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Duguid, Beverley. "Plural perspectives : Women writer-travellers in nineteenth-century central America and the Caribbean." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529042.
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Gibbons, Megan E. "Speaking out from within: Ana Caro and her role as a woman writer in seventeenth-century Spain." Thesis, Boston University, 2012. https://hdl.handle.net/2144/32018.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityAna Caro de Mallén (c.1600-1645) wrote primarily comedias, autos sacramentales, and relaciones. Since she received monetary compensation for her autos and relaciones, Caro is arguably one of the first female professional writers to appear in Spain as well as in Europe as a whole. After exploring Caro's personal life and contextualizing her situation as a female cultural producer within early modern Europe, this study presents new readings of her plays and an examination of her relaciones in order to reveal Caro's consistent, albeit subtle, challenge to the patriarchal structures so deeply ingrained in the Spain of her day. In the play entitled Valor, agravio y mujer, the role of the gracioso as male friend to the protagonist Leonor is explored, showing how their relationship diverges from that commonly found in the comedia. In El conde Partinuplés, the use of the "invisible-mistress" plot is examined as a parody of certain elements of the typical "wife-murder" drama. While the relaciones are studied as independent texts, they are compared to other texts written by male writers about the same events, thereby revealing some of the ways Caro diverges from dominant representational practices. Although not a feminist in the modern sense of the word, Caro is certainly partial in her stance toward women in that her plays consistently highlight the dilemmas, frustrations, hopes and aspirations of her female characters. Likewise, in her relaciones , Caro does not refrain from commenting on the qualities of good leadership, the economic crisis in Spain, and the political tensions between Spain and countries such as France and Portugal. In this way, Caro succeeds in inserting her voice into a public sphere that often cultivated women's silence. Unlike Spain's other early modern women writers--who largely wrote either lyric poetry or religious texts from within the confines of convents--Ana Caro intervened in public and male-dominated areas by writing plays for the commercial stage and selling relaciones about major events.
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Letcher, Valerie Helen. "Trespassing beyond the borders Harriet Ward as writer and commentator on the Eastern Cape frontier." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002283.
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The aim of this thesis is to provide an introduction to the work of writer and journalist Harriet Ward, resident in the Eastern Cape from 1842 to 1848. She was a prolific correspondent to various periodicals published both in South Africa and in London. It would be true to say, to judge from the evidence, that she fulfilled a need felt by the British public for information on life and events in South Africa, and that she became the trusted guide of the middle-class reader. Her range covers reports from the frontiers of war, journalistic articles, memoirs, short stories, novels, autobiography, and editions of other writers' work. After the publication of her articles on the Seventh Frontier War (1846-7), she was recognised and respected as a commentator on the situation at the Eastern Cape, an unusual role for a woman at this time. She was also amongst the foremost victorian women writers published from the early eighteen forties until the end of the eighteen-fifties. Harriet Ward has left a vivid historical and sociological account of the Cape frontier, and her observations and judgements provide a hitherto virtually unknown perspective on an important part of South African history and letters. What makes her even more interesting, as this study seeks to show, is that she was far from conventional in her response to her new environment, both as as a woman and as a representative of a colonialist power. The record she has left of her thoughts on the people, landscape and situations of the time has the capacity to surprise the post-colonial literary critic and historian. Her struggle to find a discursive mode in which to express her consciousness of the oppression, patriarchal and colonial, of the marginalised, whether woman, indigene, Afrikaner, or creole, reveals a significantly transgressive or subversive response to the issues of the day. In re-discovering Harriet Ward, we are forced to reassess our assumptions regarding the period of colonial history to which she was a witness.
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Baker, Leslie Carlene. "Breasts, butts, and blackness: a textual analysis of stereotypical images of black women in the works of black detective writer Walter Mosley." The Ohio State University, 1995. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1249667848.
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Bench, Sheree Maxwell. ""Woman Arise!": Political Work in the Writings of Lu Dalton." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2002. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4518.
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In 1872, Mormon plural wife, educator, and suffragist Lucinda Lee Dalton began writing fiery political essays and insightful poetry for the Woman's Exponent from her small community in southern Utah. Through her writings Dalton endeavors to shape the opinions of Exponent readers by working within public discourse toward the goal of equality for women. At times both optimistic and troubled, she uses the rhetorical strategies of humor, irony, reason, identification, and persuasion to educate men and women on disparities and to encourage women to participate actively in their own emancipation. She often engages in a dialogical process with other writers by crafting both polemic and poetic responses to specific writings in order to work toward greater insight on critical issues. As an essayist Dalton defends her religion, calls for the expansion of women's political and economic opportunities, and asserts that the elevation of women is crucial to achieving the potential of both sexes. As a poet she is a compelling writer who reveals in her poems her apprehensions and aspirations, her faith and feminism. Much of her poetry reflects the same commitment to reform that is clear in her essays, and she uses both genres do effective political work. This thesis uses a pluralist approach to recover Lu Dalton as an important early Mormon writer. It articulates her merit as a representative voice by evaluating the historical context and rhetorical function of her published writings in which she actively calls for broad societal reform, writing on women's roles, political rights, and relationship with God and men.
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MacIntyre, Christine Anne. "Turn-of-the-century Canadian women writers and the "New Woman"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/10372.
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This study examines the literature written by the generation of women who come between pioneering women writers such as Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie and contemporary women writers such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, literature which helps us to understand the tradition of New Woman writing present in Canada at the turn of the century. This thesis examines selected texts published between 1895 and 1910, a period of rapid urban and industrial expansion in Canada when women began seeing themselves and their roles in society in "new" ways. The first chapter of this thesis examines the concept of the "New Woman" in terms of its original connotations. The second chapter focuses on the representations of the "New Woman" in Lily Dougall's The Madonna of a Day. Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of Today is the subject of the third chapter. The final chapter examines short stories written by Canadian women journalists Kit Coleman, Ethelwyn Wetherald, and Jean Blewett. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Shen, Ruihua. "New woman, new fiction : autobiographical fictions by twentieth-century Chinese women writers /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3113028.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-366). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Hale, Julie Elizabeth. "Creating the Appalachian Woman: An Anthology of Appalachian Women Writers, 1865-1884." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2005. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/990.
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This anthology of nineteenth-century women’s regional fiction, written in the mode of canon revision, explores how persistent stereotypes of Appalachian women originated. These stereotypes are not merely identified but are also considered in the context of women’s studies. Works by the following six authors are included: Elizabeth Appleton, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sherwood Bonner, and Mary Noailles Murfree. Topics addressed include nineteenth-century women as authors, the influence of northern literary magazines on regional writing, the image of the Appalachian woman in fiction, and the critical evaluation of primary texts. Original work required for the completion of a master’s thesis comes by way of a thirty-page analytical introduction, six biographical headnote entries, and an extended bibliography of primary works by Appalachian women writers.
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Ford, Anna Jane. "Endangered bodies : woman and nature in the contemporary British novel by women writers." Thesis, Brunel University, 2004. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5793.
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Criticism that involves the linkage of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘literature’, or ‘ecocriticism’, has focused largely on texts such as nature writing or on fiction that is set in rural or wilderness settings. This project attempts to widen the scope of ecocriticism by analysing the contemporary British novel, in which nature conceived in such stereotypical ways is largely absent. However, in my analysis of the fifteen texts selected here, I demonstrate that British women writers employ new discursive constructions of nature in order to contest deterministic formulations that subjugate both women and nature. My focus on female textual bodies enables me to explore representations of the fluid interfaces of nature and culture. In my analysis of novels from an environmental standpoint, `environment' is reconceived to refer to `where we live, work, and play' and may include not only the countryside and urban nature, but also the female body itself. Thus, the nature of my title is an inclusive term that includes contemporary discourses of nature employed by the sciences of biomedicine, genetics and technology. This project examines the ecofeminist premise that discourses of mastery not only affect subjugated others such as women, animals and others, but also influence the treatment of the natural environment. Analysing novels that employ forms of embodiment that foreground extreme bodily conditions such as pregnancy, monstrosity and death, I employ the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin (the grotesque body, carnivalisation and dialogism) and Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as tools of analysis to provide a new conception of ecological bodies. Novelists such as Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Margaret Drabble, Kathy Lette and Eva Figes provide a wide range of viewpoints from which to gather evidence of the insistence of the recurring trope of the endangered body within the troubled landscape of contemporary Britain.
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Scowcroft, Ann. "Escaping the hegemony of the written word : Canadian women writers and the dislocation of narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61803.
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Wright, Eamon David. "British women writers and race." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298874.
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Singh, Amritesh. "Tudor women writers fashioning masculinity." Thesis, University of York, 2011. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1522/.
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This thesis contributes to the growing interest in early modern masculinity and its literary representations by introducing texts by women writers into dialogue with their male-authored counterparts. It argues for a more nuanced approach that recognises that the concepts of masculinity and femininity can only be fully understood when studied in relation with each other. The first chapter explores how, notwithstanding the wisdom of conduct books and marriage guides, the demands of the state may not always be commensurate with those of the domestic realm and shows that this conflict necessitates a rethinking of existing definitions of masculinity by focusing on selected writings of the Tudor sisters Mary and Elizabeth and Jane Fitzalan’s *Tragedie of Iphigeneia*. The second chapter identifies how Elizabeth’s unique discursive strategies were designed to elicit support from her male subjects and subdue the belligerence that simmered under polemic like John Stubbs’ *Gaping Gulf*. In her letters to Anjou, the chapter examines how Elizabeth manoeuvred around her position as a beloved and as a monarch to fashion a husband who would not only be sympathetic but also subordinate to her political authority. This chapter also shows how the fabulous world of John Lyly’s *Galatea* consummates the Queen’s desire for the ideal male subject. The final chapter investigates the construction of martial manhood. It juxtaposes Mary Sidney’s *The Tragedy of Antonie* with William Shakespeare’s *Antony and Cleopatra* to determine how the figure of Cleopatra, common to both plays, challenges and revises the martial code of masculinity as embodied by Antony. By examining the authorial position appropriated by Cleopatra in the plays and its impact on the narrative, this chapter also extends this thesis’ interest in the extent to which female characters within texts compete for diegetic control with male protagonists.
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Daybell, James. "Women letter-writers in Tudor England." Oxford [u.a.] Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259915.001.0001.
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McKenzie-Stearns, Precious. "Venturesome women : nineteenth-century British women travel writers and sport." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2007. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001901.
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Bordoni, Silvia. "Imaginary homeland : romantic women writers and Italy." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2004. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13190/.
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The aim of this work is to investigate the importance of Italy, as a real and imaginary country, in British Romanticism, particularly in women's writings. Since the heyday of the Grand Tour, Italy has been approached as an alien and distant country, but also as a liberating and stimulating reality. Italy as an 'other country' constitutes an important element in the delineation of British Romanticism. The opposition between North and South, which was developed and consolidated by Romantic authors, constitutes the theoretical frame for this work. As part of southern Europe, Italy stands in opposition to Northern societies. North and South, however, are not simply in opposition; they merge and interconnect in the literary production of the time. Italy and Great Britain exemplify the dialogical connection between apparently irreconcilable opposites. In women's writings, Italy is exploited as an alternative imaginary setting onto which they can project their anxieties, their artistic ambitions and their dreams of literary success. The role of Italy in women's writings is important to demonstrate their participation in contemporary social, national and political issues. The work focuses first on travel reports and the real encounter with Italy. Then it analyses the imaginary figurations of Italy in Gothic literature and in poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of Italy as a morally liberating and artistically stimulating country is consolidated in the works of Stael and Byron. The representation of Italy as an ideal country for women artists makes their support of the Italian fight for independence particularly important. Since Italy represents a feminised and politically enslaved country, women associate its effort to gain freedom with their own struggle for political and social emancipation.
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Cohen, Stephanie B. "Four contemporary Jewish women writers from Argentina." Thesis, Boston University, 2000. https://hdl.handle.net/2144/38020.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityPLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.
Until recently little attention has been paid to Latin American women writers and even less to those of them who are Jewish. This dissertation is an attempt to remedy that situation through the study of four contemporary Argentine Jewish women writers. My introduction explores theoretical issues relating to the specificity of both Jewish and women's writing. Chapter One considers the work of Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). Although a Jew by birth, she shows very little overt Jewish influence in her work because she did not acknowledge her heritage. However, her background appears obliquely throughout her writing, for example, in many biblical references. Pizarnik's perspective on women is equally elusive, but nonetheless can be traced in her treatment of love and loss. Ana Maria Shua (1951- ), whose writing is the subject of the second chapter, is openly Jewish and unavowedly feminist. I study those aspects of her work that can be considered Jewish, such as her interest in the immigrant experience and her recounting of traditional Jewish folk tales. Although Shua does not admit to being a feminist, her books portray female dominance over men, particularly in El marido argentino promedio. Chapter Three centers on the writings of Manuela Fingueret (1945- ). Traditional customs, the Yiddish language and biblical references appear in her fiction and poetry. She depicts her female characters as strong and independent. Her poetry contains an element of eroticism, which she presents from a distinctively feminine perspective. The final chapter studies the work of Alicia Steimberg (1933- ). Steimberg's characters indicate contradictory feelings about being Jewish. Steimberg, like Shua, deals with the Jewish immigrant experience; she focuses on women, many of whom work outside the home. Steimberg's treatment of eroticism is idiosyncratically straightforward in its emphases. The dissertation's epilogue summarizes its conclusions and points the way for additional work to be done on Latin-American Jewish women writers.
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Wang, Jing. "Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers' Autobiography." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392046947.
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Swart, Susanna Maria. "Beyong the veil : Muslim women write back." Thesis, University of Pretoria, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/37291.
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This thesis sets out to provide what is perceived as the nature of Islam and background
that inform the interpretation of the two novels ofMariama Ba as well as that of selected
works by fellow Muslim writer, N awal El-Saadawi. Although the question of gender is
carefully addressed, the principal viewpoint is Islamic theocratic rather than purely
feminist.
This study surveys the struggle of these two women writers to claim public space in a
dominant patriarchal society. It examines the socio-political conditions affecting women
in the Arab peninsula before the rise of Islam, also called Jahiliyyah, from Islam's
inception (622 AD). It notes that the principle of equality of all the believers was
established by the injunction in the Qur'an, and endorsed by Muhammad, the Prophet,
after whose death, manipulation of the sacred texts, especially of the Hadiths, took place.
This led to opposition to gender equality; while fitna (civil war) in Medina, led the Prophet to re-institute the hijablveil, in order to protect women from being sexually
harassed. The significance of the hijab is then explored, and Fatima Mernissi's text Women and
Islam (1987; 1992) is used as seminal to the argument that the hijab was not instituted
to put a barrier between men and women. The question of how the Islamic tradition
succeeded in transforming the Muslim woman into a submissive, marginal creature, one
who once buried herself behind a veil, is considered in the light of feminist theory and practice in both the Third and Arab worlds as well as in terms of the postcolonial notion
of 'writing back'.
The works of Ba and El-Saadawi, chosen for discussion in this thesis, examine these
common issues, and underscore the entitlement of women to equality. The proposition,
that Muslim women talk/write back, is epitomized in Ramatoulaye's forceful wordsuttered
after thirty years of silence and harassment: 'This time I shall speak out' (So Long
a Letter, 1980; 1989: 58).
This study also shows that both Ba and El-Saadawi (by employing the journalisme-verite
approach) move beyond gender and cultural issues to explore the universal nature of man
and woman, and that in accordance with Muslim theocracy, these writers ultimately
advocate the notion of redemption through humanity, coincidentally expressed in the
Wolofproverb: 'Man, man is his own remedy!' (Scarlet Song, 1981; 1994: 165). Furthermore, within the context of these concerns, a few speculative remarks on the likely
future ofMuslim women in the Arab and African world are made, arguing that had Ba's
life not been cut short so tragically, it is reasonable to suppose that she would, like ElSaadawi,
have continued to advocate a holistic, healthy Muslim society, in which the
humane treatment of women would prevail.
Finally, in terms of the title Beyond the veil: Muslim women write back, an attempt has
been made to show how both Ba and El-Saadawi strive by 'writing back' to move 'beyond'
the veil, speaking out on behalf of fellow Muslim women in Africa.Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 1999.
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Vogt-William, Christine Florence. "Women and transculturality in contemporary fiction by South Asian diasporic women writers." Thesis, University of York, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.489210.
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My thesis investigates how transculturality is articulated and theorised in contemporary fictional works from the 1990s onwards by South Asian diasporic women writers from England, Canada and America. Using the paradigm of transculturality, diasporic and postcolonial theories as well as gender concepts, the thesis takes a broadly chronological approach in addressing South Asian diasporic female identificatory processes in South Asian women's cultural production.
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Bretag, Tracey. "Subversive mothers : contemporary women writers challenge motherhood ideology /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1999. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ARM/09armb844.pdf.
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Clay, Catherine. "Biographies of friendship : professional women writers (1918-1939)." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.404231.
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Milligan, Jennifer E. "French women writers of the inter-war period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319011.
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Safran, Morri. ""Unsex'd" texts : history, hypertext and romantic women writers /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3026209.
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Parra, Lazcano Lourdes. "Transcultural performativities : travel literature by Mexican women writers." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/21346/.
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This thesis examines travel literature by Mexican women in relation to transcultural performativities, which refers to a feminist critique of how writers capture their normative performativity and their agency as they interact with different cultural contexts. My analysis considers texts from the end of the nineteenth century, taking into consideration the first Mexican women who published travel literature, through to contemporary writers from the early twenty-first century. The major focus of this thesis will be to show how Mexican women writers repeat political and poetic performativities in their literature, based on their trips to foreign places. This thesis is composed of four parts: a theoretical analysis of transcultural performativities and three close, comparative readings of travel writing and the context of their production. In the first chapter, I propose a conceptual model named transcultural performativities to analyse travel literature. This model takes into consideration the contributions of Judith Butler, Fernando Ortiz, Walter Mignolo, Julio Ortega, Eyda Merediz, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha and Édouard Glissant. This analytical model has a tripartite structure: occidental Atlanticism, post-occidental border thinking, and the Philosophy of Relation in worldliness (globalisation). The second chapter is a comparative analysis of the works of Laura Méndez de Cuenca and Elena Garro to exemplify the Atlanticist relations among Europe, the United States, Latin America and, in particular Mexico. The third chapter examines the works of Rosario Castellanos and María Luisa Puga to grasp the cultural negotiations of the intermediate social experience between Mexico and other foreign countries. The final chapter explores the works of Esther Seligson and Myriam Moscona to analyse the positionality of Mexican Jews in relation to World Literatures. Overall, this thesis suggests that we can understand the complexities of the fluidity and non-fixity of subjectivity in Mexican women’s travel writing by dwelling on the constantly changing nature of sex/gender, social classes, racialization, nationalism, and religiosity.
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Minunno, Marisa. "Subjectivity in women writers' contemporary Arabic short stories." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2009. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28770/.
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This thesis examines the development of female subjectivities as presented in the short stories of women writers who started writing In Arabic in the second half of the 20th century in Egypt and the Levant (represented by Lebanon, Syria and Palestine), Iraq and the Gulf (represented by United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and North Africa (represented by Morocco and Tunisia). My theoretical approach draws on the theories of subjectivity elaborated by Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and other critical re-elaborations of Foucauldian concepts by several feminist theorists. This thesis aims at filling some of the lacunae in the available studies of Arab women literary achievements, which tend to be scarce, geographically limited, and concentrated on few famous names, dealing mostly with the novel and history of literature. Therefore the geographical area covered is extensive, showing the cultural, social and political variety of Arab countries against its mass media image of a monolithic whole. Whenever possible the authors have been selected among the younger, little known or translated women writers. The focus on the short story rather than the novel provides an insight into a dynamic area of Arab women's literary production which is widely understudied. Selecting subjectivity enables the study to move from the phase of history of literature to a deeper critical appreciation of women's literary achievements. Moreover subjectivity allows one to meet and hear the voices of female subjects with differences, opinions, sexualities, and so forth, and hence overcomes the many stereotypes diffused by mass media about 'Muslim women', transformed into a homogeneous, ahistorical and universalised category.
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Reus, Anne Maria. "Virginia Woolf's rewriting of Victorian women writers' lives." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20896/.
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This thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s representation of the lives of nineteenth-century women writers in her journalism and essays. I study Woolf’s lifelong engagement with Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, as well as her sporadic interest in Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Mary Augusta Ward and Margaret Oliphant to reveal her enduring engagement with the Victorian period and complicate her famous feminist statement that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’. Woolf’s literary criticism has a strong biographical component and often blends discussions of women’s literary works with extensive examinations of women’s historical and social circumstances. It is therefore perfectly situated for an analysis of the continued influence of Victorian biography and gender ideology on her writing. Based on an analysis of Woolf’s engagement with these writers’ rich biographical afterlives, I argue that Woolf’s responses to Victorian ideology are varied and complex, and range from the outright rejection of exemplary domesticity to the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes and limiting definitions of femininity. My thesis establishes that Woolf ignores changing modes of female authorship as well as the increasing professionalization of literature throughout the nineteenth century and instead prioritizes domestic amateur writers. While Woolf’s engagement with early nineteenth-century writers like Austen and Mitford often revolves around an imaginative reconstruction of their lives, her attitude towards later, better-documented writers like Brontë and Eliot is more contentious and demonstrates that Woolf used her predecessors to position herself as a modern woman writer who is not limited by her gender.
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Zulfiqar, Chaudhry Sadia. "African women writers and the politics of gender." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5202/.
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This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this thesis is threefold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are ‘national allegories’ and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.
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Taylor, Georgina. "Talking women : H.D. and the public sphere of modernist women writers, 1913-1961." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.339927.
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Kellett, Janine. "A study of working women in selected postwar texts by French women writers." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325394.
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Tolley, Rebecca. "Review of A to Z of American Women Writers." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2008. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/5652.
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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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Persico, Melva M. "Counterpublics and Aesthetics: Afro-Hispanic and Belizean Women Writers." Scholarly Repository, 2011. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/539.
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My project explores ways in which legitimacy is granted within the literary field. This is done through an analysis of literary anthologies, university course syllabi, publishing trends, literary prizes, and levels and sources of critical attention. The project seeks to determine the extent to which the works of Afro-descendant Spanish American and Belizean writers are reflected in the hegemonic Spanish American and Anglophone Caribbean literary canons. I examine the works of Cristina Rodríguez Cabral (Uruguay), Shirley Campbell Barr, and Delia McDonald Woolery (Costa Rica), and Zee Edgell, and Zoila Ellis (Belize). The project records the varying degrees of legitimation these writers have received and the factors that have had an impact on their recognition. It also shows that literary interculturality is possible in Spanish America and the Anglophone Caribbean through the aesthetics some writers employ and the activities of legitimizing agencies. Further I propose a plurality of canons based on the concept of plural public spheres/counterpublics as outlined by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner. My analysis of Belizean works emphasizes ways in which a national literary canon can be considered a counterpublic within a regional literary corpus. The concept of counterpublics I use to present the works analyzed is a model other scholars can employ in their examination of other minority literatures.
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Rowe, Donna Lynn. "From the inside out women writers behind prison walls /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/1966.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.Thesis research directed by: American Studies. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Chan, Lai-on. "New enemies women writers and the First World War /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2004. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/HKUTO/record/B38628703.
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Chan, Lai-on, and 陳麗安. "New enemies: women writers and the First World War." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B38628703.
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Osborne, Deidre Jean Juliet. "New women writers, motherhood and colonial ideology (1880-1903)." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.270839.
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Fronius, Helen. "The diligent dilettante : women writers in Germany, 1770-1820." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d95009fe-e8ea-4bcf-b520-29f2e9e849b5.
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The thesis sets out to explain the presence of women writers in the book market of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to do so, it examines the position of women writers in Germany - in the context both of their discursive and of their social reality. The thesis investigates the ideological and material background for women's writing, by exploring the areas of gender ideology, contemporary concepts of authorship, women's reading, and the literary market. The final chapter examines women's freedom of expression in different public circumstances. The thesis argues that women's position in the business of culture in general and literature in particular is not as unpromising as has often been claimed. By investigating less well-known texts on gender roles, such as eighteenth-century journal articles, it is possible to show that the rhetoric of prohibitions, for example regarding women's reading and writing, was by no means uniform, but fragmentary and frequently contradictory. Women's own responses to the conditions under which they were working are highlighted throughout the thesis, and examined on the basis of a range of texts, including unpublished correspondence. The examination of non-literary factors, such as the expansion of the literary market and the emergence of a newly diverse reading public, enables the identification of causes other than gender as determining women's position as writers during this period. In the course of this study, numerous neglected texts are considered, which broaden our understanding of this period of literature. The creative and successful use which women writers made of the opportunities they were afforded is emphasised throughout, thereby making an important contribution to the study of women writers.
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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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Ivey, Adriane Louise. "Rewriting Christianity : African American women writers and the Bible /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9987234.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Sowinska, Suzanne. "American women writers and the radical agenda 1925-1940 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9328.
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Alshatti, Aishah. "Appropriations of the Gothic by Romantic-era women writers." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/232/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Smith, Tania S. "The rhetorical education of eighteenth-century British women writers." The Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1303136879.
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Smith, Tania Sona. "The rhetorical education of eighteenth-century British women writers /." The Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486463321626562.
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Woodworth, Megan Amanda. "Becoming gentlemen : women writers, masculinity, and war, 1778-1818." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/38453.
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In Letters to a Young Man (1801) Jane West states that “no character is so difficult to invent or support as that of a gentleman” (74). The invention of that character, determining what qualities, qualifications, and behaviour befits a gentleman, preoccupied writers and thinkers throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis traces the evolution of the masculine ideals – chivalry, republican virtue, professional merit – that informed what it meant to be a gentleman. Because gentlemanliness had implications for citizenship and political rights, Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau, and the other men who sought to define gentlemanliness increasingly connected it and citizenship to gendered virtue rather than socio-economic status. Women writers were equally concerned with the developing gentlemanly ideal and, as I will show, its political implications. This thesis brings together masculinity studies and feminist literary history, but also combines the gendered social history that often frames studies of women’s writing with the political and military history traditionally associated with men. Doody (1988) suggests that novels are influenced by three separate histories: “the life of the individual, the cultural life of the surrounding society, and the tradition of the chosen art” (9). With the feminocentric novel, however, the historical context is often circumscribed by a concern for what is ‘feminine’ and what polite lady novelists might be responding to. With the exception of women’s participation in the 1790s debates, eighteenth-century women writers have been seen as shying away from divisive political topics, including war. However, I will show that masculinity is central to re-evaluating the ways in which women writers engaged with politics through the courtship plot, because, as McCormack (2005) stresses, “politics and the family were inseparable in Georgian England” (13). Furthermore, as Russell (1995) observes, war is a cultural event that affects and alters “the textures of thought, feeling, and behaviour” (2-3). Focusing on late-eighteenth-century wars, this thesis will explore how political and military events influenced masculine ideals – particularly independence – and how these changes were negotiated in women's novels. Beginning with Frances Burney, this thesis explores the ways in which women writers offered solutions to the problem of masculinity while promoting a (proto)feminist project of equality. By rejecting chivalry and creating a model of manliness that builds on republican virtue and adopts the emerging professional ethic, women writers created heroes defined by personal merit, not accidents of birth. Burney begins this process in Evelina (1778) before problematising the lack of manly independence in Cecilia (1782). Charlotte Smith and Jane West take the problems Burney’s work exposes and offer alternatives to chivalric masculinity amidst the heightened concerns about liberty and citizenship surrounding the French revolution. Finally, Maria Edgeworth’s and Jane Austen’s Napoleonic-era novels promote professionalism as a path to gentility but also as a meritocratic alternative to landed and aristocratic social models. Though the solutions offered by these writers differ, in their opposition to chivalric masculinity they demonstrate that liberating men from the shackles of feudal dependence is essential to freeing women from patriarchal tyranny.
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Al-Ayoubi, Amal. "The reception of Arab women writers in the West." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.490567.
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This thesis explores the reception in the Anglophone West of the works of three Arab women writers Nawel el-Saadawi, Hanan al-Shaykh and Sahar Khalifa. The principal methodological tools are drawn from cultural theories of translation, methods that go beyond a narrow technical focus on accuracy and commensurability in translation. The focus is therefore not on textual analysis, but on (1) political events such as the Iranian revolution of 1979, (2) forms of expertise such as academics, critics, reviewers and translators, and (3) ideological trends, primarily Orientalism and feminism, which all affect the success or failure of reception of a translated text in the host culture. The thesis finds that both forms of expertise and political events play important roles in forging a horizon of expectation, primarily among readerships respecting the content of works which are deemed to be interesting. The principal aim of the thesis, however, is to subject the conventional wisdom, which heavily stresses the overwhelming importance of Orientalism in the reception of female Arab writers in the West, to serious scrutiny. To this end, the oeuvre (mostly fiction) of three prominent writers whose reception has been marked by controversies over Orientalism and feminism was chosen. The goal is not to replace the 'Orientalism' thesis with a simplistic feminism thesis: The present argument accepts that Orientalism has played an important role in the reception of the three writers, although in fractured and varied ways. However, I also argue that feminism has played an important and increasing role in literary reception, particularly in the case of Nawal el-Saadawi. The idea is that feminist expectations and concerns, in conjunction with political events, create a 'knowledge vacuum' among readerships which is then filled by particular, relevant texts. In other words, it is inadequate to shoehorn all forms of Western reception into a vague and hydra-like category of Orientalism. However, the argument does not lionize the feminist movement: I show how feminism is marked on the one hand by Orientalism -a standard claim - but also how feminism itself is limited by its concern for gender on the one hand, and forins of political conservatism on the other, especially on controversial issues in Middle East politics, such as Israel / Palestine. I show this last point particularly through my exploration of the reception of the work of Sahar Khalifa. In a broader sense, the thesis aims to indicate how cultural interaction between 'West' and 'East' is more complicated than monolithic and essentialist analyses would have us believe. The idea is to bolster readings of Edward Said which do not fall into this trap. Ultimately, such a reading points beyond the notion of nativism on the one side, and Eurocentrism on the other.
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Adams, Brenda Byrne. "Patterns of healing and wholeness in characterizations of women by selected black women writers." Virtual Press, 1989. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/720157.
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Some Black women writers--Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker--of American fiction have written characterizations of winning women. Their characterizations include women who are capable of taking risks, making choices, and taking responsiblity for their choices. These winning women are capable of accepting their own successes and failures by the conclusions of the novels. They are characterized as dealing with devastating and traumatic personal histories in a growth-enhancing manner. Characterizations of winning women by these authors are consistently revealed through five developmental stages: conditioning, awareness, interiorizing, reintegrating, and winning. These stages contain patterns that are consistent from author to author.While conditioning and awareness of the negative influcences of conditioning are predictable, this study introduces the concept of interiorizing and reintegrating as positive steps toward becoming a winning woman. Frequent descriptions of numbness and disorientation mark the most obvious stages of interiorizing. It is not until the Twentieth Century that we see women writers using this interiorizing process as a necessary step toward growth. Surviving interiorizing, as these winning women do, leads to the essential stage of reintegrating.Interiorizing is a complete separation from social interaction; reintegrating is a gradual reattachment to social process. First, elaborate descriptions of bathing rituals affirm the importance of a woman's body to herself. Second, reintegrating involves food rituals which signal social reconnection. Celebration banquets and family recipes offer an important reminder to the winning woman that the future is built on the past. Taking the best of what has been learned from the past into the future provides strength and stability.The characterization of a winning woman stops with potential rather than completion. A winning woman must still take risks, make choices, and bear the consequences of her choices. The winning woman does not accept a diminished life of harmful conformity. She is characterized as discovering how to use choice and power. Novels included in this study are: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching God; Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters; Paule Marshall's Brownstone, Brown Girl; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; and Praisesong for the Widow; Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills; and Alice Walker's Meridian, and The Color Purple.Department of English
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Lei, Victoria. "Positioning the woman writer : Augusta Webster and her Victorian context." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/40935/.
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This thesis takes its direction from the belief that the preoccupations of a period are often most helpfully discussed through the work of its so-called minor writers. Such writers also enable the critic to articulate and clarify the concerns of other writers more firmly established in the canon. At the same time, of course, the minor writer is inevitably given importance and position within the context of the period, in a fruitful two way process. This is particularly the case with the Victorian writer Augusta Webster since her use of a wide variety of literary genres helps to express the breadth of literary culture in the period. At the same time, since she is a woman and a woman writer, subject to the historical circumstances peculiar to her sex, a study of her work enables the articulation of the linked literary, social and political concerns that surround the problem of identifying how writers construct and are constructed by gender. Positioning Augusta Webster, which is what this thesis seeks to do, thus unavoidably involves a discussion of the Victorian context within which she works and, I hope, goes some way to illuminating both the writer and the context. I begin by offering a literary and biographical overview with the aim of identifying the major issues both formal and historical which she encountered as an aspiring writer and semi-public figure. I try to show that her growth as a writer was linked to her preoccupations with the 'woman question', specifically with the education, work and political situation of women. I try also to show how these issues were those of the time and how Augusta Webster's treatment of them affected contemporary responses to her work. The Introduction is followed by a chapter on Webster's novel, Lesley's Guardians. My next chapter engages with Webster's translations of Æschylus and Euripides. The central section of my thesis is devoted to Webster's most famous work, A Castaway, which notoriously provides the fallen woman, here a middle-class prostitute, with a voice. Dickens, Gaskell and Barrett Browning are also introduced in their treatment of the fallen woman. Portraits, in the next chapter and the way in which the outsider is employed as social critic is analysed. Chapter five deals with Webster's closet dramas. I begin with brief outlines of these little known works; place them among other nineteenth century dramas and note that they were generally well reviewed. The sixth chapter takes Webster's writing life towards its conclusion with a discussion of her fantasy for girls. Daffodil and the Croäxaxicans. This story of the adventures of a young girl in a frog kingdom is situated within the genre of Victorian writing for children. I conclude with some speculation about the reputation of Augusta Webster. Beginning with Theodore Watts-Dunton's prediction that Webster would, like many others, probably be forgotten after her death, I suggest that although the factors that shape the subsequent reputation of a writer are extremely complex, some possibilities may be put forward to explain why Webster is only now becoming known again.
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Gillis, Lesley. "The woman who gains : women's rights, women writers, and the periodical essay in Britain and the United States, 1850-1905." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38194.
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This dissertation examines the periodical essay as a site for women's political activity in the nineteenth century. I suggest that the essays and articles of well-known writers Fanny Fern, Marie Corelli, and Sarah Grand, and others who are less well-known, such as Ignota and Mary Livermore, together form a significant body of prose non-fiction that highlights women's active involvement in political debate. I focus primarily upon women's contributions to general-interest periodicals---where women were competing for space against a wider variety of male writers---rather than on ladies' magazines or the suffrage press, whose more narrow goals diminish the potency of women's appearance in the press. Much of my study focuses on the British Nineteenth Century and the American North American Review , both of which turned to series of articles and carefully organized groups of essays to showcase women's inclusion in the debate, often summarized as the Woman Question, over women's position in nineteenth-century society. Throughout, I posit that women's publication on topics concerning women's rights constitutes culturally and generically sanctioned political activity. The five chapters represent increasingly specific aspects of this activity. The first positions women's involvement within the press's penchant for diversity. The second argues for a connection between the influential function of the periodical press and the role of women as positive influences on others. While this influence is generally interpreted as purely domestic, I suggest an alternative reading that endorses women's publication in periodicals. The third chapter examines how women play on notions of gender and identity to create viable public voices in the press. In chapter four, I turn my attention to the ways in which women occupy the forum of the periodical to comment on and prescribe male behavior. Finally, in chapter five I discuss the ways women exert their powers to interpret and comment upon p
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Harris, Sally. "If women write in milk, do children write in snot? : children's voices in documented drama." Thesis, University of Northampton, 2011. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/8858/.
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Zalduondo, María M. "Novel women gender and nation in nineteenth-century novels by two Spanish American women writers /." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3037032.
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