Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914.

Thesis--Cologne. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [175]-185) and index.

Originally published as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1935. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Nancy Armstrong. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210- 228).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Vita.

Inaug.-Diss.--Münster. / Vita. "Verzeichnis benutzter Werke": p. [v]-xii.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong. / Type-written copy. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is concerned with narrative constructions of women's identities in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. I focus on texts by A. L. Kennedy, Liz Lochhead, Angela Bourke, Éilís Ní Dhubhne and Marina Carr. The theoretical framework of my analysis has been inspired by these writers' concerns with the relationship between narrative and reality. An important idea derived from the study of this relationship is that one's voice often, if not always, accommodates others' voices and is modulated by the power they convey. This power, derived from traditions that naturalise legitimate subjectivity constructs, steers and disciplines narrators, characters borne in these narrators' voices, as well as to whom they speak, readers or other characters, affecting the representations of the realities they inhabit. In my thesis, I examine literary explorations of the power through which narratives voices operate to constitute identities. The vision of voice as necessarily accommodating others' voices has suggested the use of Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia in my analyses. The idea that an other's voice speaks in one's voice has sent me to Derrida's theory of citationality and to Judith Butler's theory of discursive reiteration and subjectivity. Regarding the act of narrating as an act of citation, I examine the role of narratives in shaping identity by providing subject positions derived form a citational chain of stories. The analysis of the relationship between narrative and reality undertaken in this thesis is interdisciplinary, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory. The main argument can be summarised thus: myth is a manifestation of authority in the discursive acts through which we present ourselves to ourselves and to others in social reality. These discursive acts are to an extent acts of citation that reiterate subjective identities which, through this reiteration, have become naturalised, normative and constraining. The kind of subject they constitute is produced at the expense of alternative possibilities of cultural expression.

The thesis offers a reading of Rebecca West's longer fiction as texts constituted by disputing authorities. It begins by placing West in a socio-historical context, showing how her own life, personal and political interests were insistently grappling with questions of authority. It moves on in the second chapter to examine the contradictions inherent in the patterning of narrative structures in West's fiction. The third chapter considers the construction of authority within narrative contexts as a complex of textual power relations. A reading of female subject positions as sites of gendered struggle comprises the last chapter. Together these demonstrate the necessity for the redefinition of the notion of authority, a move which has significant implications for the meaning and relevance of power in respect of art and female subjectivity. In the course of the thesis, I draw on a selection of West's non-fiction writing and journalism, as well as autobiographical and biographical material, in order to furnish 8 context for her work, and to highlight the significance of opposing voices heard through the fictional texts. My readings are made from a feminist perspective (no extended study of West's fiction has hitherto been made from this pOSition), and are influenced by the writings of a range of feminist critics and theoreticians.