Humanities Literature Review: Philosophy & Literature
Budget: $750 – $1,500 USD
I'm looking for a comprehensive literature review focusing on the Humanities, specifically Philosophy and Literature. The review should synthesize existing scholarly work in these areas, highlighting key themes, debates, and gaps in the literature.
Ideal Skills:
- Extensive experience in literature reviews
- Strong background in Humanities, mainly Philosophy and Literature
- Excellent analytical and synthesis skills
Please provide a sample of your previous work in a similar field and your approach to conducting this literature review. I have no sample
1- I need 20-pages article discussing my topic [The female paradoxical prism in Victorian fiction Marriage plot: Agency or Repression].
2—If possible, I want at least eight pages of a draft by Friday, March 14th, and the full 20 pages by next Friday, March 21st. [I have already summarized the scholarly works if you need full summaries], and I have most of the scholarly works as pdf copies.
3- Send your quote in full; there is no need for an introduction or conclusion.
4-Create a synthesis essay focusing solely on scholars' debates for a comprehensive exam.
3-Major questions: 1. Foucault, power, and novels
a. Explain the meaning of the following terms in Foucault’s writing: power, discourse, and the repressive hypothesis.
b. Explain how one or more of these concepts apply to and help us understand the gender and/or marriage dynamics in Eight (8) novels from your list. You don’t need to apply all the concepts to each novel; you can just apply one concept to each novel. For example, you might explore how Foucault’s understanding of power helps us understand the way Laura Fairlie is controlled in The Woman in White.
c. This question is designed to allow you to demonstrate your knowledge of the novels, your mastery of Foucault’s theories, and your ability to apply theory to novels.
2. Marriage and the novel
a. How have literary scholars characterized the relationship between marriage and the Victorian novel? Is the novel like a marriage, and if so, how? Does the novel reinforce the norms of marriage, and if so, how? Does the novel offer commentary upon the institution of marriage, and if so, in what way?
b. Summarize at least eight (8) scholars’ arguments and compare/contrast their approaches.
c. This question is designed to allow you to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of secondary literary scholarship in your chosen subfield.
4- Here is My previous feedback to help understand my major weakness:
You need Specificity and Depth:
a- Specificity and Depth: Overall, I can see that you have studied and are familiar with the texts. One positive aspect of this exam is that you are successfully able to recall several scholars and their main arguments without any external resources. That is a good sign! However, the responses you have produced here are not quite reaching a Ph. D.-level of specificity and depth.
b- Effectively Applying Theory/Scholarship to Novels: In the first question, you summarize some key concepts from Foucault accurately (although not quite enough specificity/depth, as I mentioned above). However, further work is needed to apply a concept to the novel effectively. For example, if you are interested in Foucault’s concept of power as dispersed across multiple loci, you need to be able to apply that to a novel and explain specifically how that theorization of power helps us understand how power operates in the novel. (I am particularly emphasizing Foucault because his work comprised such a significant portion of the prospectus draft you sent and seems like your primary methodological influence. If you are planning on using Foucault extensively in the dissertation, then you need quite a strong understanding of the work and a good ability to apply it to the novels in order to write that dissertation successfully.)
5- My list:
A. Feminisms and Marriage
Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Classics, 2011.
Beaumont, Matthew. "'A Limited Political Universe of My Own': The New Woman, the New Existence, and New Amazonia." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007, pp. 215–32. Cambridge UP.
Buzard, James. “The Wild English Girl: Jane Eyre.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Jane Eyre, edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, 2007, pp. 191–216.
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Authors in the Marketplace, 1670-1920. U of California P, 1994.
Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge UP, 1997.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 2000.
Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Routledge, 2013.
Larson, Jil. "Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers." Rereading Victorian Fiction, edited by Alice Jenkins and Juliet John, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 159–72.
Manly, Susan. "Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Legacy." A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 60–77.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007.
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. U of Michigan P, 2008.
O’Connell, Lisa. The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Perkin, Joan. Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England. Routledge, 1989.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1988.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Primitive Marriage Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity. Oxford UP, 2023.
Psomiades, Kathy. “Mythic Marriage: Haggard, Frazer, Hardy, and the Anthropology of Myth.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 55–76.
Pykett, Lyn. The 'Improper' Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992.
Schaffer, Talia. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction. Princeton UP, 2021.
Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 1989.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1998.
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Ashgate, 2007.
Tromp, Marlene. “Til Death Do Us Part: Marriage, Murder, and Confession.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 127–44.
Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. "Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siècle." Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 1998, pp. 169–82.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Yale UP, 2014.
B. Reading in Scholarly, Theoretical, Historical, and Legal Contexts
Allen, Laura. "'The Laws Themselves Must Be Wicked and Imperfect': The Struggle for Divorce in Mary Eliza Haweis's A Flame of Fire." For Better, for Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women, edited by Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw, Routledge, 2017.
Combs, Mary Beth. "'Concealing Him from Creditors': How Couples Contributed to the Passage of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act." Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, edited by Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring, McGill-Queen's UP, 2013, pp. 217–39.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. 1976. Vintage, 1990.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. 1869. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878.
Mitchell, Rebecca N. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference. U of Virginia P, 2021.
Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Ashgate, 2007.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. 1957. U of California P, 2001.
Fiction:
First: Primary Literary Texts (Fiction):
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. 1862. Broadview Press, 2003.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. The Doctor's Wife. 1864. Reissue ed., Oxford UP, 2008.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Broadview Press, 2009.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Penguin Classics, 2009.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Wordsworth Editions, 1992.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Penguin Classics, 2016.
Collins, Wilkie, and Matthew Sweet. The Woman in White. 1859. Penguin Books, 2003.
Collins, Wilkie. The Law and the Lady. 1875. Penguin Classics, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Oxford UP, 1998.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Broadview Press, 2007.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871. Wordsworth Editions, 1994.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Oxford UP, 2008.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth. 1853. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1854. Wordsworth Classics, 1998.
Gissing, George. The Odd Women. 1893. W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Wordsworth Editions, 1995.
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Wordsworth Editions, 1997.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890. Warbler Classics, 2020.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1848. Wordsworth Editions, 1998.
Ideal Skills:
- Extensive experience in literature reviews
- Strong background in Humanities, mainly Philosophy and Literature
- Excellent analytical and synthesis skills
Please provide a sample of your previous work in a similar field and your approach to conducting this literature review. I have no sample
1- I need 20-pages article discussing my topic [The female paradoxical prism in Victorian fiction Marriage plot: Agency or Repression].
2—If possible, I want at least eight pages of a draft by Friday, March 14th, and the full 20 pages by next Friday, March 21st. [I have already summarized the scholarly works if you need full summaries], and I have most of the scholarly works as pdf copies.
3- Send your quote in full; there is no need for an introduction or conclusion.
4-Create a synthesis essay focusing solely on scholars' debates for a comprehensive exam.
3-Major questions: 1. Foucault, power, and novels
a. Explain the meaning of the following terms in Foucault’s writing: power, discourse, and the repressive hypothesis.
b. Explain how one or more of these concepts apply to and help us understand the gender and/or marriage dynamics in Eight (8) novels from your list. You don’t need to apply all the concepts to each novel; you can just apply one concept to each novel. For example, you might explore how Foucault’s understanding of power helps us understand the way Laura Fairlie is controlled in The Woman in White.
c. This question is designed to allow you to demonstrate your knowledge of the novels, your mastery of Foucault’s theories, and your ability to apply theory to novels.
2. Marriage and the novel
a. How have literary scholars characterized the relationship between marriage and the Victorian novel? Is the novel like a marriage, and if so, how? Does the novel reinforce the norms of marriage, and if so, how? Does the novel offer commentary upon the institution of marriage, and if so, in what way?
b. Summarize at least eight (8) scholars’ arguments and compare/contrast their approaches.
c. This question is designed to allow you to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of secondary literary scholarship in your chosen subfield.
4- Here is My previous feedback to help understand my major weakness:
You need Specificity and Depth:
a- Specificity and Depth: Overall, I can see that you have studied and are familiar with the texts. One positive aspect of this exam is that you are successfully able to recall several scholars and their main arguments without any external resources. That is a good sign! However, the responses you have produced here are not quite reaching a Ph. D.-level of specificity and depth.
b- Effectively Applying Theory/Scholarship to Novels: In the first question, you summarize some key concepts from Foucault accurately (although not quite enough specificity/depth, as I mentioned above). However, further work is needed to apply a concept to the novel effectively. For example, if you are interested in Foucault’s concept of power as dispersed across multiple loci, you need to be able to apply that to a novel and explain specifically how that theorization of power helps us understand how power operates in the novel. (I am particularly emphasizing Foucault because his work comprised such a significant portion of the prospectus draft you sent and seems like your primary methodological influence. If you are planning on using Foucault extensively in the dissertation, then you need quite a strong understanding of the work and a good ability to apply it to the novels in order to write that dissertation successfully.)
5- My list:
A. Feminisms and Marriage
Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford UP, 1987.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Classics, 2011.
Beaumont, Matthew. "'A Limited Political Universe of My Own': The New Woman, the New Existence, and New Amazonia." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007, pp. 215–32. Cambridge UP.
Buzard, James. “The Wild English Girl: Jane Eyre.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Jane Eyre, edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, 2007, pp. 191–216.
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Authors in the Marketplace, 1670-1920. U of California P, 1994.
Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge UP, 1997.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 2000.
Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Routledge, 2013.
Larson, Jil. "Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers." Rereading Victorian Fiction, edited by Alice Jenkins and Juliet John, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 159–72.
Manly, Susan. "Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Legacy." A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 60–77.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007.
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. U of Michigan P, 2008.
O’Connell, Lisa. The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Perkin, Joan. Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England. Routledge, 1989.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 1988.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Primitive Marriage Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity. Oxford UP, 2023.
Psomiades, Kathy. “Mythic Marriage: Haggard, Frazer, Hardy, and the Anthropology of Myth.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 55–76.
Pykett, Lyn. The 'Improper' Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992.
Schaffer, Talia. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction. Princeton UP, 2021.
Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 1989.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1998.
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Ashgate, 2007.
Tromp, Marlene. “Til Death Do Us Part: Marriage, Murder, and Confession.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 127–44.
Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. "Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siècle." Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 1998, pp. 169–82.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Yale UP, 2014.
B. Reading in Scholarly, Theoretical, Historical, and Legal Contexts
Allen, Laura. "'The Laws Themselves Must Be Wicked and Imperfect': The Struggle for Divorce in Mary Eliza Haweis's A Flame of Fire." For Better, for Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women, edited by Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw, Routledge, 2017.
Combs, Mary Beth. "'Concealing Him from Creditors': How Couples Contributed to the Passage of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act." Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, edited by Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring, McGill-Queen's UP, 2013, pp. 217–39.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. 1976. Vintage, 1990.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. 1869. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878.
Mitchell, Rebecca N. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference. U of Virginia P, 2021.
Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Ashgate, 2007.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. 1957. U of California P, 2001.
Fiction:
First: Primary Literary Texts (Fiction):
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. 1862. Broadview Press, 2003.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. The Doctor's Wife. 1864. Reissue ed., Oxford UP, 2008.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Broadview Press, 2009.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Penguin Classics, 2009.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Wordsworth Editions, 1992.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Penguin Classics, 2016.
Collins, Wilkie, and Matthew Sweet. The Woman in White. 1859. Penguin Books, 2003.
Collins, Wilkie. The Law and the Lady. 1875. Penguin Classics, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Oxford UP, 1998.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Broadview Press, 2007.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871. Wordsworth Editions, 1994.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Oxford UP, 2008.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth. 1853. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1854. Wordsworth Classics, 1998.
Gissing, George. The Odd Women. 1893. W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Wordsworth Editions, 1995.
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Wordsworth Editions, 1997.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890. Warbler Classics, 2020.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1848. Wordsworth Editions, 1998.