From the earliest draft of her first novel through her last published work, Virginia Woolf treated science--particularly evolutionary theory--as a powerful discourse that claimed the authority to explain reality and which legitimized the patriarchal social structure. While appreciating the richness of Darwin and later evolutionary writers, Woolf consistently criticized science in general and evolutionary discourse in particular as expressions of patriarchal values. In turn-of-the-century Britain, biology, medicine and the theories that directed social policies were imbued with various interpretations of evolution, most of which considered white northern European men the apex of evolution. Belief in the possibility of devolution prompted evolutionary minded social thinkers to warn that global societal degeneration would ensue if "lesser races" followed their own paths without European guidance and if women of any race or class turned their limited energies to educating themselves and entering professional work rather than bearing and rearing children. Woolf grew up in an intellectual Victorian circle involved in evolutionary fervor and the reification of the sciences that both objectified her as a female and provided her imagination with new realms of experience. Woolf read Darwin and the science and social theory of the late nineteenth century, and as scientific writing itself became more specialized, she continued to read about science throughout her life. Through extensive and usually ironic revisionist readings of evolutionary concepts, Woolf anticipated the feminist critiques of science of the late twentieth century. The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, along with their published drafts, are the works in which Woolf most clearly involves science in her social criticism and evolutionary discourse in her treatment of science. In those three sets of works, Woolf critically examines the cultural values that made evolutionary theory such a compelling social force. In these same works, she also creatively appropriates evolutionary writing, particularly Darwin's, to evoke connections among eons of time, vast reaches of the earth and relationships among different types of beings.

<p> By reconsidering the concept of a &ldquo;women&rsquo;s literary tradition,&rdquo; this study aims to uncover the links binding together Austen, Bront&euml;, and Gaskell in a shared, female project of literary inquiry and political reformation. Reading the physical, material dimensions of the fictional environments (female movement, bodies, and socially defined spaces) in <i>Mansfield Park, Villette,</i> and <i>North and South,</i> we can see that all three novels engage in acts of <i>subversive recuperation.</i> After problematizing incumbent systems of masculine authority, these texts all work to infuse fresh relevancy and import into traditional value systems. Old is made new again as the influence of the novels&rsquo; heroines is seen to initiate processes of thoughtful social renovation able to rescue these young women from positions of threatening marginalization and able to realign existing patriarchal constructs with evolving communal needs.</p>

With the posthumous publication of Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf afforded her readers an intimate view of her childhood in late Victorian England. The signal event in that childhood was the death of Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen. By Woolfs own admission, her lost parent "obsessed" her until the completion of To the Lighthouse. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, which stresses the primacy of mother-child relations, and the more recent "identity theory" of Hans Lichtenstein, which postulates that one's "way of being" is dictated by early maternal experience, this study contends that Woolf's obsession never ends. Indeed, maternal loss, coupled with what Klein calls "the urge towards reparation," are central motivating factors in Woolf's continuing creative process. This reading considers the author's nine novels, in order to highlight Woolf's lifelong, recurrent "vision" of Julia Stephen. Woolf's vision is encoded in several symbolic variations of her "identity theme," including the use of the mother figure as writer, as moral progenitor, and as prognosticator of a twofold philosophy of resignation and melancholy. Virginia Woolf writes to recreate the lost figure of Julia Stephen, and to recapture the love denied by her mother's death.

Popular novels by women during the Weimar Republic have been accused of creating a discursive climate among women that glorified motherhood and encouraged political apathy. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that, on the contrary, these novels contained important social criticism and provided advice and role models for women. I also show that critics of these novels have misunderstood the discourse of "organized motherhood," long used within the women's movement to encourage women's entry into the public sphere in the name of civic activism. After situating the texts historically and culturally, my analysis of four texts: Stud. chem. Helene Willfuer by Vicki Baum, Die mit den 1000 Kindern, by Clara Viebig, Die Madels aus der Fadengasse, by Lisbeth Burger, and Thea von Harbou's Metropolis--works all influenced by the philosophies of the bourgeois women's movement--demonstrates a concept of women's role common to authors of the Weimar Republic's older generation. Here, women have the inherent potential to redeem and reform a society damaged by war and modern civilization through their entry into the public sphere and civic activism. Works of Weimar's younger generation of authors--Gilgi-eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Madchen, by Irmgard Keun, Die Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, by Marieluise Fleisser, Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm, by Gabriele Tergit, and Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, by Christa Anita Bruck--were written mainly in a neusachliche style by authors who did not experience the pre-war fight for women's rights but instead came of age during the harsh economic and social realities of the Weimar Republic. These works, devoid of bourgois utopias, instead contain strategies for individual survival and bitter criticism against modern conditions for women. Then as now, the personal was political for women. A novelistic description of the hardships suffered due to an unwanted pregnancy was as surely a protest against existing legislation and social conditions for women as a political speech--and one more likely to be accessed and understood by other women. Rather than contributing to political apathy, these novels criticized political and social realities, intervening into discourses about modern women and their role within society.

This dissertation is an exploration of the novel Gone with the Wind and its journey into Vietnamese readers' minds, specifically how the novel's concept of womanhood is perceived by Vietnamese women readers. It looks at the original text and a variety of Vietnamese translations to discover the perceptions of Vietnamese readers that may have formed from this Southern saga of the American Civil War. Chapter I traces the creation of Gone with the Wind from a Southern belle's experience of the Confederate's defeat, contextualized by women's viewpoints during the roaring 20s of the last century. Chapter II examines the characteristics of the translations into Vietnamese from English and Drench. It identifies the problems inherent in the translation process and highlight issues relating specifically to the Vietnamese language. This chapter explores various translation theories and practices and analyses the derivations that are due to the translators' viewpoints and their relation to the text. Chapter III discusses the reading and feedback process of a group of female lecturers in the English Department of Hochiminh City Open University in Vietnam. Their feedback is considered the precritical responses to the basic elements of a literary work such as the narrative's plot, characters, story, and ending. Chapter IV interprets the readers' treatment of the novel's concept of womanhood, especially the central female protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, who dealt with the collapse of the plantation's system of values and the emergence of a new role for women. This dissertation concludes by showing that there is a strong link between Gone with the Wind and Vietnamese women readers, illustrating the reflection of Vietnamese society's interaction on a personal level. The novel's influence manifested itself in different ways in each of the respondents. This dissertation explores, through qualitative research, the meaning of Gone with the Wind for women readers in Vietnam and gives a fresh perspective of the novel's success.

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton's satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton's anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk's monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker's biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset's Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America's failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.

Working at the intersections of various disciplinary axes, this dissertation brings together contradictory elements to create a postmodern feminist critique of the "autobiographics" of three American women writers, Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Kim Chernin, whose works enter into current conversations about the contemporary subject, story, and representation. This study explores thirteen self-representational works that cross numerous genres to examine how these writers foreground the mediating role of language in self-construction, but refuse to surrender the self to language. Close readings of selections from these texts suggest that, although socio-cultural symbolic systems are often motivated by efforts to control, social scripts are continually under processes of revision, as are histories and individual subjects. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn's scientific theory or shifting paradigms, this study illustrates how apparently fixed structures and systems are in fact fluid forms always in the process of change. The concept of "eX-centricities" that is worked with in this dissertation is linked to the politics and possibilities of moving beyond (as in time) and outside (as in space) traditional cultural and literary "centrist" thinking. It suggests a perspective that is in concert with contemporary physics, which suggests that all systems are dynamic, multifaceted, interdependent, and mutually influencing. Such a perspective argues that postmodern tropes do not arrive on the contemporary landscape as abstract theory, but from the lived reality of plurality, marginalization, annihilation, mobility, and partial positionality within constantly changing configurations. Within such systems, "universal truths" are problematized, and although patterns do arise, difference and diversity become as significant as sameness and commonality. In deconstructing the cultural matrices of dominant socio-symbolic systems, Allison, Pratt, and Chernin fracture those frames that have been constructed to contain some self-representational stories while privileging others. By foregrounding what has been in the background, these "autobiographics" create a geo/graphically transformative shift in perspective that brings the invisible into view. By seizing authority for self-representation, these writers show that "the subject" who has purported to be "universally representative" has in fact been merely another eX-centric point of view.

This dissertation investigates selected third world women writers' texts to explore how they reevaluate the relationship between woman and nation from postcolonial feminist perspectives. Further, this dissertation proposes that these texts, Kamala Maskandaya's Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), and Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes (1991), revealing a rootedness in the nation, resist national cultures, which are complicit with patriarchal ideologies, making it possible for us to see their "national" constructions of woman's identity as postnational. Chapter One formulates the dissertation's theoretical framework, drawing on selected writings of postcolonial third world feminist critics, among others, that are relevant to my discussion. Applying Benedict Anderson's concept of nation and identity as "imagined" constructs, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, I explore how these texts challenge the "imagined" patriarchal constructions of women as signifiers of national cultures. Chapter Two focuses on the impact of Markandaya's colonial heritage and diasporic consciousness in generating an ambivalence towards the concept of nationalism as seen in Nectar in a Sieve. Chapter Three analyzes how Dangarembga's feminist consciousness critiques the role of colonial and patriarchal agendas in creating a "nervous" national culture with neocolonial repercussions for women. Chapter Four compares feminist consciousness across cultural, geographical, and historical differences in Nectar in a Sieve and Nervous Conditions to examine how the latter text's postcolonial awareness reconceptualizes woman's empowerment. Chapter Five explores third world feminism, decolonization, and the modes of resistance to patriarchal structures in Changes, Clear Light of Day, and Nervous Conditions. Chapter Six, the Conclusion, offers a few questions for further exploration. Central to my analysis is the postnationalism I read into these texts which, I suggest, derives from the writers' more immediate concerns with female empowerment that problematize the female gendered identity and critique the role of nationalism, particularly in its complicity with the patriarchal. In doing so, these writers' diasporic consciousness leads towards a postnational conceptual paradigm, which reveals what is most particular in their writings--an inherent paradox implicit in that they both oppose and reaffirm nationalistic agendas.

The following examination of Cordelia Edvardson's Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir, Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, and Elizabeth Trahan's Walking with Ghosts: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna explores how three German-speaking, Jewish women remember their childhoods by creating a new lens through which the Holocaust can be viewed. The authors compel their readers to accompany them on their journeys into the past and to witness particular events by using language to zoom in and focus on childhood experiences—like a camera bringing an image closer through a telephoto lens. Their narratives remain translucent in that the reader is always aware of the authors' contemporary, critical perspective. Edvardson's, Klüger's, and Trahan's writings are similar in how they transmit memory; they break from the traditional, nineteenth-century form of autobiography by constantly interrupting the chronological framework of their narratives to oscillate between past and present as memories occur to them. This process of interweaving memory into narrative challenges readers to re-view in a new way the making of testimony about events with which they (the readers) may already be familiar. By using James Young's Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation as a theoretical foundation, I approach these narratives as a viewer with the intention of documenting the transmission of memory rather than merely examining the events that the authors recalled. These texts offer us access to an extraordinary perspective in Holocaust literature—an uninhibited view of daily life through the eyes of three young girls who came of age during the National Socialist era and who were persecuted for being Jewish.

This dissertation, the first book-length investigation of the works of Julia Franck, investigates representations of the mother-daughter relationship in Franck’s five major texts: Der neue Koch (1997), Liebediener (1999), Bauchlandung: Geschichten zum Anfassen (2000), Lagerfeuer (2003), and Die Mittagsfrau (2007). Specifically, it examines the roles of “daughter” and “mother” as social constructs, which are open to resignification and reinvestigation. In the introduction, I outline the trajectory of Franck’s career, focusing particularly on her relationship with feminist scholarship and her persona as a representative of feminism in the German media. In chapter 1, I begin with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and look for examples of performative identity in Franck’s works of fiction. I further destabilize identity in chapter 2 by demonstrating how identity is contingent on space, drawing on Marc Augé’s theory of “places” and “non-places.” In chapter 3, I demonstrate how psychoanalysis, as the primary theoretical lens through which the mother-daughter relationship has been viewed, conflicts with destabilized gender binaries, as laid out in chapter 1. Consequently, I argue, the psychoanalytic models of attachment and identity are not relevant to an investigation of the mothers and daughters in Franck’s works. I explain my theory of “maternal drag” in chapter 4. I argue that the mother figures in Franck’s novels exhibit a performative maternal identity, specifically one that so conflicts with expectations of the maternal that it calls into question those very expectations. Finally, in the conclusion, I consider the wider implications of my theory, particularly in light of the media discussions in Germany surrounding feminism, motherhood, and the decline in birth-rate.