Academic literature on the topic 'Dramatic writing; Women writers'

Of the generation of playwrights who began to write around 1968. Howard Barker came more belatedly than some to full critical recognition, but has emerged in recent years as a major voice in all the available dramatic media: thus, among his most recent work, Scenes from an Execution was for radio and The Blow for television, while The Castle was premiered by the RSC at The Pit in November 1985 – and last spring he contributed an updated final act of his own when adapting Middleton's Women Beware Women for production at the Royal Court. Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler interviewed Howard Barker on his earlier work in Theatre Quarterly No.40 (1981), and now Finlay Donesky discusses with the dramatist the more recent development of his writing, as of the thinking about society and his own craft which underpins it. The interview was conducted in July 1985 while Donesky was in England on a fellowship from the University of Michigan, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the plays of Barker, Brenton, and Hare.

The theme of this paper are the nineteenth century woman authors in the United Kingdom and their writing. A brief overview of the woman writers during the whole century will be given. The most important authors will be represented. The paper will also explore the economic, social, political and other circumstances that determined their writing and try to represent their lives, their struggles, their writing and the styles they used.

In his Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (1559), Lodovico Domenichi publishes the poetry of fifty-three women authors across borders of nation, city, politics, religion, profession, class, and genre. Among them, thirty-five dedicate or address their compositions to another woman, thus constructing their own female audience and community. Through the analysis of the sonnets of two well known writers, Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna, and two almost unknown writers, Lucrezia Figliucci and Cassandra Petrucci, this article seeks to establish why and how so many Renaissance women authors dedicated poems to, or addressed another woman author, and how these poems inform our understanding of their authors’ relationships. These texts reveal the importance of literary friendships which encouraged and promoted reciprocal admiration and respect, and show that, although these women poets did abide by sixteenth-century conventions of language and imagery, they also drew consciously from each other’s writings, following closely each other’s cues, style, and preferences, thus establishing a meaningful dialogic mode.

In response to concerns about declining writing instruction in K-12 classrooms, this qualitative interview study draws on ethnodrama to better understand teachers’ experiences teaching writing in one Canadian province. Through dramaturgical coding of 21 transcripts, we examine teachers’ objectives, conflicts, and tactics in teaching writing, as well as the significant role of educators’ subjectivities as writers and writing teachers, the settings in which they work, the people who influence their thinking and practice, and their engagement in reflexive inquiry. Two dramatic vignettes explore these themes. We then discuss implications for creating a province-wide professional learning network in critical writing pedagogies.

The article aims to withdraw the works of women writers from years of oblivion and neglect. These are the writers who depicted the dire consequence of war and its impact on women. The article draws parallels between the dedication, commitment of female factory workers, their readiness to sacrifice their own health for the common sacred cause and the heroic deeds of the soldiers fighting in the battlefield. The article also includes a number of works by women writers together with their interpretations which come to confirm the creative skills of the latter.

This essay analyzes how multiethnic women writers of the Americas draw a map of a critical geography by delineating the interrelated brutalization of human beings and the environment at the colonial-decolonial interface. Its theoretical approach is comparative, interdisciplinary, and intersectional and embedded in Cultural/ Post-Colonial Studies and Ecocriticism with the objective to problematize the issue of identity, ethnicity, and gender in correlation with the land qua place and style of life within a capitalist system. The objective is to reveal and examine the decolonial attitude in texts by multiethnic women writers of the Americas: what is decolonization and how is it translated into the narrative structure, style and theme?

Reading has received renewed scrutiny in the digital age, a result of the defamiliarization of the medium that has also brought about a rethinking of what is meant by “text,” “book,” and “author.” Fascination with large-scale data analysis has shifted attention toward modes of reading that sample the source to produce a statistical artifact from which we can in turn read clusterings of words, shifts in topic or register, or changing orthographic habits. These remote reading practices, however, fail to capitalize on valuable modeling of the individual text, but more recently researchers have been exploring ways of bringing these two ends of the digital spectrum into closer conversation. This article explores the study of readership and reception of pre-Victorian women’s writing through these emerging digital methods, examining two collections (Women Writers Online and Women Writers in Review) related to early women’s writing with large-scale analytical methods that engage with the detailed textual models in these collections’ metadata and markup.

This thesis explores the concept of black womanhood and female identity in Africa and its diaspora. It examines questions of black womanhood in relation to cultural concepts of black women. It analyses the ways black women perceive and represent themselves and how they articulate their self-perceptions within and outside the traditional cultures of their societies. The problems of black women foregrounded in most postcolonial black women's texts reflect their marginal and oppressed position. The study will explore the textual voice, social and political agency, and how black women's experiences and histories are articulated in the writing of four contemporary black women writers from Africa and the Caribbean. Contesting and reacting against distorted and marginalizing constructions in black men's texts, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ema Brodber and Olive Senior portray a black womanhood which challenges black women's marginality in literature and in society. I suggest that the writers' concerns, focus and narrative strategies contribute to an understanding of the ways in which black women perceive themselves. The four writers create a variety of characters who illustrate individual as well as communal gender and class-specific conflicts produced by their socio-historical realities. The writers’ perceptions and sensibilities as women are informed by their different backgrounds and relationships to their societies. Their narrative points of view which are grounded in history and which involve use of the oral storytelling techniques of their societies reflect the diversity and complexity of black women's lives and experiences.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis examines how women writers from Uganda and South Africa simultaneously offer a critique of nationalist narratives and articulate a gendered nationalism. My focus will be on the new imaginings of women in and of the nation that are being produced through the narratives of emerging women writers in post-repressive nation-states. I explore the linkages in post-conflict writing by focusing on the literary representations of women and womanhood, while taking into account some of the differences in how these writers write women in these two post-repressive regimes. I read the narratives from these two countries together because, in the last fifty years, both Uganda and South Africa have been through prolonged periods of political repression and instability followed by negotiated transitions to new political dispensations. I use the phrase post-repressive to refer to the post-civil war era after 1986 in Uganda and the post-apartheid period subsequent to the 1994 first democratic elections in South Africa. From the late 1990s, there has been a steady increase in fiction written by emerging women writers in Uganda and South Africa. The term emerging women writers in the Ugandan literary context refers to the writers who have benefitted from the emergence of FEMRITE Publications, the publishing house of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association; in the South African setting, I use the term to define black women writers publishing for the first time in a liberated state. The current political climate in both countries has inaugurated a new era for women writers; cracks are widening for these new voices, creating more spaces that allow them to foreground, interrogate, engage and address wide-ranging topics which lacked more forms of expression in the past. This study explores how women writers from Uganda and South Africa attempt to capture women’s experiences in literary texts and seeks to find ways of interpreting how such constructs of female identity in the aftermath of different forms of oppression articulate various signs of rupture and continuation with earlier representations of female experience in these two nation states. There are three core chapters in this thesis. I approach the gendered experience as represented in the fictional narratives of emerging women writers through three different perspectives; namely, war and the aftermath, popular literary genres, and identity markers. In the process, I try to think through the following questions: How are writers reclaiming and re-evaluating women’s participation during the oppressive regimes of civil war in Uganda and apartheid in South Africa? How are women writers rethinking and repositioning the roles of women as they continue to live in patriarchal societies that marginalize and oppress them? To what extent have things changed for women in the aftermath of these oppressive regimes as represented in the texts? What new representations of women are emerging? For whom, and from what positions, are these women writing? Is literary representation a reiteration of political representation that ends up not being effective? What is the relation between literary and political representation? Do these narratives open up alternative avenues for writers to represent women’s interests? How do new female literary representations emerge in different novels such as chick lit and crime fiction?<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die wyses waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika krities kyk na nasionalisitiese narratiewe en tegelyk ook na ‘n gendered nasionalisme. Daar word gefokus op die nuwe uitbeeldinge van vroue in en van die nasies wat spruit uit die narratiewe van opkomende vroueskrywers in nasiestate in die post-onderdrukking-tydperk. Deur te fokus op die uitbeeldinge van vroue en vroulikheid word die verbande tussen post-konflik-skryfwerk ondersoek, en word ook rekening gehou met etlike verskille in die wyses waarop vroue deur sodanige skrywers in spesifieke post-onderdrukking-regimes uitgebeeld word. Die narratiewe uit die twee lande word saam gelees, want in die loop van die afgelope vyftig jaar ondervind sowel Uganda as Suid-Afrika langdurige politieke onderdrukking en onbestendigheid, gevolg deur onderhandelde oorgange na nuwe politieke bedelings. Die term post-onderdrukking verwys na die tydperk na 1986 na die burgeroorlog in Uganda en na die post-apartheid-era na afloop van die eerste demokratiese verkiesing in Suid-Afrika in 1994. Sedert die laat-1990’s was daar ‘n geleidelike toename in fiksie deur opkomende vroueskrywers in Uganda en Suid-Afrika. In die Ugandese letterkundige konteks verwys die term opkomende vroueskrywers na skrywers wat gebaat het by die totstandkoming van FEMRITE Publications, die uitgewery van die Ugandese vroueskrywersvereniging; in die Suid-Afrikaanse opset word die term gebruik om swart vroueskrywers te beskryf wat vir die eerste keer in ‘n bevryde land kon publiseer. Die huidige politieke klimaat in albei lande het vir vroueskrywers ‘n nuwe era ingelei; vir sulke vars stemme gaan daar breër barste oop wat hulle toelaat om al hoe meer ruimte te skep waarin wyduiteenlopende onderwerpe, wat in die verlede minder uitdrukkingsgeleenthede geniet het, vooropgestel, ondersoek, betrek en aangespreek kan word. Die proefskrif ondersoek die maniere waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika die vroulike ervaring in letterkundige geskrifte uitbeeld. Daar word gepoog om te vertolk hoe sodanige konstrukte vroulike identiteit verwoord in die nadraai van verskeie soorte onderdrukking en uiting gee aan verskillende tekens van beide die onderbreking in en die voortsetting van vroeëre uitbeeldinge van die vroulike ervaring in die twee nasiestate. Die proefskrif bevat drie kernhoofstukke. Die gendered ervaring word uit drie afsonderlike hoeke benader soos dit in die narratiewe verteenwoordig word, naamlik: oorlog en die nadraai daarvan; populêre letterkundige genres; en identiteitskenmerke. In die loop daarvan word getrag om die volgende vrae te deurdink: Hoe word vroue se deelname tydens die onderdrukkende regimes van die burgeroorlog in Uganda en apartheid in Suid-Afrika hereien en herwaardeer? Hoe herdink en herposisioneer vroueskrywers tans die rolle van vroue soos hulle steeds in patriargale samelewings voortleef waar hulle opsygeskuif en onderdruk word? In hoe ‘n mate het sake vir vroue verander in die nadraai van die onderdrukking, soos dit in die tekste uitgebeeld word? Watter vars representasies van vroue kom onder die nuwe bedeling tot stand? Vir wie, en uit watter posisies, skryf hierdie vroue tans? Is die letterkundige representasie bloot ‘n herhaling van die politieke representasie, wat dan op niks doeltreffends uitloop nie? Wat is die verhouding tussen politieke en letterkundige representasie? Baan hierdie narratiewe alternatiewe weë oop waar skrywers die belange van vroue kan verteenwoordig? Hoe kom nuwe vroulike letterkundige representasies in verskillende narratiewe vorms soos chick lit en misdaadfiksie voor?

This thesis studies the progressive nature of women’s writing and the various factors that helped and hindered the successful publication of women’s written works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis interrogates culturally encoded definitions of the term “success” in relation to the status of these women writers. In a time when success meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “attainment of wealth or position”, women could never achieve a level of success equal to the male elite. The dichotomous worldview, in which women were excluded from almost all active participation in the public sphere, led to a literary protest by women. However, the male-privileged binary system is seen critically to affect women’s literary success. Hence, a redefinition of success will specifically refer to the literary experience of these women writers and a long-lasting recognition of this experience in the twentieth century. An examination of literary techniques used in key works from Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen suggests that there was a critical double standard with which women writers were constantly faced. The literary techniques, used by the earlier writers, fail in overcoming this critical double standard because of their emphasis on revolution. However, the last two women writers become literary successes (according to my reinterpretation of the term) because of their particular emphasis on amelioration rather than revolution. The conclusion of the thesis suggests that despite the “unsuccessful” literary attempts by the first three women authors, there is an overall positive progression in women’s journey toward literary success. Described as the ‘generational effect’, this becomes the fundamental point of the study, because together these women represent a combined movement which challenges a system of patriarchal tradition, encouraging women to continue to push the gender relations’ boundaries in order to be seen as individual, successful writers.

This thesis explores how the celebratory figure of the hysteric as imagined by proponents of écriture féminine is developed and complicated in more recent representations of hysterical female bodies in contemporary women’s writing in French. With the aim of understanding the evolution of the hysteric from a traditionally negative embodiment of patriarchal parameters of femininity to a potentially revolutionary female figure, this thesis undertakes single-chapter studies of the most telling contemporary representations of hysterical bodies. The first chapter focuses on the physicality of Lorette Nobécourt’s writing in La Démangeaison (1994) and La Conversation (1998), and argues that the abject subject matter of the former coupled with the innovative and experimental form and style of the latter constitutes an almost physical performance of ‘madness’. The second chapter focuses on Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996) and argues that Darrieussecq’s hybrid narrator harnesses the anti-establishment carnival force of the hysteric in a shifting and grotesque body which forms the epitome of all that threatens order. The final two chapters focus on anorexia as a contemporary equivalence of Victorian hysteria. The first of these deals with Petite (1994) by Geneviève Brisac and Thornytorinx (2005) by Camille de Peretti and examines how these writers recreate the fragmentation of the anorexic self through a realist, performative ‘rhetoric of anorexia’. The second deals with Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres (2002), Biographie de la faim (2004) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000), and argues that Nothomb privileges a disembodied aesthetic that presents a masculine fantasy of the female body which all but erases the feminine. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to discover how and why selected contemporary female authors choose to engage with – and reject – 1970s models in which writing by women was presented as a means of finding one’s own voice, as well as a platform for politically significant action. It argues that new configurations of the hysteric nevertheless achieve a certain social and political impact.

During the period of economic expansion and openness to personal expression and individuality following Deng Xiaoping's reforms, the Chinese avant-garde women writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the female body, image, and voice. This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously construct a private space in their fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that this space is created by presenting alternative forms of female sexuality, in contrast to the heterosexual wife and mother, and by adding details of their own personal histories in their writing. Key to this argument is the Chinese concept of si (privacy) and how the female avant-garde writers turn its traditionally negative associations into a positive tool for writing the self. While male appropriations of images of the female body for political or state-authored purposes are not new to the contemporary period or even the twentieth century, the female avant-garde writers are particularly conscious of the ways in which their bodies are not their own. Moreover, contemporary criticism that labels the works of the female avant-garde writers as self-exposing, titillating, and trite overlooks the difference between authorial intent and commercial or political appropriation, which has led to a profound misunderstanding of these works. In addition, it has also led to a conflation of the female avant-garde writers' works with those of the later body writers. Therefore the purpose of this dissertation is to provide a closer look at the concept of si-privacy and how it intersects with various forms of self-writing, as well as how it is used as a narrative strategy by three contemporary female authors, Xu Kun, Lin Bai, and Hai Nan. Specifically, I consider the similarities and differences in the ways that these authors create and orient themselves in both their memoirs and their self-referential fiction.