appropriation of Dido's robe. Marlowe's Dido, however burns the robe and thus repudiates Virgil's embrace of imperialist values. Moreover, Marlowe's different treatment of Dido's robe pertains to the wider theme of empire and liberty. I argue that the liberty Marlowe portrays through Dido comments on the Elizabethan discourse of early imperialism, especially on its civic humanist endorsement of public duty over private passion.

This paper examines the representation of global sisterhood between Rose, a working-class British immigrant woman, and Sonali, an upper class Indian female civil servant, in Nayantara Sahgal's Rich Like Us. The novel centers on the Emergency, India's period of political upheaval from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the county. Rose and Sonali are both searching for their true identity and independence in a rapidly changing India. I argue that this cross-cultural relationship expresses the author's perspective of the new Indo-British experience in postcolonial India. These two women that Sahgal calls “twin souls” build their bond based on their common marginalization within patriarchal upper-class India by sharing emotional conflicts against unfair treatment. However, this solidarity of privileged women fails to garner any meaningful change in postcolonial India when it excludes subaltern voices from the narrative by repeating the same mistake patriarchical society imposes on them.