Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English fiction Women writers History and criticism'
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Gantzert, Patricia L. "Throwing voices, dialogism in the novels of three contemporary Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq23313.pdf.
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Chung, Wing-yu, and 鍾詠儒. "British women writers and the city in the early twentieth century." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B2702409X.
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Sojka, Eugenia. "Search procedures, carnivalization in language- and theory-focused texts of four Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25775.pdf.
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Wallace, Linda M. "Negotiating place, explorations of identity and nature in select novels by contemporary Canadian women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/MQ49460.pdf.
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Shea, Maureen Elizabeth. "Latin American women writers and the growing potential of political consciousness." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184310.
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This dissertation provides a feminist reading of the works of Latin American women writers since the decade of the sixties to the present who focus on the particular historical moment of their times from a political perspective. A systematic study of the narrative figure in novels by Dora Alonso, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, and Isabel Allende, reveals an awareness of the undercurrents of oppression existent in their societies based on racial and class stereotypes with a growing understanding of oppression based on sex. From the perspective of the female narrator in Tierra Inerme by the Cuban writer Dora Alonso, the Cuban social structure before 1959 is condemned for its inequality on the basis of class, race, and sex. However, the perspective of the narrator reveals that she has not entirely escaped the prejudices that permeate her society concerning women. Hasta no verte Jesus mio, by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska concentrates on the testimony of Jesusa Palancares who condemns the structural inequality existent in Mexican society. Although Palancares' perspective reveals an awareness of the unequal treatment of women, because of her underprivileged status she concentrates on oppression based on class. In Cenizas de Izalco by Darwin Flakoll from the United States and the Salvadoran Claribel Alegria, the 1931 massacre of the peasants in El Salvador is condemned. However, through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators, oppression on the basis of sex is most emphasized. La casa de los espiritus by the Chilean Isabel Allende depicts brutal class, racial and sexual oppression in Chile from the 1920's to 1973. It is in this novel that sexual oppression is portrayed most vividly, again through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators. Although a growing awareness of sexual oppression emerges in the novels studied becoming most emphatic in this decade through an awakening feminist consciousness, the perspective of the narrators emphasize to varying degrees the importance of solidarity among women to combat injustice of every form to achieve a more equitable existence for all oppressed people.
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李仕芬 and Shi-fan Lee. "The male characters in the fiction of contemporary Taiwanese women writers." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31235979.
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Gossage, Ann. "Between the lines : the representation of Canadian women in English-language novels written by women in the 1930s." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24085.
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This thesis examines the role of Canadian women as presented in English language novels of the 1930s written by women authors. Within the context of the Great Depression it focuses on issues that are central to women's daily lives such as work, love, marriage and motherhood. It also isolates recurring themes in the novels and attempts to understand the authors' messages within their social context. Social reform, politics and gender relationships are among the subjects explored.
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Johnston, Susan 1964. "Calling the question : women and domestic experience in British political fictions, 1787-1869." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39928.
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This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.
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Jakobsen, Pernille. "Touring strange lands, women travel writers in western Canada, 1876 to 1914." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/mq20791.pdf.
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LeStage, Gregory. "Forces in the development of the British short story, 1930-1970 : some writers, editors, and periodicals." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670227.
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Carrière, Marie J. "Poetics of the other, five feminist writers from English Canada and Quebec." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0015/NQ45662.pdf.
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Richter, Yvonne Nicole. "A Critic in Her Own Right: Taking Virginia Woolf's Literary Criticism Seriously." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/56.
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Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.
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Dredge, Sarah. "Accommodating feminism : Victorian fiction and the nineteenth-century women's movement." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36917.
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The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2).In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.
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Macfarlane, Karen E. "The politics of self-narration : contemporary Canadian women writers, feminist theory and metafictional strategies." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0016/NQ44504.pdf.
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Vasil, Christina Jane. "Ann-Marie MacDonald in the context of Hugh MacLennan and Alistair MacLeod, gender formation in three Cape Breton writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0026/MQ33830.pdf.
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West, Mary Eileen. "White women writing white : a study of identity and representation in (post-)apartheid literatures of South Africa." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/442.
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This thesis examines aspects of identity and representation using contemporary theories and definitions emerging out of a growing body of work known as whiteness studies. The condition of whiteness as it continues to inform identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa is explored in an analysis of selected texts written by white women, to demonstrate the ways in which whiteness continues to suggest normativity. In reading a representative selection of literatures produced in contemporary South Africa by white women writers, this study aims to illustrate the ambivalence apparent in the interstitial manifestations of emergent reconciliatory gestures that are at odds with residual traces of superiority. A sampling of disparate texts is examined to explore the representations of race and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa in the light of contemporary theories of whiteness which posit it as a powerful and invisible identification. The analysis attempts to plot a continuum from writers who are least, through to those who are most, aware of whiteness as a cultural construct and of their own positionality in relation to the discursive dynamics that inform South African racial politics. A contextualising overview of the terrain of whiteness studies is provided in Chapter One, marking the ideological and theoretical affiliations of this project, and foregrounding the construction of whiteness as an imagined identity in contemporary cultural criticism. It also provides a justification for the selection of the textual material under scrutiny. Chapter Two explores a genre that has been identified as a growing trend in South African fiction: the production of pulp fiction written by white middle-class women. Two such texts are the focus of this chapter, namely, Pamela Jooste’s People like Ourselves (2004) and Susan Mann’s One Tongue Singing (2005), and the complicities and clichés that are characteristic of popular literature are examined. Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003) is the focus of Chapter Three. It is examined as a book offering the writer’s personal response to the difficulties of transformation within the first decade of South African democracy. Krog confronts her own defensiveness, her sense of normalcy, and her sense of alienation in relation to multiple encounters with different people. Chapter Four focuses on the journalism of Marianne Thamm. Her role as columnist for the popular women’s magazine, Fairlady is explored, particularly in relation to the inclusion of a contending voice writing against the general tenets of Fairlady. Thamm’s critique of the mores governing bourgeois white womanhood is read in relation to her role as officially sanctioned Court Jester. Her Fairlady columns have been collected in Mental Floss (2002) but the analysis includes selected columns from 2003 to 2005. Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors (1998) by Karen Press is the focus of Chapter Five. Her work is read as examining a white South African crisis of belonging in relation to the implications of mapping the co-ordinates of whiteness in South Africa. Chapter Six offers a reading of four short stories, written by Nadine Gordimer and Marlene van Niekerk. These stories are juxtaposed to trace an anxious impasse in white responses to suburbia, the place of enactment of white bourgeois mores, which both writers interrogate.
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Hoffman, Megan. "Women writing women : gender and representation in British 'Golden Age' crime fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11910.
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In this thesis, I examine representations of women and gender in British ‘Golden Age' crime fiction by writers including Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. I argue that portrayals of women in these narratives are ambivalent, both advocating a modern, active model of femininity, while also displaying with their resolutions an emphasis on domesticity and on maintaining a heteronormative order, and that this ambivalence provides a means to deal with anxieties about women's place in society. This thesis is divided thematically, beginning with a chapter on historical context which provides an overview of the period's key social tensions. Chapter II explores depictions of women who do not conform to the heteronormative order, such as spinsters, lesbians and ‘fallen' women. Chapter III looks at the ways in which the courtships and marriages of detective couples attempt to negotiate the ideal of companionate marriage and the pressures of a ‘cult of domesticity'. Chapter IV considers the ways in which depictions of women in schools, universities and the workplace are used to explore the tensions between an expanding role in the public sphere and the demand to inhabit traditionally domestic roles. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the image of female victims' and female killers' bodies and the ways in which such depictions can be seen to expose issues of gender, class and identity. Through its examination of a wide variety of texts and writers in the period 1920 to the late 1940s, this thesis investigates the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in Golden Age crime fiction written by women, and argues that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe' solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.
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Dueck, Cheryl E. "Rifts in time and in the self : two generations of GDR women writers and the development of the female subject (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Helga Künigsdorf, Helga Schubert)." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35875.
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This dissertation examines the development of the female literary subject in the work of two generations of women writers of the GDR, represented by Christa Wolf (1929), Brigitte Reimann (1931--1973), Helga Konigsdorf (1936) and Helga Schubert (1941). The objectives are twofold: first, to assess the influence of two opposing discursive frameworks of subjectivity, the socialist and the psychoanalytic, on the works of these writers, and second, to examine the effects of an ideological disjuncture of two generations on their literary production.The first generation to embark on a literary career in the GDR, with great aspirations for the socialist project, is represented by Wolf and Reimann. A shift in political parameters meant that the following generation of writers, including Konigsdorf and Schubert, was faced with a pre-determined ideological structure, unsatisfactory to them. Accordingly, a diachronic investigation of the literary subject is pursued, and reveals the shift between these generations. As a result, rifts in time, in the subject, and rifts between the subject and its time are exposed.
In the 1960s, Wolf and Reimann rejected the literary female subject's role as an agent in the implementation of socialism. Crises in GDR social structures and crises of the psyche are shown to overlap and to result in divided subjects. The non-contemporaneity of Marxism begins to surface in the 1970s, and the rift in time affects the female subjects of Wolf and Reimann, which increasingly fragment Konigsdorf's and Schubert's short prose of the late 1970s reveals a rejection of the unified Marxist subject and the move toward a notion of the self informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the effects of the socio-political environment prove fatal to the individual subject in the works by both generations, and parallels are drawn to the National Socialist past. These links instigate a fundamental reevaluation of standards in language, power and cycles of history at the crossroads of life and death. The post-Wende period witnesses a shift away from problems of subjectivity in the texts of Konigsdorf and Schubert, while Wolf initially experiments with the postmodern, and most recently, surprisingly re-consolidates the female subject.
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Chanda, Geetanjali. "Indian women in the house of fiction : place, gender, and identity in post-independence Indo-English novels by women /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19736617.
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Harrison, Rebecca L. "Captive Women, Cunning Texts: Confederate Daughters and the "Trick-Tongue" of Captivity." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04232007-094815/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Thomas L. McHaney, committee chair; Audrey Goodman, Pearl A. McHaney, committee members. Electronic text (247 p.) : digital, PDF file. Title from file title page. Description based on contents viewed Mar. 27, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-247).
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Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
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The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
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Marron, Rosalyn Mary. "Rewriting the nation : a comparative study of Welsh and Scottish women's fiction from the wilderness years to post-devolution." Thesis, University of South Wales, 2012. https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/en/studentthesis/rewriting-the-nation(acc79b10-cd63-48ee-b045-dabb5af2f77c).html.
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Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.
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Hall, Karen Peta. "Discovering the lost race story : writing science fiction, writing temporality." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0216.
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Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.
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Jackson, Lisa Hartsell. "Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2572/.
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The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.
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Marsh, Rebecca Kirk. "Refiguring Milton in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2602.
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Since 1979 feminist scholars have misread key images in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. They delineated the extended essay as a groundbreaking feminist polemic that advocates abolishing the literary patriarchy, expressing distain for John Milton as chief offender. Through rhetorical analysis and close readings of passages, there seems advocacy for change in patriarchial education and for opening of the literary canon to women.
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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.
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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).
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Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.
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This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.
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Fan, Yiting. "Capital and the heroine : reconfiguring gender in the Victorian novel." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2011. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1293.
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Rine, Abigail. "Words incarnate : contemporary women’s fiction as religious revision." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1961.
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This thesis investigates the prevalence of religious themes in the work of several prominent contemporary women writers—Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A.L. Kennedy. Relying on Luce Irigaray’s recent theorisations of the religious and its relationship to feminine subjectivity, this research considers the subversive potential of engaging with religious discourse through literature, and contributes to burgeoning criticism of feminist revisionary writing. The novels analysed in this thesis show, often in violent detail, that the way the religious dimension has been conceptualised and articulated enforces negative views of female sexuality, justifies violence against the body, alienates women from autonomous creative expression and paralyses the development of a subjectivity in the feminine. Rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority, as previous studies have done, I argue that these writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that subvert the binary logic that dominates Western religious discourse. Chapter I contextualises this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlines existing work on feminist revisionist literature. The remaining chapters offer close readings of key novels in light of these theories: Chapter II examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Chapter III explores two novels by Roberts that expose the violence inherent in religious discourse and deconstruct the subjection of the (female) body to the (masculine) Word. Chapters IV and V analyse the fiction of Kennedy and Walker respectively, revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity. Evident in each of these fictional accounts is a forceful critique of religious discourse, as well as an attempt to more closely reconcile foundational religious oppositions between divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit, and body and Word.
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Campbell, Leslie Marion. "Scottish influence and the construction of Canadian identity in works by Sara Jeannette Duncan, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ57276.pdf.
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Vrtis, Christina E. 1979. ""Death is the Only Reality": a Folkloric Analysis of Notions of Death and Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10697.
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viii, 91 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.Caribbean cultural ideas and values placed on death and mourning, especially in relation to cultural roles women are expected to perform, are primary motivating factors in the development of female self and identity in Caribbean women's literature. Based on analysis of three texts, QPH, Annie John, and Beyond the Limbo Silence, I argue that notions of death and funerary rituals are employed within Caribbean women's literature to (re)connect protagonist females to their homeland and secure a sense of identity. In addition, while some texts highlight the necessity of prescribing to the socially constructed roles of women within the ritual context and rely on the uproper" adherence to the traditional process to maintain the status quo, other texts show that the inversion or subversion of these traditions is also an important aspect of funerary rituals and notions of death that permeate contemporary Caribbean culture.
Committee in Charge: Dr. Dianne Dugaw, Folklore; Dr. Lisa Gilman, English; Dr. Phil Scher, Anthropology
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Watson, Anna Elizabeth. "Music lessons and the construction of womanhood in English fiction, 1870-1914." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5479.
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This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).
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Götting, Elena Rebekka. "Challenging maleness : the new woman's attempts to reconstruct the binary code." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6612.
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This thesis explores the construction of masculinity in novels written by New Women authors between the years 1881-1899. The fin de siècle was a period during which gender roles were renegotiated with fervour by both male and female authors, but it was the so-called New Woman in particular who was trying to transform the Victorian notion of femininity to incorporate the demands of the burgeoning women's movement. This thesis argues that in their fiction, New Women authors often tried to achieve this transformation by creating male characters who were designed to justify and to mitigate the New Woman protagonist's departure from traditional structures of heterosexual relationships. The methodology underlying this thesis is the notion that men and women were perceived as binary opposites during the Victorian period. I refer to this as the binary code of the sexes. This code assumes that men and women naturally possess diametrically opposed character attributes, and also that “masculine” attributes are perforce better than “feminine” ones. In the body of this work, I argue that New Women authors attempted to contest both of these assumptions by creating, on the one hand, traditional male characters whose masculinity is corrupted in crucial and recurring ways, and on the other, impaired male characters who cannot assume the traditional role of man. The comparison of the New Woman protagonist with the corrupt traditional man elevates her feminine attributes, while the impaired man's dependency legitimises her acquisition of what were otherwise considered “masculine” attributes and privileges, thereby contesting the notion that men and women possess sex-specific attributes at all. The second part of my thesis examines contrasting examples, in which this way of characterising masculinity – as traditional or impaired – is questioned and manipulated. It examines the limitations of the New Women authors' specific approach to reconstructing the binary code.
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Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.
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This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.
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Hale, Frederick. "Literary challenges to the heroic myth of the Voortrekkers : H.P. Lamont's War, wine and women and Stuart Cloete's Turning wheels." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/52325.
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Thesis (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of various historical novels which dealt to a greater or lesser degree with the Great Trek and were written between the 1840s and the 1930s in Dutch, Afrikaans and English but with particular emphasis on H.P. Lamont's War, Wine and Women and Stuart Cloete's Turning Wheels (1937). The analysis of all these fictional reconstructions focuses on the portrayal of the Voortrekkers found in them. Much attention is also paid to the historical contexts in which the two principal works in question were written and the great controversies which they occasioned because both of their authors had had the temerity to challenge the long-established myth of the heroic Voortrekkers, one of the holiest of the iconic cows in the barns of their Afrikaner descendants. Chapter I, "Introduction", is a statement of the purpose of the study, its place in the context of analyses of the history of Afrikaner nationalism, its structure and the sources on which it is based. Chapter II, "The Unfolding of the Myth of the Heroic Voortrekkers", traces its evolution from the 1830s to the 1930s and explores how both English-speaking South Africans and Afrikaners, especially Gustav PrelIer, purposefully contributed to it. Also highlighted in this chapter is the significance of the Great Trek Centenary and the events leading up to it in the middle and late 1930s in intensifying Afrikaner nationalism. Chapter III, "The Heroic Myth in Early Dutch and Afrikaans Novels about the Great Trek", considers especially how these works were used as vehicles for placing before Afrikaners the historic virtues of their ancestors both to provide models for emulation and to stimulate their ethnic pride. Chapter IV, "Sympathetic English Reconstructions of the Great Trek", deals with two novels, Eugenie de Kalb's Far Enough and Francis Brett Young's They Seek a Country, both of which reproduced the heroic myth to some extent. Chapter V, "Rendezvous with Disaster? The South Africa in Which Lamont Wrote War, Wine and Women" establishes the context of intensifying Afrikaner nationalism which this immigrant from the United Kingdom encountered in the late 1920s when he accepted a lectureship at the University of Pretoria and why this context was hostile to a novel which was critical of Afrikanerdom. Chapter VI, "Wa1~ Wine and Women: Its General Context and Commentary on South Africa" explores how this work, conceived as a "war book" dealing with the 1914-1918 conflict in Europe, depicted both Englishmen and Afrikaners negatively. Chapter VII, "Academic Freedom vs. Afrikaner Nationalism: The Consequential Strife over War, Wine and Women" deals with the hostile reception of Lamont's pseudonymously published novel, the physical assault on him and his dismissal from his lectureship at the University of Pretoria. Chapter VIII, "The Rhetoric of Revenge in Lamont's Halcyon Days in Africa", explores how the author, after relurning lo England, used his pen as a weapon for striking back al his Afrikaans foes in South Africa. Chapter IX, "Stuart Cloete's Portrayal of the Voortrekkers in Turning U'heels", focuses on the portrayal of various ethnic types in his gallery of characters. Chapter X, "The Con troversy over Turning U'heels", handles the hostile and apparently orchestrated reaction to Cloete's book and how it was eventually banned. Chapter XI, "Conclusion: Quod Eral Demonstrandum", summarises several thematic findings which a detailed examination of the novels in their historical context yields.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie verhandeling is 'n interdissiplinêre studie van verskeie historiese romans waarin daar in 'n mindere ofmeerdere mate op die Groot Trek gefokus word en wat geskryfis tussen die 1840's en die 1930's in Nederlands, Afrikaans en Engels, maar met die klem op H. P. Lamont se War, Wine and Wamen en Stuart Cloete se Turning Wheels (1937) in die besonder. Die analise van al hierdie fiktiewe rekonstruksies fokus op die uitbeelding van die Voortrekkers daarin. Daar word ook in die besonder aandag gegee aan die historiese kontekste waarbinne hierdie twee hoofwerke geskryfis en die groot polemiek daarrondom, omdat beide outeurs die vermetelheid gehad het om die lank reeds gevestigde mite van die heldhaftige Voortrekkers, een van die heiligste ikoniese koeie in die skure van die Afrikanernageslagte, uit te daag. Hoofstuk I, "Introduction", stel die doel van die studie, waar dit staan in die konteks van analises van die geskiedenis van Afrikanernasionalisme, die skruktuur en die bronne waarop dit gebaseer is. Hoofstuk II, "The Unfolding of the Myth of the Herioc Voortrekkers", volg die evolusie van Afrikanernasionalisme van die 1830's tot die 1930's en ondersoek op beide Engelssprekende Suid-Afrikaners en Afrikaners, veral Gustav Preller, doelgerig hiertoe bygedra het. In hierdie hoofstuk word daar ook beklemtoon hoe betekenisvol die honderdjarige herdenking van die Groot Trek en die gebeure wat daartoe aanleiding gegee het gedurende die middel- en laat 1930's, bygedra het tot die versterking van Afrikanernasionalisme. Hoofstuk III, "The Heroic Myth in Early Dutch and Afrikaans Novels about the Great Trek", bespreek veral hoe hierdie werke gebruik is om aan Afrikaners die historiese deugsaamheid van hulle voorvaders voor te hou en wat as voorbeelde moet dien wat nagestreef moet word en om hulle etniese trots te stimuleer. Hoofstuk IV, "Sympathetic English Reconstructions of the Great Trek", bespreek twee romans, Far Enough van Eugenie de Kalb en TheySeek a Country van Francis Brett Young, wat altwee die heroïse mite in 'n sekere mate herproduseer. Hoofstuk V, "Rendezvous with Disaster? The South Africa in Which Lamont Wrote War, Wine and Women" vestig die konteks van groeiende Afrikanernasionalisme wat hierdie immigrant van die Verenigde Koninkryk in die laat 1920's teëgekom het toe hy 'n lektoraat aan die Universiteit van Pretoria aanvaar het, en hoekom hierdie konteks vyandiggesind was teenoor 'n roman wat krities was teenoor die Afrikanerdom. Hoofstuk VI, "Wa1~ Wine and Women: Its General Context and Commentary on South Africa" ondersoek hoe hierdie werk, beskou as 'n "oorlogsboek" wat handeloor die 1914-1918 konflik in Europa, beide die Engelse en die Afrikaners in 'n negatiewe lig gestel het. Hoofstuk VII, "Academic Freedom vs. Afrikaner Nationalism: The Consequential Strife over War, Wine and Women" skenk aandag aan die vyandige ontvangs van Lamont se roman (gepubliseer onder 'n skuilnaam), die fisieke aanval op hom en sy ontslag as lektor van die Universiteit van Pretoria. Hoofstuk VIII, "The Rhetoric of Revenge in Lamont's Halcyon Days inAfrica", ondersoekhoe die outeur, na hy na Engeland teruggekeer het, sy pen as wapen gebruik het in 'n teenaanval op sy Afrikaanse vyande in Suid-Afrika. Hoofstuk IX, "Stuart Cloete's Portrayal of the Voortrekkers in Turning Wheels", fokus op die uitbeelding van verskeie etniese tipes in sy gallery karakters. Hoofstuk X, "The Controversy over Tumng Wheels", bespreek die vyandige en klaarblyklike georkestreerde reaksie op Cloete se boek, en hoe dit uiteindelik verban is. Hoofstuk XI, "Conclusion: Quod Era! Demonstrandum", bied 'n opsomming van verskei tematiese bevindinge aan, wat deur 'n gedetaileerde ondersoek van die romans opgelewer is.
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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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Spencer, Sandra L. "The Angel in the House and The Woman in White: The Unfolding and Decoding of a Victorian Stereotype." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500620/.
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Abstract: Modern readers frequently perceive female characters in Victorian novels as insipid and inane, blaming the static portrayals on the angel in the house stereotype attributed to Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. The stereotype does not accurately reflect the actual Victorian woman's life, however. Examining how the stereotype evolved and how the middle-class Mid-Victorian woman really lived provides insight into literary devices authors employed either to reinforce the angel ideal or to reconcile the ideal with the real. Wilkie Collins's portrayal of Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White features a dynamic female who has both androgynous characteristics and angel-in-the-house qualities, exemplifying one more paradox in a society riddled with contradictions.
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Holton, Danica Lynn. "Class and stratification in the works of Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/MQ49367.pdf.
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Veillette, Marie-Paule. "La représentation de la folie dans l'écriture féminine contemporaine des Amériques." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ57482.pdf.
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Wambui, Mary Theru. "Female identity in the post-millennial Nigerian novel: a study of Adichie, Atta, and Unigwe." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020013.
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This thesis project examines the work of three female Nigerian authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta and Chika Unigwe. They are part of a growing number of young African writers who are receiving international acclaim and challenging narratives that have long defined the continent in pejorative terms. They question what it means to be female and African in a transcultural, global world but counter discourses that are both restrictive and prescriptive. Their female characters are not imaged in binary terms as either victims or villains. For all three writers, the African story has to be told in its entirety incorporating what some may argue are negative stereotypes but doing so in a manner that examines and undermines those same stereotypes. For the purposes of the thesis, I focus on their first novels: Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. Chapter One examines Purple Hibiscus and argues that the novel is much more than a coming of age story or, as some critics have posited, an allegory of the postcolonial state. Chapter Two highlights Atta’s use of fairly familiar feminist theories but grounds them in the lived realities of the African city. All three authors are concerned with issues of violence and death. Unigwe’s novel, which forms the focus of Chapter Three, offers a critical perspective on how both of those themes intersect with the increasing commercialisation of global culture. Her characters are female sex workers whose lives are irrevocably altered by the murder of one of their colleagues. I conclude by arguing that the three novels offer a nuanced if not necessarily new understanding of the various social, economic and political forces that continue to shape the lives of women on the continent.
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Viegas, Shéllida Fernanda da Collina 1978. "A extraordinária e irresoluta história da trajetória de Roxana e Moll Flanders." [s.n.], 2011. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270173.
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Orientador: Suzi Frankl SperberTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T21:56:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Viegas_ShellidaFernandadaCollina_D.pdf: 120671766 bytes, checksum: 6769e677622ca23add669406b7687de0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011
Resumo: Como é possível o mesmo autor, na mesma época, escrever dois romances com a mesma temática e dar-lhes tratamento tão distinto? Essa é a pergunta que intriga os leitores de Defoe ao ler duas das suas principais obras literárias, Moll Flanders (1722) e Roxana (1724), e é também a pergunta que norteou esta pesquisa. Para responder a isso, estudamos a história da leitura, o surgimento e a popularização do romance, a história dos direitos autorais e a influência do público leitor na produção de romances. Isso porque ambas as obras de Defoe tiveram várias edições ao longo do séc. XVIII que se diferenciavam das primeiras tiragens. Visando estabelecer algumas hipóteses para explicar os motivos que levaram os editores a alterar os finais das obras, foram analisadas, nesses romances, as figuras da prostituta, amante, esposa e mãe e a condição da mulher na Inglaterra pré-Revolução Industrial, sem perder de vista a questão da edição e da recepção
Abstract: To what extent is it possible that an author over the same decade had written two novels about the same central theme, but from and with different perspectives? The readers of Daniel Defoe are right to raise this issue after reading Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). This research sets about answering such questions. To this end, I used Defoe's novels to take a close look at the history of reading, the creation and popularity of the novel, copyright implications and the influence of the reader in the production of novels. After all, both novels underwent a series of different editions throughout the eighteenth century. To formulate a working hypothesis to outline the reasons that allowed such changes in editions, I analyzed the figures of the prostitute, lover, wife and mother and the condition of women in pre-Industrial Revolution England in both novels
Doutorado
Literatura Geral e Comparada
Doutor em Teoria e História Literária
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Rickard, Suzanne. "On the shelf : women writers, publishing and philanthropy in mid-nineteenth-century England." Phd thesis, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139147.
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Pasi, Juliet Sylvia. "Theorising the environment in fiction: exploring ecocriticism and ecofeminism in selected black female writers’ works." Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/23789.
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Text in EnglishThis thesis investigates the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world or natural environment in selected literary works by black female writers in colonial and post-colonial Namibia and Zimbabwe. Some Anglo-American scholars have argued that many African writers have resisted the paradigms that inform much of global ecocriticism and have responded to it weakly. They contend that African literary feminist studies have not attracted much mainstream attention yet mainly to raise some issues concerning ecologically oriented literary criticism and writing. Given this unjust criticism, the study posits that there has been a growing interest in ecocriticism and ecofeminism in literary works by African writers, male and female, and they have represented the social, political (colonial and anti-colonial) and economic discourse in their works. The works critiqued are Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not (2006), Neshani Andreas’ The Purple Violet of Oshaantu (2001) and No Violet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The thrust of this thesis is to draw interconnections between man’s domination of nature and the subjugation and dominance of black women as depicted in different creative works. The texts in this study reveal that the existing Anglo-American framework used by some scholars to define ecocriticism and ecofeminism should open up and develop debates and positions that would allow different ways of reading African literature. The study underscored the possibility of black female creative works to transform the definition of nature writing to allow an expansion and all encompassing interpretation of nature writing. Contrary to the claims by Western scholars that African literature draws its vision of nature writing from the one produced by colonial discourse, this thesis argues that African writers and scholars have always engaged nature and the environment in multiple discourses. This study breaks new ground by showing that the feminist aspects of ecrocriticism are essential to cover the hermeneutic gap created by their exclusion. On closer scrutiny, the study reveals that African women writers have also addressed and highlighted issues that show the link between African women’s roles and their environment.
English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)
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Le, Marquand Jane Nicole. "'I'm not a woman writer, but--' : gender matters in New Zealand women's short fiction 1975-1995 : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1462.
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From the late 1970s, New Zealand women short story writers increasingly worked their way into the literary mainstream. In the wake of the early, feminist-motivated years of the decade their gender, which had previously been the root of their marginalized position, began to work for them. However, rather than embracing womanhood, this growth in gender recognition led to many writers rejecting overt identification of their sex. To be a labeled a woman writer was considered patronising, a mark of inferiority. These women wanted to be known as writers only, some even expressing a hope for literature to reach a point of androgyny. Their work, however, did not convey an androgynous perspective. Just as the fact of their gender could not be avoided, so the influence their sex had on their creativity cannot be denied. Gender does matter and New Zealand women's short fiction published in the 1975-1995 period illustrates its significance. From the early trend for adopting fiction as a site for social commentary and political treatise against patriarchy's one-dimensional image of woman, these stories show a gradually increasing awareness of fictional possibilities, allowing for celebration of the multiplicity of female experience and capturing a process of redefinition rather than rejection of 'women's work'. Though in the later 1990s it may no longer have been politically 'necessary' to promote women's work on the grounds of gender, on a personal level the 'difference of view' of the woman writer remained both visible and vital. An increasing sense of woman-to-woman communication based on shared experience emerges: women are writing as women, about women, for women.
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Chion, Loretta Ravera. "The female dilemma : subversion and art in some novels by Australian women writers." Master's thesis, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139376.
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Janzen, Beth E. "The boundary between "us" and "them": readers and the non-English word in the fiction of Canadian Mennonite writers." Thesis, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1805.
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This study asks whether the use of non-English words in the novels of Canadian Mennonites perpetuates a cultural binary, and concludes that it does not. The use of the non-English word, rather than enforcing a binary between "us and them", ultimately reveals that cultural boundaries are permeable and unstable. Recent reader-response theory, which sees the reader as always influenced by a context, is central to this inquiry. Analysis of readers' responses in the form of questionnaires constitutes part of the support for my assertions, while an examination of typography, orthography, interlingua, and theme in three novels by Canadian Mennonites provides the balance.
Chapter one lays the theoretical framework for the investigation. It discusses: reader-response theory and the impossibility of accessing a stable textual meaning coincidental with the author's intention, the challenge of the non-English word to the concept of universality, and the distinction between proper “English" and non-institutional "english". Chapter two examines some readers' responses to non-English words and finds that “inside" readers have interpretations in common with "outside” readers, and that variations exist between the interpretations of “inside" readers. A binary model is too simplistic to encompass the range of contexts from which readers read. Chapter three discusses typography, orthography, and interlanguage in relation to (Low) German, and suggests the importance of these features to a discussion of the texts. Chapters four through six examine Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970), Anne Konrad's The Blue Jar (1985), and Armin Wiebe's The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (1984) respectively. Each novel's thematic concern with cultural boundaries serves as a framework for interpreting its physical and linguistic features. Chapter seven concludes by examining the influence of my own fragmented identity on the development of my argument, and revisits the issue of authorial intent in our politically less-than-perfect world. A lengthy appendix serves as a pluralistic glossary to the texts, and contains the responses to my questionnaires. A brief section outlines some of the appendix's interesting patterns and trends. An index to the appendix is provided since the appendix is not arranged alphabetically.
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Muganiwa, Josephine. "Shifting identities: representations of Shona women in selected Zimbabwean fiction." Thesis, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/26875.
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Bibliography: leaves 215-230This thesis uses a postcolonial framework to analyse the construction and representation of identities of Shona women in selected black and white Zimbabwean-authored fiction in English published between 1890 and 2015. The study traces meanings associated with Shona women’s identities as ascribed by dominant powers in every epoch to create narratives that reflect the power dynamics. The thesis argues that identities are complex, characterized by various intersections such as race, gender, class and ethnicity. Shona women have to negotiate their identities in various circumstances resulting in shifting multiple identities. The thesis focuses on how such identities are represented in the selected texts. Findings reveal that the colonial project sought to write the Shona women out of existence, and when they appeared negative images of dirt, slothfulness and immorality were ascribed to them. These images continued after independence to justify male dominance of women. However, the lived experience of women shows they have agency and tend to shift identities in relation to specific circumstances. Shona women’s identities are dynamic and multifarious as they aim at relevance in their socioeconomic and political circumstances. Representations of Shona women’s identities are therefore influenced by the aim of the one representing them. All representations are therefore arbitrary and must be interrogated in order to deconstruct meaning and understand the power dynamics at play. The works analysed are Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), Cythia Marangwanda’s Shards (2014), Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), Violet Masilo’s The African Tea Cosy (2010), Eric Harrison’s Jambanja (2006), Dangarembgwa’s The Book of Not (2006), Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother (2012) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009).
English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)
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Belluccini, Federica. "“A MUCH MILDER MEDIUM”: ENGLISH AND GERMAN WOMEN WRITERS IN ITALY 1840-1880." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10222/14358.
Full textAbstract:
Travel writing is by definition an open and hybrid form that encompasses a variety of genres, styles, and modes of presentation. This study focuses on four little-known travel texts about Italy written between 1840 and 1880 by two English and two German women writers and shows how, by exploiting the openness of the form of travel writing, they broadened its scope beyond mere description to provide insight into national ideologies and identities while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere of influence. This study considers the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Adele Schopenhauer’s Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) (2007), Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy, in 1864 (1864), and Fanny Lewald’s Reisebriefe aus Deutschland, Italien und Frankreich 1877, 1878 (1880).
In the first chapter, the four texts under consideration are presented against the backdrop of nineteenth-century sexual ideology of the ‘separate spheres’ and the conventions of women’s travel writing. A survey of the long tradition of English and German travellers to Italy and their writings is provided to establish the context in which the texts were produced. Also considered is the role they play in the narrative of Italian nation-building. In the second chapter, the discussion of Rambles in Germany and Italy examines how, by presenting herself as a mother and an educator, Shelley foregrounds the pedagogical purpose of the book, which aims at garnering the sympathy of her British audience for the oppressive political situation of the Italian people and their growing nationalism. The third chapter explores Schopenhauer’s attempt in Florenz to create her own gendered version of the guidebook for travellers in the style of Murray and Baedeker and to revive the memory of the democratic institutions of thirteenth-century Florence at a time when Italians were fighting for democratic reforms and independence. The fourth chapter shows how, in Italics, the representation of Italy in the wake of its partial unification in 1861 is closely intertwined with Cobbe’s own thinking on politics, religion, and women’s emancipation. The fifth chapter examines how, in Reisebriefe, the discussion of the social and political changes that had affected both Italy and Germany in the previous forty years allows Lewald to engage in a reflection on her own femininity and on the role of women in the newly formed German nation.
Shelley, Schopenhauer, Cobbe and Lewald each used travel writing to explore their own identities as women and as writers. Pushing the form beyond exposition into the realm of social commentary, they used it to shape public opinion and to explore new roles for women in society.
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Mukiwa, Faresi Rumbidzai. "Women and utterance in contexts of violence : Nehanda, Without a name and The strange virgins by Yvonne Vera." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/1632.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation is a study of women and utterance in contexts of violence in the three selected novels written by the late Yvonne Vera: Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), and The Stone Virgins (2002). A study of the representation of women in particular is appropriate because their role in the making of the history of Zimbabwe has been deliberately undermined or ignored by 'patriotic' historians and politicians alike. This study incorporates a historical and post-colonial feminist analysis of women and their empowerment through utterance in Vera's novels. Their achieving utterance is seen as a way of countering a past tendency to focus on women being victims of patriarchal ideologies with little being done to expose the degree and nature of women's resistance against oppressive, socially constructed gender relations. The kind of violence experienced by Vera's women is both physical (rape and murder) and psychological. Two dimensions of utterance have been explored in this study. Firstly, the study examined what the characters can and cannot say about their conditions of suffering. This entailed an examination of their cultural and contextual limitations as well as their personal difficulties. Secondly, the study investigated how Vera, writing some fifteen years after the events she depicts and with the advantage of hindsight, represents her women characters as agents of their own recovery from the violation perpetrated against them. This involved an analysis of Vera's utterance and her thematic concerns, especially her revisioning of history in breaking the silence of her women characters. Positioned in relation to existing critical works on Vera's novels, this study's contribution to the critical debate has been its demonstration of how Vera, through the use of her narrative technique and unique poetic style was able to challenge the conditions of women in the past in a way that has relevance to present-day Zimbabwe and offers possibilities for the future Zimbabwe.Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.
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Chiriseri, Zoe Tessa Takudzwa. "South African chick lit and the ghost of the township: Cynthia Jele's happiness is a four-letter word." Thesis, 2017. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/24541.
Full textAbstract:
Submitted in the partial fulfilment for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of African Literature University of the Witwatersrand, March 2017This research reads the popular literature genre, chick lit, as a site for the elaboration of new forms of womanhood in post-Apartheid South Africa and through an analysis of the novel Happiness is a Four-Letter Word seeks to discover how new constructs of black female identity in the genre of chick lit disrupt as well as extend earlier representations of female experience in South Africa. The literary aspect of this research is essentially a genre study that attempts to identify how we recognize genre. Chick lit was initially read as a homogenously white normative genre, it was imagined, theorized and researched through the western gaze to the exclusion of other races and classes. This research rejects this essentialism of gender and as such recognizes that when addressing gender in Africa not only race and class need to be contextualized but further historical and cultural contexts are fundamental when constructing the black woman’s subjectivity. Postfeminism is understood as a modern social sensibility declaring that women are ‘now empowered,’ and celebrating and encouraging their consequent ‘freedom’ to return to normatively feminine pursuits. There is a growing field of research around postfeminism and chick lit pertaining to black African women and this is where this research locates itself. By positioning existing western literature, on chick lit, in dialogue with scholarship around chick lit in Africa, a transnational analytic and methodological approach to the critical study of chick lit and postfeminism can be made. Chick lit signals a transition for black women living in post-Apartheid South Africa, one of upward social mobility. This research looks at the contradictory space that black middleclass women occupy in this transition. There is a spectral ‘other’ that restricts black women in fully expressing their agency in the private sphere despite the progress made for women on a national scale. This I have called ‘the Ghost of the Township.’ I explore the extent to which the narrative opens up alternative avenues for writers to represent women’s interests. The author, Cynthia Jele, like other authors writing chick lit about black African women, illustrates how women writers can rethink and reposition the roles of women as they continue to live in patriarchal societies that marginalize and oppress them. In this research, I endeavor to explore if and how these new roles for women create contradictory zones for women by at once empowering and oppressing them. I also ask to what extent things have changed for black women and examine the effects of these changes.
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