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Milling, Jane Rebecca. "The performance and politics of seventeenth century women dramatists." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.388603.
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Mutawakil, Antelak Mohammed Abdulmalek Al. "Gender and the writing of Yemeni women writers : Proefschrift /." Amsterdam : Dutch university press, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40244018p.
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Chabwera, Elinettie Kwanjana. "Writing black womanhood : feminist writing by four contemporary African and black diaspora women writers." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2004. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7186/.
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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.
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Turner, Katherine S. H. "The politics of narrative singularity in British travel writing, 1750-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.296251.
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Dyer, Rachel Louise. "Reading and writing in collaboration : dialogues with Scottish and Canadian women writers." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.340518.
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Spencer, Lynda Gichanda. "Writing women in Uganda and South Africa : emerging writers from post-repressive regimes." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86251.
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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?
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Stanford, Roslyn, and res cand@acu edu au. "Righting Women’s Writing: A re-examination of the journey toward literary success by late Eighteenth-Century and early Nineteenth-century women writers." Australian Catholic University. School of Arts and Sciences, 2002. http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/digitaltheses/public/adt-acuvp25.09042006.
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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.
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Jackson, Laura Ann. "Representations of the hysteric in contemporary women's writing in French." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8944.
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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.
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Tuft, Bryna. "This Is Not a Woman: Literary Bodies and Private Selves in the Works of the Chinese Avant-Garde Women Writers." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12934.
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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.
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Watkinson, Nicola Jayne. "Medieval textual production and the politics of women's writing : case studies of two medieval women writers and their critical reception /." Connect to thesis, 1991. http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000703.
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Mpoke-Bigg, Amba. "Leadership, Voice, and Visibility Strengthening African women’s voice and representation: A case study of the African Women Development Fund’s social justice writing workshop for women writers." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21974.
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Despite recent gains in areas such as school attendance and literacy, the struggle for women’s rights and equality in Africa remains constant. Alongside the socio-economic barriers holding down millions of women, is the fight against the gender bias and stereotyping which puts women in the backseat of decision-making, policy-driving, or leadership roles.This dissertation project is a case study of a women’s social justice writing workshop run by the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), a Pan-African grant-making organisation. Convened three times since 2014, it brings together women from across the continent for a residential camp to sharpen participants’ skills in writing and communicating about social justice issues.This research project attempts to examine the workshop in the context of media for development theory and strategies, which see the media (print, electronic and new media) as the fundamental strategies that drive the process of communicating. (Manyozo). It also looks at its relevance in the context of gender inequalities in media representation in Africa in line with Beijing 1995’s global call.Although to a very limited scale, the study suggests that the workshop has played a small, yet significant role in conceptualising and implementation of a communication for development strategy that emphasizes capacity-building.Harnessing the power of storytelling, the five years since the workshop, has seen many of the African women who participated, produce local content, confidently representing and analysing “our own issues for ourselves in our diversities.” Through their writings, radio shows, news stories, blogs and public speaking engagements, they are joining powerful agents of change in bringing transformation to the struggle to combat gender stereotypes and inequality, which is still far from over.
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Bazzoni, Maria Alberica. "Writing for freedom : body, identity and power in Goliarda Sapienza's narrative." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d99db352-1203-479b-9f1c-7099e384ffe9.
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This thesis explores the theme of freedom in Goliarda Sapienza's narrative, focusing in particular on three works: Lettera aperta (1967), L'arte della gioia (1998, posthumous) and Io, Jean Gabin (2010, posthumous). The analysis concentrates on the interplay between body and power in processes of identity formation; the main aspects taken into consideration are gender, sexuality and political ideology, with specific attention to the power involved in human relationships. This thesis comprises four chapters. The first three develop a close textual analysis of individual works, each one progressing from the exploration of the internal composition of the self to the analysis of identity in its interpersonal and socio-political dimension. The fourth chapter engages with a comparative analysis of the same works’ narrative structures, accounting for the role of writing in the evolution of Sapienza’s narrative. I identify the pivotal tension of Sapienza's works in the ideal of freedom, and propose to define her narrative as Epicurean and anarchic, characteristics that place it at the intersection of post-structuralist and Marxist-feminist discourses. Overall, I argue in favour of Sapienza's originality and significance within the context of 20<sup>th</sup>-century Italian literature. I suggest an affinity between Sapienza's works and the literary legacy of Pirandello and Svevo, as well as certain tenets of postmodern fiction, but also a significant difference, concerning the presence of a tension towards agency and subjectivity, extraneous to the trajectory of the modern and postmodern subject. From a position of marginality and ex-centricity, Sapienza gives voice to a radical aspiration to individual and social transformation, in which writing and literary communication are granted a central role. Her works trace the parable of a strenuous deconstruction of oppressive norms and structures, aimed at retrieving a space of powerful bodily desire, which constitutes the foundation of the process of becoming a subject.
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McDaniel, Jamie Lynn. "Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women’s Writing 1925 – 2005." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1278650822.
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Dantas, Ana Luiza Libanio. "The Autonomous Sex: Female Body and Voice in Alicia Kozameh's Writing of Resistance." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1212634746.
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Hattaway, Meghan Burke. "Fallen Bodies and Discursive Recoveries in British Women's Writing of the Long Nineteenth Century." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339280314.
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Newnum, Anna Kristina Stenson. "The poetry of religion and the prose of life: from evangelicalism to immanence in British women's writing, 1835-1925." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5819.
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The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century.
These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism.
This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.
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Huguley, Piper Gian. "Why Tell the Truth When a Lie Will Do?: Re-Creations and Resistance in the Self-Authored Life Writing of Five American Women Fiction Writers." unrestricted, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04252006-174728/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006.<br>Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Thomas L. McHaney, Elizabeth West, committee members. Electronic text (253 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May15, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (243-253).
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Serraf, Lola. "Writing the ‘People’s War’. Evaluating the myth of the blitz in british women’s fiction of the second World War." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/664058.
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En la memoria popular de los británicos, el Blitz se recuerda como un periodo de la guerra durante el cual la moral de los civiles se mantuvo alta, las producciones del país se vieron poco afectadas por los bombardeos y la voluntad de vencer a los Nazis permaneció más fuerte que nunca en una sociedad fraternal, sin jerarquía social. La «guerra del pueblo» convirtió a los civiles en héroes extraordinarios en su rutina ordinaria, mientras ese nuevo tipo de «guerra total» se libraba tanto en las primeras líneas como en el «frente interno».
Sin embargo, desde fines de los años 1980, varios historiadores han empezado a cuestionar esa versión idealizada del coraje invencible del pueblo británico. En The Myth of the Blitz, Angus Calder escribe que la imagen de una nación unida en la adversidad y resistiendo las dificultades fue casi exclusivamente construida por la propaganda política de los años 1940. Considera necesario cuestionar la memoria colectiva del evento del Blitz, explicando que se ha ignorado lo aterrador y confuso que fueron los bombardeos (1991, p. 18).
Esta tesis sale del capítulo «Formulations of Feeling» en el libro de Calder, en el cual se le da poco crédito a la capacidad de los escritores de la segunda guerra mundial de ver más allá de la propaganda del gobierno británico. El historiador sugiere que la literatura del conflicto ofrece poco material para entender cómo fue realmente la experiencia individual durante los bombardeos, ya que pocos autores trabajan fuera del paradigma del «Mito» (1991, pp. 143-144).
Aunque sea verdad que la literatura fue reclutada dentro del esfuerzo de guerra por un gobierno que la recogía como un principio democrático (Hartley, 1997, pp. 6-7), me parecen reductivos e incompletos los argumentos de Angus Calder y Mark Rawlinson según los cuales los escritos de la guerra eran fuertemente determinados por su relación con los discursos oficiales de las autoridades británicas (Rawlinson, 2000, p. 205). Sostengo que es imprudente considerar que autores de la guerra no podían reflexionar críticamente sobre la sociedad y solamente crearon obras que participaban en la defensa de los objetivos del gobierno.
Esta tesis es entonces uno de los primeros trabajos de recerca que se basa en el marco teórico del «Mito del Blitz» de Angus Calder para analizar obras poco conocidas, escritas por mujeres en los años 1940. En su análisis, Calder deconstruye el ‘mito’ confrontándolo con datos históricos. En este trabajo, sigo la misma metodología, comparando aspectos específicos de la retórica de la «guerra del pueblo» con la producción literaria de escritoras. He destacado tres aspectos principios del estudio de Calder que considero cruciales en su definición del «Blitz spirit»: las «clases socioeconómicas», el «patriotismo» y, más abstracto, la «representación del cuerpo herido». Reflexiono sobre esos temas en los tres capítulos de ese trabajo, centrándome en tres textos diferentes en cada uno de ellos.
A través del análisis de los nueve textos elegidos, mi objetivo es echar luz sobre autoras olvidadas que produjeron obras que nos presentan una visión de la guerra que contesta, y hasta cuestiona, el contexto de propaganda política en el cual fueron escritas. Mi propósito principal es ayudar a colocar escritoras femeninas en una categoría de autores de la guerra talentosos y reconocidos, destacando su capacidad de mantener su individualidad y su habilidad de criticar y opinar, incluso estando rodeadas por la convincente y efectiva propaganda de Churchill.<br>In popular memory, civilians’ morale during the Blitz remained high, war production was little affected by the bombings and the will to fight the Nazis was stronger than ever in a classless, fraternal society. The ‘People’s War’ turned civilians into extraordinary heroes in their ordinary city life, as this new kind of ‘total war’ was fought equally as hard on the ‘frontline’ as on the ‘home front’. However, since the late 1980s, historians have started to question this seemingly idealised vision of the determined, invincible spirit of the Blitzed population. In The Myth of the Blitz, Angus Calder argues that the image of a nation united in adversity and resisting hardship was almost entirely constructed by the political propaganda of the 1940s. He believes it necessary to critically rethink the collective memory of the Blitz, stating that it has been ignoring ‘how frightening and confusing the period [...] was for the British people’ since ‘the Myth stands in our way’ (1991, p. 18).
Taking as a point of departure Calder’s chapter ‘Formulations of Feeling’, the main objective of my thesis is to oppose the historian’s idea that writers during the Second World War had a very limited ability to produce work that stood outside the People’s War rhetoric. Calder explains that although ‘the writer […] is in a position to defy the myth’s status as an adequate and convincing account of human feeling and behaviour’, unfortunately only few ‘work outside the myth’s paradigm’ (1991, pp. 143-144).
Whilst it is true that literature ‘was conscripted into the war effort’ by a government that ‘enshrined [it] as a democratic principle’ (Hartley, 1997, pp. 6-7), I believe too reductive Angus Calder and Mark Rawlinson’s argument according to which ‘the character of wartime writing was strongly determined by its relations to the discourses with which, in the broadest sense, Britain’s war effort was administered’ (Rawlinson, 2000, p. 205). I contend that it is unwise to consider that authors writing in a time of overwhelming social and cultural propaganda could not critically reflect on their surroundings and solely contributed to a literature that aimed to form a coherent defence of war.
This thesis is therefore one of the first pieces of research to take Angus Calder’s theoretical framework of the ‘myth of the Blitz’ as the main point of reference to discuss lesser known women’s texts of the 1940s. In his study, Calder deconstructs the ‘myth’ by confronting it with historical facts. In my thesis, I follow the same method by comparing specific values of the ‘People’s WaR4 rhetoric against the literary production of women writers. I have selected three main aspects of Calder’s work crucial to his definition of the constructed and superficial rhetoric of the ‘Blitz Spirit’: ‘class’, ‘patriotism’, and the more abstract ‘representation of the hurt body’. I analyse several novels by different authors in three separate chapters dedicated to each theme.
Through the close reading of the nine texts I focus on, my aim is to shed light on forgotten authors who produced works that present us with a vision of the war that questions, and even challenged the propaganda setting they were written in. My main objective is to help place women writers in a category of valuable, talented and recognised war writers by highlighting their ability to maintain their individuality and capacity to criticise even when surrounded with Churchill’s very forceful propaganda.
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Stohler, Ursula. "Russian women writers of the 1800-1820s and the response to sentimentalist literary conventions of nature, the feminine and writing : Mariia Pospelova, Mariia Bolotnikova and Anna Naumova." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.426240.
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Alldred, Elizabeth. "'Was noch nicht sein kann, muß wenigstens immer im Werden bleiben' : the prose-writing of the 'second generation' of GDR women writers before, during and after the Wende." Thesis, University of Bath, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.340941.
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Sikstrom, Hannah J. "Performing the self : identity-formation in the travel accounts of nineteenth-century British women in Italy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fdd4d82a-8bfe-4d3d-b668-4e88da45db7e.
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From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.
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Clarke, Patricia, and n/a. "Life Lines to Life Stories: Some Publications About Women in Nineteenth-Century Australia." Griffith University. School of Arts, Media and Culture, 2004. http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20040719.150756.
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This thesis consists of an introduction and six of my books, published between 1985 and 1999, on aspects of the history of women in nineteenth-century Australia. The books are The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882 (1985); A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857 (1986); Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988); Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist (1990); Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (1994); and Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999). At the time they were published each of these books either dealt with a new subject or presented a new approach to a subject. Collectively they represent a body of work that has expanded knowledge of women's lives and writing in nineteenth-century Australia. Although not consciously planned as a sequence at the outset, these books developed as a result of the influence on my thinking of the themes that emerged in Australian social and cultural historical writing during this period. The books also represent a development in my own work from the earlier more documentary-based books on letters and diaries to the interpretive challenge of biographical writing and the weaving of private lives with public achievements. These books make up a cohesive, cumulative body of work. Individually and as a whole, they make an original contribution to knowledge of the lives and achievements of women in nineteenth-century Australia. They received critical praise at the time of publication and have led to renewed interest and further research on the subjects they cover. My own knowledge and expertise has developed as a result of researching and writing them. The Governesses was not only the first full-length study of a particular group of letters but it also documented aspects of the lives of governesses in Australia, a little researched subject to that time. A Colonial Woman, based on a previously unpublished and virtually unknown diary, pointed to the importance of 'ordinary' lives in presenting an enriched view of the past. Pen Portraits documented the early history of women journalists in Australia, a previously neglected subject. Three of the women I included in Pen Portraits, Louisa Atkinson, Tasma and Rosa Praed, the first two of whom were pioneer women journalists as well as novelists, became the subjects of my full-length biographies. In my biographies of women writers, Pioneer Writer, Tasma, and Rosa! Rosa!, I recorded and interpreted the lives of these important writers placing them in the context of Australian cultural history as women who negotiated gender barriers and recorded this world in their fiction. My books on Louisa Atkinson and Tasma were the first full-length biographies of these significant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, while my biography of Rosa Praed was the first for more than fifty years. Each introduced original research that changed perceptions of the women's lives and consequently of attitudes to their creative work. Each provided information essential for further research on their historical significance and literary achievements. Each involved extensive research that led to informed interpretation allowing insightful surmises essential to quality biography.
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Adam, Sibyl Alexandra. "Affective everyday in narratives of Muslim women migrating to the UK, 1906-2012." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31548.
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This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.
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Molloy, Carla Jane. "The art of popular fiction : gender, authorship and aesthetics in the writing of Ouida : a thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the University of Canterbury /." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/1956.
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This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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James, Ann Juli. "Figures in fine print and Hindustani hopes and fears : identity and expectations in the poetry of Kamala Das." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/27007.
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Kamala Das is one of the best-known contemporary Indian women writers, albeit largely for the controversy that her candid, confessional writing has sparked in the relatively traditional context of Indian academia. Since the publication of her first collection of poetry, Summer in Calcutta (1965), Das has been considered an important voice of her generation. Her provocative poems are known for their unflinchingly honest explorations of the self and female sexuality, urban life, and women’s roles in traditional Indian society. Critics have expressed a range of opinions on her work: some laud her boldness, compelling sincerity and striking originality, while others dismiss her work as sensationalist, limited in scope and unsophisticated. In this dissertation, issues of selfhood represented in the poetry of Kamala Das will be analysed with regard to various aspects of her identity, such as those of a housewife, a lover, an Indian, a female writer, and a confessional poet. Selected theories on identity formation posited by Erik Erikson and Norman Holland will be explored, as will relevant hypotheses on female identity by Nancy Chodorow and Judith Gardiner. I propose that selected aspects of these theories shed light on the themes, tones and subject matter of Das’s verse. Almost all of her poems are personal and are fuelled by an intense need for emotional fulfilment. I suggest that the poet’s search for love is central to her identity and I aim to show how this (largely unsuccessful) quest, as reflected in Das’ poems, stems from various expectations by and on her. The recurring theme of expectations and the resulting tones of despair (the ‘hopes and fears’) in her work will be traced and analysed. This research is valuable in that there has been little exploration into identity and expectations in Das’ work and there is almost no research on her emanating from Africa. Through close textual analysis I also aim to highlight how useful insights into identity formation and female writing can enable a more in-depth understanding of Das’s poetry. Both female identity and women’s writing are increasingly significant fields in academia today, and there has been a rise in autobiographical writing in recent years; thus this research will contribute to debates about these issues in contemporary poetry. A portfolio of my own creative writing will accompany the essay. Like Kamala Das, I am also a Malayalee woman (from the province of Kerala in India) and I identify with some of her concerns with regard to the roles of women. Although my writing is not confessional or as personal as Das’s, our shared experience of the socio-cultural expectations placed upon us (due to our gender and ethnic background) links this mini-dissertation to my poetry portfolio.<br>Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2010.<br>English<br>unrestricted
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Alaybani, Rasmyah. "Words and Images:Women’s Artistic Representations in Novels and Fine Art in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2005-2017." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1565009668743079.
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Wood, Hannah. "Video game 'Underland', and, thesis 'Playable stories : writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency'." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/29281.
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Creative Project Abstract: The creative project of this thesis is a script prototype for Underland, a crime drama video game and digital playable story that demonstrates writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency. The story is set in October 2006 and players are investigative psychologists given access to a secure police server and tasked with analysing evidence related to two linked murders that have resulted in the arrest of journalist Silvi Moore. The aim is to uncover what happened and why by analysing Silvi’s flat, calendar of events, emails, texts, photos, voicemail, call log, 999 call, a map of the city of Plymouth and a crime scene. It is a combination of story exploration game and digital epistolary fiction that is structured via an authored fabula and dynamic syuzhet and uses the Internal-Exploratory and Internal-Ontological interactive modes to negotiate narrative and player agency. Its use of this structure and these modes shows how playable stories are uniquely positioned to deliver self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion simultaneously. The story is told in a mixture of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative, the combination of which contributes new knowledge on how writers can use mystery, suspense and dramatic irony in playable stories. The interactive script prototype is accessible at underlandgame.com and is a means to represent how the final game is intended to be experienced by players. Thesis Abstract: This thesis considers writing and design methods for playable stories that negotiate narrative and player agency. By approaching the topic through the lens of creative writing practice, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature related to the execution of interactive and narrative devices as a practitioner. Chapter 1 defines the key terms for understanding the field and surveys the academic and theoretical debate to identify the challenges and opportunities for writers and creators. In this it departs from the dominant vision of the future of digital playable stories as the ‘holodeck,’ a simulated reality players can enter and manipulate and that shapes around them as story protagonists. Building on narratological theory it contributes a new term—the dynamic syuzhet—to express an alternate negotiation of narrative and player agency within current technological realities. Three further terms—the authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are also contributed as means to compare and contrast the narrative structures and affordances available to writers of live, digital and live-digital hybrid work. Chapter 2 conducts a qualitative analysis of digital, live and live-digital playable stories, released 2010–2016, and combines this with insights gained from primary interviews with their writers and creators to identify the techniques at work and their implications for narrative and player agency. This analysis contributes new knowledge to writing and design approaches in four interactive modes—Internal-Ontological, Internal-Exploratory, External-Ontological and External-Exploratory—that impact on where players are positioned in the work and how the experiential narrative unfolds. Chapter 3 shows how the knowledge developed through academic research informed the creation of a new playable story, Underland; as well as how the creative practice informed the academic research. Underland provides a means to demonstrate how making players protagonists of the experience, rather than of the story, enables the coupling of self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion in a way uniquely available to digital playable stories. It further shows how this negotiation of narrative and player agency can use a combination of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative to employ dramatic irony in a new way. These findings demonstrate ways playable stories can be written and designed to deliver the ‘traditional’ pleasure of narrative and the ‘newer’ pleasure of player agency without sacrificing either.
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Sharif, Maryam. "Constance de Salm (1767-1845) : une modernité contradictoire." Thesis, Lyon 2, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014LYO20004.
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Cette thèse s’inscrit dans un mouvement de redécouverte et d’inscription dans l’histoire littéraire des femmes auteurs longtemps considérées comme mineures. Son objectif est d’étudier le statut d’une écrivaine au tournant du XVIIIe et du premier XIXe siècle français à travers la carrière littéraire de Constance de Salm (1767-1845) et l’analyse de celles de ses œuvres qui traitent directement de la condition de la femme écrivain. Nous avons étudié la position de l’écrivaine sur le statut de la femme auteur à travers son traitement d’un sujet antique (Sapho, 1794), sa prise de position face à un débat d’actualité (l’Épître aux femmes, 1797) et finalement à travers le regard qu’elle porte sur sa propre carrière littéraire dans son autoportrait en vers (Mes soixante ans, 1833). Notre but est de montrer les raisons de l’oubli puis de la redécouverte d’une écrivaine chez qui un féminisme précurseur contraste avec des pratiques littéraires qui sont en apparence désuètes, même de son temps. Cette étude nous a révélé l’originalité d’une femme auteur qui voyait et revendiquait les implications politiques de ses idées et de l’acte d’écrire. Par ailleurs, pour éclairer la place qu’occupaient la réflexion et les pratiques de Constance de Salm dans les milieux intellectuels nous avons tenue compte des différents états des textes et de leurs variantes ainsi que des articles et des comptes-rendus que lui a consacrés la presse contemporaine. L’ensemble de ces documents constitue les annexes réunis dans le deuxième volume de notre travail<br>This dissertation is part of the rediscovery movement of women writers within literary history, who were long considered insignificant. Its aim is to study the status of a writer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France through the discovery and analysis of the life and career of Constance de Salm (1767-1845) whose works deal directly with the condition of the woman writers. The writer’s position is studied in relations to the status of the woman writers through her analysis of a subject from antiquity: Sappho (1797), the stance she took on a contemporary debate in the Epistle to the Women (1797), and finally the way in which she regards her own literary career in her autobiography in verse, My Sixty Years (1833). The goal is to show the reasons for which this writer was forgotten and then rediscovered, a writer whose avant-garde feminism contrasted with her literary practices that were considered antiquated even at the time. This study has revealed the originality of a woman writer who recognized and accepted the political implications embodied in her ideas and the act of writing. Furthermore, in order to clarify the position that Constance de Salm’s thoughts and actions occupied within intellectual circles of the day, we have reviewed texts in various states and their variants as well as articles and reports that the contemporary press dedicated to her. All these documents are attached as appendices in the second volume of this work
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Leduc, Noëmie Anne. "« Nourricritures » sino-américaines : la représentation de l'alimentation chez Gish Jen, Fae Myenne Ng et Amy Tan." Thesis, Bordeaux 3, 2020. http://www.theses.fr/2020BOR30031.
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Cette thèse porte sur l’œuvre d’écrivaines sino-américaines de deuxième génération : Amy Tan, Gish Jen et Fae Myenne Ng. Nous étudions plusieurs de leurs romans dans lesquels la nourriture constitue un thème particulièrement significatif : The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) et The Hundred Secret Senses (1996) de Tan ; Typical American (1991) et Mona in the Promised Land: A Novel (1996) de Jen ; et enfin, Bone (1993) et Steer Toward Rock (2008) de Ng. Il s’agit de démontrer que l’alimentation et ses corrélatifs sont liés à de multiples processus de déstabilisation et de reformulation des normes identitaires tant ethniques que genrées ou littéraires, en mettant en lumière les lignes de convergence mais également les divergences dans la façon qu’ont les auteurs d’écrire la nourriture. Celle-ci est au cœur de la construction de l’identité. La bouche est la zone liminale de l’incorporation ou du rejet des mets et impératifs extérieurs, dont l’ingestion et la digestion ou le crachement et le vomissement permettent de façonner ou de délimiter dans un même temps les corps physiologiques, sociaux, culturels et psychologiques, individuels et collectifs. Il s’agit alors d’explorer le contexte spécifique qui sous-tend la centralité de l’alimentation dans les diverses communautés sino-américaines et les romans qui les représentent. Cela nous permet ensuite d’étudier en quoi les scènes culinaires sont, pour les écrivaines, des topoi privilégiés afin de souligner de multiples problématiques interculturelles, genrées et scripturales, et ainsi de redéfinir les attentes et les modalités qui régissent leur représentation<br>This dissertation deals with the literary production of three second-generation Chinese American women writers: Amy Tan, Gish Jen et Fae Myenne Ng. It focuses on some of their novels in which food plays a central part: The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1996) by Tan; Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land: A Novel (1996) by Jen; and Bone (1993) and Steer Toward Rock (2008) by Ng. It aims to show that food and all other elements related to it are linked to multiple processes of ethnic, gender and literary identity destabilization and reformulation. It highlights both common and diverging features between the different ways in which the authors write about food, which is itself a paramount element in identity construction. The mouth is the liminal area through which the incorporation or rejection of external food and imperatives are carried out. Ingestion and digestion, or spitting out and vomiting enable subjects to shape or delimit physiological, social, cultural and psychological bodies simultaneously, both on a collective and on an individual level. This dissertation thus explores the specific contexts related to food in the diverse Chinese American communities represented in the novels. It then analyzes how culinary scenes are useful topoi for the writers to underline several intercultural, gender, and scriptural issues, and thereby to redefine the expectations and the terms that underlie their representation
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Kang, Sooyoung. "Tracing the maternal Memory and writing in contemporary American women writers of the diaspora /." 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1542151621&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=39334&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008.<br>Title from PDF title page (viewed on Nov. 20, 2008) Available through UMI ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Thesis adviser: Schmid, David, Kim, Myung Mi Includes bibliographical references.
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Behrends, Maike. "Writing on The Poverty Line. Working-Class Fiction by British Women Writers, 1974-2008." Doctoral thesis, 2012. https://repositorium.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-2012121710551.
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In the course of my degree studies it became apparent that there was little historical evidence of British working-class women writers. This led me to the question whether such women actually wrote or whether it was the case that their writing was not deemed good enough for publication. (Merelyn Cherry 75)
In her essay entitled Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers, Cherry discusses the omission of these writers in literary studies. She concludes that their (supposed) underrepresentation is not a matter of publication, but is due to the fact that these authors are largely ignored by Western academics (cf. 115-118). In fact, there is sufficient evidence of women writing about the working classes. Relevant examinations of the British working-class novel that include female authors are Mary Ashraf’s Introduction To Working-Class Literature in Great Britain (1978), Gustav Klaus’ The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982), Pamela Fox’s Class Fictions (1994), Merylyn Cherry’s Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers (1994) and some excerpts from Ian Haywood’s From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998).
Merylyn Cherry lists some of the writers whose works will be discussed in my thesis; however, she does not specify what is to be understood by “British working-class women writers”. Various questions arise at this point. What are the distinctive features of a contemporary working-class novel written by a woman author? Which narrative strategies are employed to create the literary working-class world of female characters? What type of work is performed by such characters? The difficulty in finding answers to these questions lies in the attempt to determine a typology of such novels. The text corpus of working-class fiction is clearly male-dominated, both in terms of male authorship and the depiction of working-men characters and their living environments in the novels. Women authors, who frequently produce(d) female counterparts to the working-men characters, have fallen into oblivion even within working-class studies. Ian Haywood, for instance, ignores three significant Welsh women writers of this category, even though his anthology entitled Working-Class Fiction, From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998) focuses on British writers.
Uncovering these female writers and demonstrating the development of their fiction will be part of this thesis. Each traceable narrative of the kind shall be mentioned in chronological order. This is the first step to grasp the essence of these texts. It will become clear that a contemporary woman’s working-class novel emerged out of a “patchwork” of various writing traditions; and that the typology which I endeavor to establish does not cover the matter of common characterisations in this text corpus. None of the characters in my anthology can be labelled a “prototype”, since the characterisations vary greatly across the novels.
In a second step, I will analyse twelve novels written between 1974 and 2008, which I will approach thematically. This way, I can converge a typology more closely. The three main topics which frequently appear across the novels are women’s class-consciousness, the mother-daughter relationship, and trauma caused by battering and sexual abuse. Hereby, I raise no claim to completeness. I have chosen twelve texts which I consider to be representative; and I will precede like the literary critic Gustav Klaus, who argued in his anthology entitled The Socialist Novel in Britain: “I have chosen to introduce many writers, limiting myself, however, to the discussion of one work each. This approach can best disclose the breadth and variety of fictional devices” (Klaus 1).
I have chosen 1974 as a starting point of my analyses, since this is the publication year of Buchi Emecheta’s vanguard novel Second-Class Citizen. Being the first post-colonial woman author to write a novel about domestic violence against a Black and female working-class character, she may be considered a pioneer writer. Particularly against the background that the text was written during the years of second-wave feminism, which was “spearheaded by white middle-class women” (Louis Weis 246), the novel is a groundbreaking piece of working-class aesthetics. With this introduction of post-colonial women’s writings to the British literary scene in the early 1970s, representations of women’s lower-class life became enriched by a different writing tradition. New narrative forms and voices and various culturally determined characterisations were introduced to the literary scene. Out of this body of writing emerged a considerable phenomenon. In addition to the fact that they are also (like the “White” British texts) written from a “perspective of poverty”, a principle of postcolonial theory manifests itself in these texts: Frantz Fanon’s concept of the “schizophrenia of identity”. This “schizophrenia”, enacted via the powerful imposition of the dominant culture’s values onto the colonised subject, can also be detected as an underlying theme in the British working-class novels under discussion. The three main common topics which appear across the twelve novels to be analysed illustrate that this “schizophrenia” –a form of division– is a central textual element in most narratives under discussion. The female working-class character becomes a split subject at various levels. This division is, for instance, also caused by the male gaze and the violation of the female body, the character’s upward mobility and the consequent clash of working-class background and the “newly acquired” middle-class identity. It shall also be illustrated how this mechanism of splitting apart influences not only the themes, but also the stylistic devices employed in this body of writing.
The idea of a division within female working-class characters has –tentatively– been raised by the literary critic Pamela Fox. In her book entitled Class Fictions she demonstrates how the white women characters are torn between the shame about their working-class background and the resistance to adjust to the cultural codes of the middle and upper classes. I will elucidate the concept of “division” and illustrate why it functions as an effective reading strategy to analyse the fictional texts. By deepening the idea of the split female subject against the background of gender, class and ethnicity, I endeavour to develop a contemporary approach to understanding these texts and to hereby draw closest to a typology of the novels. With the assistance of postcolonial critics and feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon, I will repeatedly demonstrate how “class” intersects with the concepts of gender and ethnicity. Also, it shall be discussed if and how the idea of schizophrenia can perhaps be understood as a continuation of the most essential division in the context of working-class life: the division of labour.
Works Cited
Cherry, Merylyn. “Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers.” Writing on The Line. 20th Century Working-Class Writers. Eds. Sarah Richardson et al. London: Working Press, 1996. 75-119.
Klaus, Gustav. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Brighton: Harvester Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
Weis, Lois et al. “I’ve Slept in Clothes Long Enough. Excavating the Sounds of Domestic Violence among Women in the White Working-Class.” Domestic Violence at the Margins. Readings on Gender, Class and Culture. Eds. Sokoloff, Natalie & Christina Pratt. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 227-248.
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Tan, Wen-Li, and 陳文麗. "A Study of Female Writing and Figures of Malaysia and Singapore Chinese Women writers." Thesis, 2017. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70231362234591250267.
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碩士<br>國立臺灣師範大學<br>應用華語文學系<br>105<br>In this study, Malaysia and Singapore Chinese female writers and the female figures in their novel are the main research targets. In order to figure out the feminist consciousness, cultural viewpoint, and social perspective that appeared in those texts, this study analyzed and sorts out the female figures in the novels. Both Mahua Literature and Xinhua Literature began to emerge along with the May 4th Movement in 1919. Malaysia and Singapore Chinese writers had been striving to their writing career for almost a century, especially working on the theme of localization, self-identification, and national identification. The male writers played an important role in Mahua Literature, nevertheless, the female writers had marginalized due to the majority of male writers with higher number of authors and the quantity of literary output. Apart from the mainstream theme, Mahua female writers were also concentrate about the issue of female that always being overlooked. On the other hand, the rise of female writers of Xinhua Literature in 1980s was totally different from Mahua Literature. The female writers in Singapore even exceeded the male writers under some circumstances. Due to the diverse history and development between Malaysia and Singapore, feminine Literature of Mahua and Xinhua were not exactly different. Therefore, both Mahua Literature and Xinhua Literature are an important part among overseas Chinese literature. The writing perspectives of female writers is different from male writers as well. Most of time, female writers are able to illustrate accurately from female perspectives, moreover, they present feminist ideas beyond all doubt. There were four Chinese female writers who devoted to Mahua Literature and Xinhua Literature were chosen to be the research target, consisted of You Jin, Zhang Xi Na from Singapore, Shang Wan Yun, He Shu Fang from Malaysia. Overall, this study provided the analysis of female figures that appeared in the novels of four main female writers through different perspectives, and contributed the findings to testify the new discovery as well.
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Ferguson, Angela Dionne. "Women’s writing and writing women in the seventeenth century : an examination of the works of Sibylle Schwarz and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler." 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/23110.
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This dissertation is primarily concerned with women's writing in the mid-seventeenth century, comprising the years from 1624 to 1686. It covers the period immediately following Martin Opitz's vernacular literary reforms in Germany and takes as its primary subject the resultant increase in female authorship. It arises out of an interest in two separate but interrelated issues. The first is out of an interest in female literary production in Germany during the seventeenth century, specifically between 1624 and 1686, dates demarcated by the publication of Martin Opitz's Buch von der deutschen Poeterey and the publication of Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler's collection of poetry, Jungferlicher Zeitvertreiber. The second is the question of women's self-concept within a patriarchal society and the discursive strategies of female authors struggling "against complex odds" to "com[e] to written voice" (Olsen 9). In order to fully explore this subject, I have chosen to focus on the work of two poets, Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638) and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler (1657-1706?). Writing at different stages in this period and from dissimilar social positions, the two poets offer contrasting strategies of self-representation and self-authorization. By negotiating the demanding terrain of female authorship in a period inhospitable to female learning in different ways, they illustrate the tensions faced by female poets and the various strategies for overcoming the challenges they faced. I look first at the construction of female gender in the early modern period and the ways female writers could subtly shift the prevailing ideas and definitions to include the act of writing as an acceptable component of female identity. The analysis and comparison of the works of Schwarz and Zeidler also offers a glimpse into the changes in self-awareness and self-concept of female poets across the period.<br>text
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Taylor, Jessica Anne. "Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/36016.
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This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.
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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.
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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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McKetta, Elisabeth Sharp. "Asymptotic autobiography : fairy tales as narrative map in the writing of Zelda Fitzgerald." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2009-08-263.
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When a writer, usually a woman, uses fairy tales as a veil through which to narrate a story of her life, I call this practice asymptotic autobiography. In mathematics, the asymptote is a straight line that a curve approaches increasingly closely, but never actually touches. I define “asymptotic autobiography” as a term for discussing any personal narrative that deliberately employs fiction in order to tell truth. In this inquiry, I examine the use of fairy tale language in giving voice to women writers’ autobiographical representations, using Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel and letters as the focus for my analysis. My research and critical analysis will examine how Save Me the Waltz, which Zelda Fitzgerald wrote while she was a psychiatric patient in the Phipps Clinic, uses fairy tales to provide a mapping of the many performances that autobiographical selfhood entails. By experimenting with open-ended fairy tale conventions instead of being limited by clinical truths, and by contextualizing her personal history in the realm of the imaginary, Fitzgerald removes her story from the psychiatric ward and places it safely in legend.
The first three chapters of this dissertation show how, in sequence, the autobiographical self becomes free through the use of fairy tales in three stages: once the autobiographer has worked to separate herself from being bound by illness or clinical reality (Chapter One), she is free to make the decision of which self or selves she wishes to narrate and perform (Chapter Two); only once she has established her sense of self can the autobiographer then locate her plot, her map, and her narrative (Chapter Three). In Chapter Four, I offer an example of asymptotic autobiography in the form of a one-person play script that I wrote and performed about Zelda Fitzgerald’s life and hospitalization, using as a frame the fairy tale “The Swan Maiden.” This hybrid essay-performance combines the play script itself with personal writing of my own in which I describe the difficulties I had approaching and performing the rich material of Zelda’s life.<br>text
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Petropoulos, Jacqueline. "Women writing race : the politics of identity and the theatrical representation in Canada during the 1980s /." 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99225.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in English.<br>Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 364-374). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99225
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Beutner, Katharine. "Writing for pleasure or necessity : conflict among literary women, 1700-1750." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2011-05-2878.
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In this dissertation, I examine antagonistic relationships between women writers in the first half of the eighteenth century, focusing on the works of Delarivier Manley, Martha Fowke Sansom, Eliza Haywood, and Laetitia Pilkington. Professional rivalry among women writers represents an under-studied but vital element of the history of print culture in the early eighteenth century. I argue that the shared burden of negotiating the complicated literary marketplace did not, as critics have at times suggested, inspire women who wrote for print publication to feel for one another a sisterly benevolence. Rather, fine gradations in social class, questions of genre status and individual talent, and -- perhaps most importantly -- clashing literary ambitions spurred early eighteenth-century women writers into vicious rivalries recorded in print and driven by print culture. Women documented their literary battles in poems, in prefaces, and in autobiographical texts replete with self-justification and with attacks on former friends or disappointing patronesses. This dissertation recognizes rivalry as a crucial mode of interaction between eighteenth-century literary women and analyzes the ways in which these professional women writers labored to defend themselves not just against patriarchal pressures but against one another. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of a more complete literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century by exploring how early eighteenth-century women writers imagined their own professional lives, how they imagined the professional lives of other women, and how they therefore believed themselves influenced (or claimed themselves influenced) by the support or detraction of other women.
The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Delarivier Manley's career and writings, while the second two address the entangled writing lives of Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke Sansom. The concluding chapter briefly examines Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs. I investigate the way these women employed the practice of life-writing as a means of self-construction, self-promotion, and public appeal.<br>text
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Vítková, Veronika. "Léčení ran kolonizovaného těla: Vzdorné psaní v dílech britsko-karibských spisovatelek 21. století." Master's thesis, 2014. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-328785.
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Healing the Wounds of the Colonised Body: Writing Back in Twenty-first-century Works by British Caribbean Women Writers Thesis abstract Veronika Vítková Black women`s position within the world of male superiority and white supremacy came to be characterised by the term "double colonisation". Both patriarchal and imperial social order focused on their corporeality to justify their subjugation. Accordingly, black women writers came to conceptualise their experience of colonisation and slavery as wounds suffered by the black female body. They thereby use the master`s tools to dismantle the master`s house. Their "writing back" - a means of healing the body - constitutes a multi-level response to both sets of mythologies as well as other types of marginalisation and othering, which the two involved, such as sexual, territorial or discursive. It results in the construction of a complex space - a healing vision - which is not dissimilar to Homi Bhabha`s empowering theoretical concepts. However, while providing such progressive literary vision, black women writers also maintain connection with reality, where, as Gayatri Spivak argued, there is no space from where the subaltern sexed subject can speak. Their broad historical and geographical perspective, which is a product of the multi-levelness of their oppression,...
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Peay, Aisha Dolores. "Reading Democracy: Anthologies of African American Women's Writing and the Legacy of Black Feminist Criticism, 1970-1990." Diss., 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/1103.
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<p>Taking as its pretext the contemporary moment of self-reflexive critique on the part of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and American Studies, <italic>Reading Democracy</italic> historicizes a black feminist literary critical practice and movement that developed alongside black feminist activism beginning in the 1970s. This dissertation addresses the future direction of scholarship based in Women's Studies and African-American Studies by focusing on the institutionalized political effects of Women's Liberation and the black liberation movements: the canonization of black women's writing and the development of a black feminist critical practice. Tracing a variety of conceptions of black feminist criticism over the course of two decades, I argue that this critical tradition is virtually indefinable apart from its anthological framing and that its literary objects illustrate the radical democratic constitution of black women's political subjectivity. </p><p>The editors of such anthologies of African American women's writing and black feminist practice as Toni Cade Bambara's <italic>The Black Woman</italic> (1970), Mary Helen Washington's <italic>Black-Eyed Susans</italic> (1975), and Barbara Smith's <italic>Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology</italic> (1984) articulate the relationship of political praxis to creative enterprise and intellectual activity. In the case of Smith's anthology, for example, "coalition politics" emerges as the ideal democratic practice by which individuals constitute political identities, consolidate around political principles, and negotiate political demands.</p><p>Situating anthologies of black women's writing in relation to the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Reading Democracy explores how black feminist projects in the academy and the arts materialized the democratic principles of modern politics in the United States, understanding these principles as ethical desires that inspire self-constitution and creative and scholarly production. Constructing a literary critical and publication history, this dissertation identifies the democratic principles that the anthologies in this study materialize by analyzing them alongside the novels and short stories published during the 1970s and 1980s that they excerpt or otherwise reference, such as Toni Morrison's <italic>The Bluest Eye</italic> (1970), Audre Lorde's <italic>Zami: A New Spelling of My Name</italic> (1982), and Paule Marshall's <italic>Praisesong for the Widow</italic> (1983). The anthology facilitates the analysis of the single creative work's black feminist consciousness. Using the critical terms of democratic theory to mark the fulfillment of a political theory of black women's writing, as Smith first proposed, this dissertation arrives at a sense of democracy as a strategic zone of embodiment and a modern political imaginary forged by the recognition of "the others" in our midst who are coming to voice and are ineluctably constituted by the same ethical desires as are we ourselves.</p><br>Dissertation
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Burkhart, Claire Lovell. "Reading and writing women : representing the femme de lettres in Stendhal, Balzac, Girardin and Sand." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2011-05-2836.
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This dissertation explores the numerous literary representations of the femme de lettres during the first half of the nineteenth century in order to illustrate the complexities of women’s entrance into the male-dominated domain of literature and also to suggest the impact these fictional characters might have had on the reception of actual women writers as well as their omission from the century’s literary canon. The works that will be included in this analysis include: Mme de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, Honoré de Balzac’s Béatrix, La Muse du département and Illusions perdues, Delphine de Girardin’s La Canne de M. de Balzac, Napoline and La joie fait peur and George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, Lettres d’un voyageur and Un Hiver à Majorque. In compiling such diverse works of literature, it becomes clear that both male and female authors from the early nineteenth century were unable to envision a publicly embraced female genius. Although almost all of the fictional femmes de lettres in this study faced a destiny of professional silence, the reasons given for their failures are split between the male and female authors. For the male authors, the woman as a successful intellectual, artist or author was ultimately impossible because of her inability to combine her female body and psyche with the “masculine” pursuit of knowledge. Conversely, the female authors wrote characters whose inability to fully embrace a public literary or artistic career stemmed from society’s unwillingness to tolerate her exceptionality rather than from an inherent disconnect between genius and the female sex.<br>text
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Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha 1970. "From silence to speech, from object to subject: the body politic investigated in the trajectory between Sarah Baartman and contemporary circumcised African women's writing." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/1660.
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NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS....
This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation.<br>English Studies<br>D. Litt. et Phil.(English)
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Vojtíšková, Věra. "Magický realismus v perské a saúdské próze." Doctoral thesis, 2016. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-353514.
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The dissertation Magical Realism in Persian and Saudi Narrative Writing views as essential the assumption that the phenomenon of magical realism is not restricted solely to the cultures with colonial legacy, but is transferable to literary works created under systematic and systemic violence anywhere in the world. Previous research of the dissertation's author proved the existence of parallels in the dynamics of sociopolitical development of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the 20th century, foremost in the power relation of the states to their citizens and in the status of women in the society, while there was a strong tendency towards institutionalization of the traditional patriarchal, androcentric and misogynic societal paradigms since the second half of the 20th century. In the last thirty years, women have countered this situation through increased literary activity that has turned out to be an important means of self-fulfillment and emancipation. The fact that some of the most significant Iranian and Saudi women writers use magical realism directed the research to examination of this concept's relevance for the Persian and Saudi narrative writing, inquiry into the reflection of the gender issues and their comparison in both literatures. A detailed case study of two works, each from one country, led...