Point of view (Literature)

John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, employs a female narrative voice, but his novel reinforces traditional gender roles of male domination and female submission. By co-opting his female narrator, Cleland makes Fanny appear to be a willing and available sexual partner. His pornographic novel depicts sexual situations that raise virile men to the position of authority and devalue both men and women who are submissive, not "masculine." The most devalued and objectified character in the novel is Fanny herself, even though the novel portrays her as happy and satisfied.

Thatch Loop is a novel written in the modernist tradition of experimentation with form and point of view. The novel allows multiple points of view. This allows the reader the chance to view multiple realities as well as know the inner life and motives of each character. Also, this experimentation with point of view creates psychic space in what could otherwise be a cloistered and claustrophobic environment. The story ultimately belongs to Rachel Collier. Her character develops during three summers in the mid 1980s when she is visiting her grandparents. Her visits end abruptly during the summer of 1986, her grandmother dies, and her parents forbid her return to Thatch. These scenes are intermingled with a time period of a few days in 1991 when she and her father, Emerson, return to Thatch for a funeral. Rachel also seeks to reestablish a relationship with her childhood summertime sweetheart.

The genre of the "picaresque" (romances of roguery), which were popular in sixteenth-century Spain, contain the literary type of the "picaro" or rogue, which can appear at times as a "student." The current work presents the historical context of the Spanish university and of the student's life as well as the representation of the "student" in several picaresque novels, namely, Mateo Aleman's El Guzman de Alfarache, Vicente Espinel's Marcos de Obregâon, Jerâonimo de Alcalâa y Yâanez's El donoso hablador, and Francisco de Quevedo's El Buscâon, in order to contrast the social reality of the student and its literary representation. The literary character of the "student" does not depart only from its reality. Its characteristics are based on the student stories from the oral medieval tradition, a residual cultural elements, as described by Maxime Chevalier, as well as the emerging picaresque narratives.