Texte remanié de: Proefschrift : Letteren--Leiden, Pays-Bas--Universiteit Leiden, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. 219-233.

This thesis investigates the representation of femininity within a variety of cultural sources including the earlier novels of Jeanette Winterson and the films of Walt Disney. This juxtaposition parallels images of female development and ego formation bringing to the fore the adolescent heroine's ancient roots in mythology, horror and the fairy story. As a cultural studies project, the thesis deploys the critical techniques of poststructuralism in conjunction with psychoanalysis, feminist theory and film analysis. This is necessary to demonstrate to full potential the heterogeneous quality of the revisioned models of heroinism. My analysis is focused on both popular and literary texts, with Winterson's early fiction in particular selected as a sophisticated and developed example of the ways in which current theory can chart the evolution of a contemporary female literary voice. This thesis carefully scrutinises traditional strategies concerned with literary discourse in order to show how phallocentric structures infiltrate and reflect postcolonial, popular culture. This is achieved through an initial concentration upon mass representation of the female form. This is a necessary analysis as one cannot demonstrate how contemporary women authors revise traditional models of heroinism without first defining what has gone before. Building on the work of Elisabeth Bronfen, this thesis examines how contradictory narratives construct a double opposition, overlapping the dead and the feminine against the living and the masculine, to defend against the knowledge of an incommensurable difference at the origin of life. By representing the narrative of double castration, this is a thorough examination of a movement away from biologically scripted models of castration anxiety, as with Freud, relocating identity at the site of the navel. This enables the subject to move beyond the division of sexuality as presented within patriarchal, heterosexual orthodoxies and to allow for a notion of femininity which is subversive because of its very willingness to explore and inhabit abject/deject states. For the purposes of my investigations, these tradtionally disturbing 'liminalities' will be understood in both psychic and cultural terms, but will focus, in particular on female adolescene. In conclusion, the revisionary heroine marks the dissolution of the certainty once associated with the ancient constructed ideal of femininity. She does not place herself in opposition to the traditional figure, more than that, she surfaces within the broader frame of Western culture as something different, some 'thing' else in the psychoanalytical sense to the 'Other'. My analysis of the figure of the revisionary heroine demonstrates the ways in which both the creation and the interpretation of art and theory can be inflected towards an inversion of the dominant structures of knowledge and power without simply reproducing them.

Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Bropy, Winterson and Place (Abstract) The thesis examines three formally very diverse texts published in 1969, 1993 and 2013 respectively that creatively approach and subvert the gender binary: Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and Vanessa Place's Boycott. Based on Jean-François Lyotard's conception of postmodernism as modernism in a constantly nascent state, the author advances a hypothesis of "postgender." This however does not mean overcoming gender for good (as it is sometimes understood, for example by Rosi Braidotti), but as a structural momentum, a possibility of subversion at the heart of any gender schema and currently therefore of genderism, i.e. the belief that gender is necessarily binary and that aspects of our gender are inherently linked to our sex assigned at birth. Apart from feminist theory and literary criticism, the thesis also touches on the field of transgender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history and most importantly the work of Jacques Derrida. In so doing it tries to articulate the notion of postgender as part and parcel of the condition of postmodernity and a culmination of the modern split of the subject, leading to a certain cultural gender turn during the 1990s. The work nevertheless remains...

This thesis examines a recent trend in contemporary science and speculative fiction to produce new and/or alternative iterations of reproduction that are not limited by biology, gender, or species. Through Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg regeneration” and recent critical and theoretical revisionings of this concept, I investigate this trend in three key texts: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Larissa Lai’s long poem “rachel” from her book of poetry Automaton Biographies. Each of these authors offers representations of reproduction that counter gender stereotypes and essentialism and produce new cyborg maternal or explicitly non-maternal figures unbound to patriarchal models of repronormativity and colonialist constructions of the mother. By portraying these nonunitary maternal figures and/or non-reproductive bodies, I argue that these sf texts present new forms of procreation that further feminist conversations about gender, the body, the limits of the human, future populations, and desire.

This thesis utilizes Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to examine three texts from 1980s British literature for the ways that postmodern writers compose the self. The first chapter “Liminality and the Art of Self-Composition” explores the ways in which liminal space and time contributes to the self-composition in J.L. Carr’s hybrid Victorian/postmodern novel A Month in the Country (1980). The chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) titled “Intertextuality and the Art of Self-Composition” argues that Winterson’s intertextual play enables her protagonist Jeanette to resist the dominance of religious discipline and discourse and compose a more autonomous, artistically oriented self. The third chapter, titled “Spatial Experimentation and the Art of Self-Composition,” examines R.S. Thomas’s collection The Echoes Return Slow (1988), a hybrid text of prose and poetry, arguing that Thomas explores spatial gaps in the text as generative spaces for self-composition.

This essay is a reading of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body. There are three major areas regarding to which the text is analysed: the textual ambiguity of the rhetorical voice, the linguistic characteristics of the work and the reliability of its narrator. The first chapter discusses the theoretical framework used in reference to the novel. The main theory applied into the subject of sexual ambiguity is Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Since the novel deals with a narrator of unspecified gender, the second chapter examines the ambiguous gendered identity of the narrative persona. The third chapter discusses the extraordinary linguistic characteristics of the novel and analyses how the narrator in the novel can remain of sexually unidentifiable nature. As there is a great deal of ambiguity, which makes the reader question the credibility of the narrative voice, the issue of reliability is discussed in the fourth chapter of the essay.

This study sets out from the premise that the fantastic, in the hands of the women writers with feminist awareness,can be used as a tool to subvert patriarchal gender roles that are culturally constructed. The dissertation aims at analysing the fantastic novels by Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus, and by Jeannette Winterson, The Passion and The.PowerBook as examples in which the transgression of gender roles is achieved through the use of fantastic images. The analysis of the fantastic images in these novels is confined to the definitions by Tzetvan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson. The study asserts that through an efficient use of the fantastic mode, both Carter and Winterson negate culturally dominant notions of reality, whereby they resist the cultural constructions of gender. Within the framework of this dissertation, some concepts like the New Woman, historiographic metafiction, the lesbian continuum and compulsory heterosexualism are also studied where they become indispensable to the role that the fantastic images play. Thus, this study identifies each fantastic image in the novels studied with its possible cultural and political implications so that the &ldquo / un-seen&rdquo / of the culture, a term suggested by Jackson, can be seen. In other words, the study concentrates on the subversive nature of the fantastic images so as to see the ways in which the rigid boundaries of the gender roles in patriarchy can be transgressed

This essay explores the adaptation process in ​The Gap of Time ​by Jeanette Winterson, a novel basedon​TheWinter’sTaleb​yWilliamShakespeare.Itisadiscussionandanalysisofthe novel; put in contrast to the play, and an exploration of the different emerging elements and themes in ​The Gap of Time.​ The most prevalent themes in the novel are abandonment, the power of jealousy, and alienation leading to self-invention. By exploring the novel in light of adaptation theories this essay will illustrate how Winterson exposes these themes. A comparative reading of the play and the novel makes it possible to discover various points in the plot where the adaptation process contributes to a different perspective on some of the characters in the story. In addition, the author has a personal connection to abandonment and loss due to being adopted as a child. This may also influence the narrative in the novel. Whilst jealousy is primarily focused upon in the play, the novel uses abandonment as its driving force instead, which is what this essay is focusing on. This in turn leads to self-invention as a tool to cope with loss, as expressed in the novel. Arguably there are other perspectives arising from the major themes, such as alienation and to some extent faith, which is also mentioned in this essay. In conclusion, the divergence between the novel and the play is fundamentally seen in character development. / Denna uppsats har för avsikt att utforska adaptionsprocessen i “The Gap of Time” av Jeanette Winterson som är en adaption av “The Winter’s Tale” av William Shakespeare. Det är en diskussion och analys av romanen, i jämförelse med pjäsen, samt ett utforskande av tematiska inslag i “The Gap of Time”. De mest allmänt förekommande inslagen är exempelvis övergivenhet, hur svartsjuka påverkar oss, samt främlingskap och självuppfyllande. Genom att utforska romanen i ljuset av olika adaptionsteorier så har uppsatsen som syfte att genomlysa hur Winterson fångar dessa olika tematiska inslag i sitt narrativ. En komparativ läsning av romanen och pjäsen gör det möjligt att upptäcka olika vändpunkter i berättandet som gör att läsaren får ett annat perspektiv på de olika karaktärerna. Det skall tilläggas att författaren har en personlig referens till övergivenhet eftersom hon själv är adopterad. Detta kan ha påverkat berättandet i romanen. Det drivande tematiska inslaget i pjäsen är svartsjuka, men i romanen är övergivenhet det som står i centrum, vilket denna uppsats främst handlar om. Detta i sin tur leder till självuppfyllande som ett verktyg för att hantera en förlust eller övergivenhet, vilket framgår i romanen. Min tes är att det också växer fram andra perspektiv ur de tematiska inslagen, så som främlingskap och religiös övertygelse, vilket också nämns i denna uppsats. Slutsatsen är att den grundläggande avvikelsen mellan romanen och pjäsen främst ses i förändringsprocessen hos de olika karaktärerna i berättelsen.

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Jeanette Winterson’s debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is regarded as an epitome of feminist fiction. The novel centres around Jeanette, a young homosexual girl, and her mother Louie who does not accept her daughter’s sexuality. Just like most mothers in feminist fiction Louie is described, by other scholars, as a one-dimensional character who forces normative femininity upon her daughter and defends patriarchal structures. However, this thesis argues that subtle instances of characterisation create tensions in Louie’s character, especially in regard to gender norms and heterosexual norms. Although Winterson’s novel has been explored from several perspectives most scholars focus on Jeanette. Few scholars have attempted to examine Louie and how she is characterised. Thus, Louie’s character is largely unexplored. To analyse Louie, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s narratological theories on characterisation are used, such as characterisation through direct definitions, actions, and speech. By showing that Louie is marked by tensions she is characterised as a mother who both upholds and challenges patriarchal structures. Since Louie cannot only be perceived as an agent of the patriarchy, she is consequently a complex character.