Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Irish women's literary fiction'
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1
O'Byrne, Deirdre. "Irish women's rural fiction since independence." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274711.
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Wydenbach, Joanna Susan. "Irish women's fiction 1900-1924 : literature and history." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.437734.
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Meredith, Robert Beorn. "Reviving women : Irish women's prose writing 1890-1920." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.300779.
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Doyle, Trista Dawn. "Insidious Vulnerability: Women's Grief and Trauma in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107960.
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Thesis advisor: James M. SmithThis dissertation examines individual experiences of grief and trauma in Irish writing from 1935 to 2013, focusing specifically on novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, and Eimear McBride. It offers a feminist reclamation of personal forms of loss that fall outside the purview of documented history and that typically go overlooked in literary criticism. Examples in this study include the suffering caused by the natural death of a family member, infertility, domestic and sexual abuse, social ostracism, institutionalization, and forced adoption. Through careful close readings of Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938), Beckett’s Molloy (1955), Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), and McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), I unpack how women’s insidious vulnerability to grief and trauma manifests in modern and contemporary Irish fiction. The works I discuss here reveal the depth and complexity of grief—making visible forms of loss and violence that society tends to ignore, working through what impedes the grieving process, and giving voice to underrepresented experiences of emotional and psychological suffering. Over three chapters, I engage with the discourses of trauma theory, Irish memory studies, and modernism and its afterlives. I draw on feminist psychiatrist Laura S. Brown’s discussion of “insidious trauma” to inform my own concept, “insidious vulnerability,” which I use to refer to the persistent threat of loss and violence that haunts marginalized groups in their daily lives. Likewise, I make reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to distinguish trauma from other forms of emotional and psychological distress. I contribute to Irish memory studies by extending the critical conversation beyond public historical events (like the Easter Rising of 1916)—to include private forms of grief and trauma, particularly in the lives of women. Furthermore, I focus on authors who innovate, whose novels exhibit dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional realist narratives and who attempt new modes of representation in an effort to articulate the inexpressible and the unexpressed. Bowen and Beckett stand as representatives of late modernism (1930s-1950s), while Barry and McBride help extend literary modernist afterlives into the twenty-first century
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Naidoo, Y. "Speaking our minds : Black women's fiction, cultural politics and literary forms." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.339685.
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Weekes, Ann Owens. "BEGINNING A TRADITION: IRISH WOMEN'S WRITING, 1800-1984 (EDGEWORTH, JOHNSTONE, KEANE, IRELAND)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/183990.
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In search of an Irish women's literary tradition, this dissertation examines the fiction of Irish women writers from Maria Edgeworth in 1800 to Jennifer Johnston in 1984. Contemporary anthropological, psychoanalytical, and literary theory suggests that women, even those of different cultures, excluded from public life and limited to the domestic sphere, would develop similar interests. When these interests ran counter to those of the dominant group, the women would have had to develop a technique to simultaneously express and encode these interests and concerns. This technique in literature, and specifically in the writers considered, often results in a muted plot. On the overt level the plot reifies the values and tenets of the establishment, but, at the muted level, the plot often expresses contradictory and subversive values. In 1800, Maria Edgeworth employs a "naive" narrator who both expresses male disinterest in the awful situations of the women he depicts and also distances the author from any implied criticism of this male perspective. Edgeworth combines her subtle expose with a critique of the desires encoded as "human," but actually merely "male," in canonical literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross again use an arguably deceptive narratorial device, as does Molly Keane in 1981. Elizabeth Bowen employs a more subtle narratorial device in The Last September, but one which still distances the author from her text. The re-vision of texts, literary and historical, indeed the re-visioning of history, recurs in Bowen, Keane, Kate O'Brien, Julia O'Faolain and Jennifer Johnston. Finally, one can trace similarities of both theme and technique over the whole period, despite the modifications of time and social change. We can also point to the major thematic and structural change which occurs when, in the past ten to fifteen years, writers have reversed the placement of muted and overt plot.
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Byrne, Aoife. "Modern homes? : an analysis of Irish and British women's literary constructions of domestic space, 1929-1946." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/268014.
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Cosy aphorisms such as “home is where the heart is” have always suggested a universal understanding of home. But home is a subjective concept that defies any homogenous designation. If, as Walter Benjamin told us, a consequence of modernity is the necessary sequestration of ‘bourgeois’ domestic spaces from an increasingly ‘modern’ outside world, such a spatial binarism is notably absent in the works of Irish and British women authors from 1929-1946. On the contrary, in these texts, domestic space has multiple functions, not least of which is its usefulness in exploring concepts of modernity, including the consequences of industrial scale warfare on civilian life. During this time, women authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Nancy Mitford, Evadne Price and Daphne du Maurier respond to the ways in which the ideas of home were in a continuous state of redefinition. They do this for multiple reasons. Factors changing these authors’ perceptions of d0mestic space vary from material, aesthetic, external, broadly philosophical and political. These issues are also sometimes deeply violent, as is seen, for instance, in the burnings of the houses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in the Irish War of Independence, and the destruction of houses by bombing in the London Blitz. This project analyses Irish and British domestic spaces as women authors imagine them after the formal segregation of the two countries with the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922). As both countries move in different political and cultural directions, so too, these authors perceive, do the meanings of home. This changes the ways in which authors construct both the conceptual ideas of home and the material realities of houses in both countries. Congruently, this cross-cultural analysis complicates our understanding of these women authors’ responses to changing meanings of home, women’s issues, and the experience of modernity in the period.
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Painter, Ainsley. "From caramel factory to charity ward : aspects of women's fiction in the Japanese proletarian literary movement /." Title page, contents and introduction only, 1995. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arp148.pdf.
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Dunbar, Siobhan Mary. "(Un)silencing the voices of the country girls: A journey into twentieth-century Irish girlhood through the fiction of Edna O'Brien." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27977.
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Edna O'Brien is a prolific and highly successful contemporary Irish novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Her first six novels were banned in 1960s Ireland and since then, her subversive writing about Irish women's lives has often sparked controversy and debate in and even beyond her Irish homeland.
This thesis explores O'Brien's portrayal of rural Irish girlhood in post-Independence, twentieth-century Ireland in the novels The Country Girls (1960), A Pagan Place (1970), the short story collection Returning (1982), as well as the later novel Down by the River (1997). Chapter One delves into the mother-daughter bond in O'Brien's fiction. Chapter Two, in turn, examines the often painful father-daughter relationship Finally, Chapter Three discusses O'Brien's complex portrayal of female sexuality. This study argues that O'Brien constructs powerful and haunting fictional voices of "Irish girlhood" and through them, makes a unique contribution to the Irish Bildungsroman tradition. Her fiction points to some of the immense challenges confronted by young adolescent girls in mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland, not only in their homes but also within their relationships, schools, and rural communities.
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Slivka, Jennifer A. "Strangers at Home: Threshold Identities in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing." Scholarly Repository, 2011. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/534.
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This dissertation examines how contemporary Irish women writers dismantle national conceptions linking Irish women to the hearth and home by offering an alternate version of women’s lived experience, which nationalist ideologies have simplified. I consider how these writers define “home”—the domestic, the familiar, the intimate—as complicated by sexuality, exile, and violence. Using Freud’s theory of the uncanny as a lens, I analyze how these writers question established social relations in order to uncover uneasy relationships to self, home, and homeland. In my project, postcolonial theory and transnational feminisms, coupled with trauma theory, facilitate the contextualization of the uncanny as a response to the hybrid identities, dislocations, and effects of violence on gender roles within the nation. The first two chapters examine Edna O’Brien’s later fiction, which unsettles conceptions of the nation by emphasizing the experiences of marginal figures, thereby questioning who belongs within the nation’s borders. The next two chapters on the fiction of Jennifer Johnston and Mary Beckett reveal how the crossing of the public into the private sphere exposes a paradoxical homespace that is both haven and prison for rich Anglo-Irish Dubliners and working-class Catholics in Belfast. The final chapter on Kate O’Riordan’s novels explores issues of exile, alienation, and trauma through a multi-generational lens, revealing how memories of “home” and fraught parent-child relationships at once hinder and facilitate identity formation. In the epilogue, I briefly discuss how contemporary Irish poetry could address the issues raised by the works of fiction examined in my project.
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Karmi, Sali. "'Many kinds of strong voices' : transnational encounters and literary ambassadorship in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/68634.
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This research began as an attempt to question to what extent a politics of solidarity and the evolution of a ‘transnational feminism’ which travels across borders can be established within Arab and Western literary novels. While this study, in spirit, takes its lead from the call for ‘feminism without borders’ within the writings of two contemporary women writers, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaykh, it responds to the notion of transnationalism and literary ambassadorship from the perspective of Arab-Western relations. This process raises key questions for the reading of women’s writings across sensitive cultural divides: How can the literary contributions of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh help in reshaping the form and content of a transnational and cultural interaction between the Arab World and the West? Do women writers articulate their concerns in the same manner across cultures? To what extent can literature cross borders and be fully engaged within diverse women’s concerns? And what might hinder the circulation of a transnational literary interaction? These contemporary women writers have been studied in the belief that their novels are committed to a transnational feminist agenda. Both writers place their feminist concerns within a national framework that they constantly negotiate. However, this comparison to test the value of women’s writings across borders has been challenged by a more complex study of factors that intervene along the way. The politics of reception, the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of the writers’ literary texts, the writers’ own shifting allegiances moving from nationalism to broader multicultural, cosmopolitan and transnational frameworks, are all factors to be taken into account. These factors have a direct impact on the context through which the literary texts have to be studied. Hence, this study seeks to contribute to this task by showing how these writers are engaged in the process of adjusting, reconstructing and even transcending their cultural milieus.
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Balboni, Elisa. "No(i)rthern Ireland: Crime fiction and the northern-irish scene. Proposed translation into italian of two short stories from "belfast noir"." Master's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2015. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/8176/.
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The present thesis aims at proving the importance of cultural and literary contexts in the practice of translation: I shall show that, in the case of Northern Irish crime fiction, knowledge of both Northern Irish history and culture as well as of the genre of crime fiction are essential prerequisites for the production of a “responsible” translation. I will therefore offer a brief overview of the history of crime and detective fiction and its main subgenres; some of the most important authors and works will be presented as well, in an analysis that goes from the early years of the genre to the second half of the 20th century. I will then move the focus to Northern Ireland, its culture and its history, and particular attention will be paid to fiction writing in Ireland and Northern Ireland, with a focus on the peculiar phenomenon of “Troubles Trash”. I will tackle the topic of Northern Irish literature and present the contemporary scene of Northern Irish crime fiction; the volume from which the texts for the translation have been taken will be presented, namely Belfast Noir. Subsequently the focus will move on the theoretical framework within which the translations were produced: I will present a literary review of the most significative developments in Translation Studies, with particular attention to the “cultural turn” that has characterised this subject since the 1960s. I will then highlight the phenomenon of “realia” in translation and analyse the approaches of different scholars to the translation of culture-bound references. The final part represents the culmination and practical application of all that was presented in the previous sections: I will discuss the translation of culture-bound references according to the strategies presented in Chapter 4, referring to the proposed translations of two stories. Such analysis aims to show that not only expert linguistic knowledge, but also cultural awareness and a wide literary background are needed in order to make conscious choices in translation.
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Brooks, Kinitra Dechaun Harris Trudier. "The black maternal heterogeneity and resistance in literary representations of black mothers in 20th century African American and Afro-Caribbean women's fiction /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,1736.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.Title from electronic title page (viewed Sep. 16, 2008). "... in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature." Discipline: English; Department/School: English.
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Lawrence, Lindsy M. "Seriality and domesticity the Victorian serial and domestic ideology in the family literary magazine /." Fort Worth, Tex. : Texas Christian University, 2008. http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-05052008-151851/unrestricted/Lawrence.pdf.
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Limond, Kate Elizabeth. "Authorship and strategies of representation in the fiction of A.S. Byatt." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/30175.
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This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics.
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Habel, Chad Sean, and chad habel@gmail com. "Ancestral Narratives in History and Fiction: Transforming Identities." Flinders University. Humanities, 2006. http://catalogue.flinders.edu.au./local/adt/public/adt-SFU20071108.133216.
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This thesis is an exploration of ancestral narratives in the fiction of Thomas Keneally and Christopher Koch. Initially, ancestry in literature creates an historical relationship which articulates the link between the past and the present. In this sense ancestry functions as a type of cultural memory where various issues of inheritance can be negotiated. However, the real value of ancestral narratives lies in their power to aid in the construction of both personal and communal identities. They have the potential to transform these identities, to transgress natural boundaries and to reshape conventional identities in the light of historical experience.
For Keneally, ancestral narratives depict national forbears who narrate the nation into being. His earlier fictions present ancestors of the nation within a mythic and symbolic framework to outline Australian national identity. This identity is static, oppositional, and characterized by the delineation of boundaries which set nations apart from one another. However, Keneallys more recent work transforms this conventional construction of national identity. It depicts an Irish-Australian diasporic identity which is hyphenated and transgressive: it transcends the conventional notion of nations as separate entities pitted against one another. In this way Keneallys ancestral narratives enact the potential for transforming identity through ancestral narrative.
On the other hand, Kochs work is primarily concerned with the intergenerational trauma causes by losing or forgetting ones ancestral narrative. His novels are concerned with male gender identity and the fragmentation which characterizes a self-destructive idea of maleness. While Keneallys characters recover their lost ancestries in an effort to reshape their idea of what it is to be Australian, Kochs main protagonist lives in ignorance of his ancestors life. He is thus unable to take the opportunity to transform his masculinity due to the pervasive cultural amnesia surrounding his family history and its role in Tasmanias past.
While Keneally and Koch depict different outcomes in their fictional ancestral narratives they are both deeply concerned with the potential to transform national and gender identities through ancestry.
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Woo, Chimi. "Cross-Cultural Encounter And The Novel: Nation, Identity, And Genre In Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1204725332.
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"Taking back history : Irish women's fiction, 1928-1988." Thesis, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10388/6293.
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In this study of modern historical fictions by female
writers I argue that there is an "invisible intertext" in
women's writing in Ireland that challenges the tradition
discerned by mainstream critics. The mainstream tradition
is, in fact, a male tradition and it includes only those
historical fictions that inscribe a view of modern Irish
history as "the story of the struggle to overcome British
domination."
In an extended first section, I examine modern Irish
literary and historical discourse to reveal the particular
ways that women have been written out. I demonstrate that
a major project of mainstream critics and historians has been
to explain a "clash of cultures" (Protestant and Catholic).
In its insistence that cultural difference has produced
distinct literatures, this project has tended to obscure
cross-cultural similarities in the lives of women. These
similarities, I argue, are evident in women's writing. I
demonstrate also that mainstream literary criticism has fused
a male-dominated literature to a militaristic history to
create a literary canon that excludes female authors.
I then compare historical fictions by female authors
from Elizabeth Bowen (1929) to Jennifer Johnston (1987) to
show that not only do women's texts bear striking similarities
to one another (whether the authors are Catholic or
Protestant) but also that taken together they challenge the
picture of Irish history presented by male authors.
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Lieske, Pamela Jean. "The construction of gendered character in eighteenth-century British women's fiction." 1996. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9638990.
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This study is an examination of how gendered characters in eighteenth-century British women's fiction are constructed and challenged. The novels under study are Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph (1761), Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House (1793). Chapter one, "Theory, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers," discusses how eighteenth-century scholars often substitute a focus on women writers and their female characters for a more thorough examination of gender and gender issues. Using post-structuralist and feminist-materialist theory, I maintain that it is important to consider a process-oriented conception of male and female identity, and to understand that each sex is continually in dialogue with the other, and with society at large. My subsequent chapters apply this supposition on a practical level. "Negotiating Female Identity in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" argues that Trueworth constructs his masculine identity by associating with "virtuous" women and by avoiding any examination into his own sexual or moral conduct. He and society repeatedly and incorrectly judge the benevolent and high-spirited Betsy to be morally deficient and sexually permissive, and she comes to believe what everyone tells her: that she is a coquette and that it is her fault men sexually harass her. Consequently, Haywood offers no alternative way of perceiving women's gendered identity than by polarizing sexuality and ethics and by collapsing sexuality into gender. "Gender and Disguise in the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph" also focuses on the social indoctrination of women into accepting conservative notions of womanhood. More specifically, it explores the manifestation of heterosexual desire during a time when women were taught to venerate their parents and keep a tight rein over their desires while men were allowed more latitude in expressing their sexuality. The two remaining novels are more progressive in their construction of gendered characters. "A Simple Story: The Complexity of Gender Realized" argues that in Inchbald's novel gendered identity is indeterminate and in flux. Gender is consciously foregrounded with the construction and dismantling of gendered stereotypes, and the repetition and extension of their intergenerational stories. Characters' identities (same sex and different-sex) merge and plotlines (romance, incest, and adultery) are fluid. Finally, "Domestic Ideology and the Delusion of Gendered Stability in The Old Manor House" contends that Orlando and Monimia are deluded about the makeup of their gendered identities and the relationship they have with each other. While they work hard to maintain that separation between the public and private upon which their identities are based, Smith shows us that these spheres are always already intertwined and that it is impossible for heterosexual romance to remain immune from societal forces.
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Glisson, Silas Nease. "Cultural nationalism and colonialism in nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction." Thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/16852.
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This thesis will explore how writers of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction,
namely short stories and novels, used their works to express the social, cultural, and political
events of the period. My thesis will employ a New Historicist approach to discuss the effects
of colonialism on the writings, as well as archetypal criticism to analyse the mythic origins of
the relevant metaphors. The structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov will be used to discuss the
notion of the works' appeal as supernatural or possibly realistic works. The theory of
Mikhail Bakhtin is used to discuss the writers' linguistic choices because such theory focuses
on how language can lead to conflicts amongst social groups.
The introduction is followed by Chapter One, "Ireland as England's Fantasy." This
chapter discusses Ireland's literary stereotype as a fantasyland. The chapter also gives an
overview of Ireland's history of occupation and then contrasts the bucolic, magical Ireland of
fiction and the bleak social conditions of much of nineteenth-century Ireland.
Chapter Two, "Mythic Origins", analyses the use of myth in nineteenth-century horror
stories. The chapter discusses the merging of Christianity and Celtic myth; I then discuss the
early Irish belief in evil spirits in myths that eventually inspired horror literature.
Chapter Three, "Church versus Big House, Unionist versus Nationalist," analyses
how the conflicts of Church/Irish Catholicism vs. Big House/Anglo-Irish landlordism, proBritish
Unionist vs. pro-Irish Nationalist are manifested in the tales. In this chapter, I argue
that many Anglo-Irish writers present stern anti-Catholic attitudes, while both Anglo-Irish
and Catholic writers use the genre as political propaganda. Yet the authors tend to display
Home Rule or anti-Home Rule attitudes rather than religious loyalties in their stories.
The final chapter of the thesis, "A Heteroglossia of British and Irish Linguistic and
Literary Forms," deals with the use of language and national literary styles in Irish literature
of this period. I discuss Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and its applications to the Irish
novel; such a discussion because nineteenth-century Ireland was linguistically Balkanised,
with Irish Gaelic, Hibemo-English, and British English all in use. This chapter is followed by
a conclusion.English
M. Lit. et Phil. (English)
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Musgrove, Kristie Leigh. "Lilith rising American gothic fiction and the evolution of the female hero in Sarah Wood's Julia and the illuminated baron, E.D.E.N. Southworth's The hidden hand, and Joss Whedon's Buffy The vampire slayer /." 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1096.
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Dowling, Finuala Rachel. "Subversive narrative and thematic strategies : a critical appraisal of Fay Weldon's Fiction." Thesis, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/16680.
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Fay Weldon is a popular, prolific author whose oeuvre stretches from 1967 to the present
and includes 20 novels, three collections of short stories and numerous stage, radio and
television plays, scripts and adaptations. This thesis limits itself to her fiction and follows
the chronological course of Weldon's writing career in five chapters.
Fay Weldon's fiction, situated at the intersection of postmodemism and feminism, is
doubly subversive. It both overturns 'reasonable' narrative conventions and wittily
deconstructs the specious terminology used to define women. Weldon's disobedient female
protagonists - madwomen, criminals, outcasts and she-devils - assert the power of the Other.
Gynocentric themes - single parenthood, sisterhood, reproduction, motherhood, sex and
marriage - are transformed by Weldon into uproarious feminist revenge comedy. This she
achieves through an intertextuality which often involves unorthodox typography, genreswopping
and metafictional devices. Moreover, a unique ventriloquism enables her
omniscient first-person narrators to mimic 'Fay Weldon' herself.
Since her narrators are rebels and iconoclasts, Weldon has always been viewed as a
subversive individual worthy of media attention, especially interviews. For this reason, and
because she is a woman writer who struggled initially against social and domestic odds, the
thesis incorporates in its argument the author's biography and public personae.
Chapter One explores the connections between Weldon's first novels - notably Down
Among the Women (1971) - and early liberationist and anthropological feminism. In Chapter
Two, Bakhtin's dialogic imagination and Derrida's differance provide the basis for a
discussion of multiplicity in Weldon's novels of the late 1970s, particularly Praxis (1979),
shortlisted for the Booker prize. Chapter Three tests the limits of a psychoanalytical model
in accounting for Weldon's novels of (m)Otherhood, including The Life and Loves of a SheDevil
(1983).
Theories of humour and carnival inform Chapter Four's analysis of how Weldon's wit
- at its tendentious best in The Heart of the Country (1987) - declines into innocence.
Finally, Chapter Five sees Weldon's flagging literary reputation as the symptom of authorial
exhaustion and retreat from a feminist agenda. This concluding chapter is, however,
ultimately optimistic that the mercurial author's undeniable talents may reassert themselvesEnglish Studies
D.Litt. et Phil. (English)