Kiana Harker's Final Project Intertextuality

This is my final project on defiant/strong/rebellious female characters throughout pieces of literature across space and time.  This project is based on Sophocles' Antigone since Antigone can be viewed as a defiant female protagonist who goes against Creon's laws.  My project will look at how these types of female characters are portrayed in a poem from the sixth century in China, a short story from 1985 from America, a play written in 1606 by Shakespeare but set in 30 b.c. in Egypt, and a novel set in England in the 1800s.  

There are less pieces of literature with strong female characters in earlier time periods due to women being viewed as inferior in society at the time.  However, there are still some pieces from early time periods that have strong female characters, showing that maybe some authors were questioning society's norms.  A lot of the pieces of earlier time periods with strong female characters were not viewed as being feminist pieces at the time, but later interpretations show that cases can be made that these pieces may be pushing for feminism too.  Pieces of literature with strong female characters became more common as time went on especially towards the mid-1800s to modern day times when feminism really started to push forward.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Oxford U.P., 1969.

Brulé, Pierre.  Women of Ancient Greece.  Edinburgh University Press, 2003.  

Edwards, Louise. “Transformations of the Woman Warrior Hua Mulan: From Defender of the Family to Servant of the State.” Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China, vol. 12, no. 2, 2010, pp. 175–214. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/156852610x545840.

Hiscock, Andrew. “‘Here Is My Space!’: The Politics of Appropriation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” English: The Journal of the English Association, vol. 47, no. 189, 1998, pp. 187–212. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/english/47.189.187.

LeGuin, Ursula K.  “She Unnames Them.”  The New Yorker, 1985.  

Owsley, Lauren. “Charlotte Brontë’s Circumvention of Patriarchy: Gender, Labour and Financial Agency in Jane Eyre.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 54–65. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1179/1474893212Z.00000000052.

Sexton, Kristi. “Jane Eyre: Jane’s Spiritual Coming of Age.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, vol. 39, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 178–186. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1179/1474893214Z.000000000112.

Khanna, Lee Cullen. “Beyond Omelas: Utopia and Gender.” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1–2, 1991, pp. 48–58. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=2013397900&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Sophocles.  Antigone.  Translated by George Theodoridis, 2004. 

“The Ballad of Mulan.” Trans. Haiwang Yuan.  Ode of Mulan.  Retrieved from: https://people.wku.edu/haiwang.yuan/China/tales/mulan.htm 

William Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra. Harmondsworth, Middlesex :Penguin Books, 1987.