Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-319). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of History, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the close and complex relationship between dress, feminism, and British New Woman novels. It provides in-depth analysis of six New Woman novels and draws comparisons with numerous other works. The case study texts are Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man: Or Perhaps Only ... (1926, posthumously), Sarah Grand's Ideala: A Study from Life (1881) and The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897). I explore why dress was so important to such novels, and examine the diverse, individual, developing, and shared ways in which authors engaged with dress as a feminist strategy and feminist concern. Areas considered include From Man to Man's use of functional clothes and dress production to celebrate female labour, Grand's interest in both dress reform and dressing to impress, Allen's shift in focus from the white-clad free lover to the sensibly-dressed working woman, and authors' use of deceptively clean clothes to address male immorality and disease. The thesis looks beyond as well as within New Woman narratives, demonstrating that writers, and publishers, were broadly concerned with dress in its various literal and more metaphorical manifestations. Focuses include self-styling, authorial cross-dressing, and bindings. Dress does not, however, always seamlessly support these texts' feminisms, I argue. For example, Grand elevated cross-class feminism, but she belittled middle-class women's taste, side-lined poor women's most pressing sartorial concerns, and dressed to impress. I also stress that dress, being so closely bound up with New Woman novels' feminisms and their ambiguities, is a revealing lens through which to read such texts, and one often capable of prompting re-readings. Attention to Allen's rejection of sartorial realism in parts of The Woman Who Did problematises the dominant conception of this novel as straightforwardly pro-free union, for instance. The thesis, as well as gesturing towards dress's centrality to the production and interpretation of literary feminisms and anti-feminisms broadly, emphasises the importance of dress to New Woman literature and its analysts, and uses dress to provide fresh readings of various novels and genre-wide issues.

Thesis (M.A.)--Wake Forest University. Dept. of Religion, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-99).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-179). Also available on Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-105). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

THESIS submitted by Wannisinghe Mudiyanselage Jayantha to Hong Kong Baptist University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and entitled "Emerging Femininities in Selected Sri Lankan English Fiction" May 2019. The study documents the rise of emerging Sri Lankan feminine subjectivities as portrayed in post-independence novels in English by Punyakante Wijenaike, Nihal de Silva, and Chandani Lokuge. It attempts to interpret the rise of socially constructed traits of new womanhood and shifting gender norms responding to significant transformations in post-independence Sri Lanka economy and society during which the nation has rapidly shifted from a traditional rural economy to an industrialized since the 1978 free market reforms embraced with policies of globalization and neoliberalism. The selected novels are historicized by means of specific data indicating that any compensations traditionally afforded to Sri Lankan women through the collusion of colonialism with patriarchy are being challenged by the current globalization of opportunity and risk, even as Sri Lankan women continue to engage in the far older struggles for respect in traditional contexts and spaces (Wijenaike), take up arms in service in the name of nation-building projects (De Silva), or search for greater life opportunities by means of out- migration and eventual return (Lokuge). Challenges to conventional colonial-patriarchal ideology, with attention to specific objects symbolizing alternative (or even "deviant") femininity long preceding modernity, are the central focus of Punyakante Wijenaike's Giraya and Amulet. The use of a Marxist-feminist approach, localized in the setting of the walauwe, allows for the examination of potentials and limits for women's subjectivities as they emerged in the earliest 1970s-era post-independence novels. Nihal de Silva's The Road from Elephant Pass explores the fictionalized portrayal of women soldiers, conscripted to the LTTE in the early 1980s, and the effects of a revolutionary posture upon traditional gender roles. The tension in de Silva's novel between the political liberation project as national/romantic allegory uniting Sinhala and Tamil causes as ultimately endorsing patriarchal claims of Anderson's "imagined communities" thesis in the dramatic context of women's participation in the civil war. Using a "Fourth World" sovereignty frame, the final chapter of the project analyzes the potential rewards and risks of diasporic experience, for women protagonists in Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled and Turtle Nest. Collectively, the analyses indicate how Sri Lankan novels in English have documented the struggles, potentials, and continuing vulnerabilities around the emergence of new feminine subjectivities for post-independence Sri Lankan women.

Zugl.: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2005

Univ. of Iowa, Diss. u.d.T.: Rolón-Collazo, Lisette: Voces múltiples de resistencia: Mujer y representación en la producción de Carmen Martin Gaite--Iowa City, 1997.