Vera Brittain (1893-1970), English writer, feminist and pacifist, wrote the story of her life in many forms: diaries, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts. These works, along with unpublished letters and Brittain's voluminous journalism, reveal that her girlhood was dominated by her close relationship with her brother Edward, 18 months her junior, whose masculine privileges aroused envy which whe did not feel free to articulate. Brittain's early religious life was marked by intense idealism and the desire for "service" and "sacrifice," impulses which found realization during her service as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse) in the Great War. Nursing wounded German prisoners in France convinced Brittain that war was folly and that she and the Germans had all been betrayed by religious leaders and politicians. The death of her fiance, Roland Leighton, of two close friends, and then of Edward, threw her into a numb paralysis in which life itself seemed meaningless. These feelings are reflected in Brittain's first two novels, published shortly after her graduation from Oxford in 1921. Vera Brittain's recovery came about in several ways. Her friendship with Winifred Holtby, whom she met at Oxford, gave her a companion who was, unlike Edward, a woman and an equal. Political work for feminist causes during the 1920's was a positive step towards empowerment. And her marriage to political philosopher George Catlin, along with the birth of their two children, reconnected her to the world and the future. Finally, writing her war memoir, Testament of Youth, enabled Brittain to memorialize her dead and to objectify her losses and move beyond them. Brittain's conversion to pacifism in 1936, inspired by her association with Canon H. R. L. Sheppard and his Peace Pledge Union, restored her religious faith and freed her from her association with her dead heroes. Her later work, especially her 1936 novel Honourable Estate, reveals this greater sense of empowerment, presenting feminist women heroes who are scarred by their losses in the Great War but manage, like their creator, to act independently and meaningfully in the world.

La lirica de Dulce Maria Loynaz (Cuba 1902) ha sido considerada por el canon academico como perteneciente al post-modernismo hispanoamericano. Tal lectura no satisface la plenitud metaforica que la constituye. Esta disertacion propone una relectura de su obra lirica desde las teorias de Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray y Julia Kristeva en torno a la identidad femenina. Se inicia con dos capitulos socio-historicos. El primero revisa la aportacion lirica de las mujeres poetas cubanas al canon literario desde sus camienzos hasta la generacion de Loynaz. Para la organicazion del esquema generacional se sigue a Raimundo Lazo. A caballo entre el post-modernismo y la vanguardia, el segundo capitulo analiza la produccion de estos movimientos en Cuba, deteniendose en unas consideraciones sobre la "poesia pura", para concluir que la lirica de Loynaz amplifica su poder significativo si se plantea su lectura desde los presupuestos de la Modernidad. Loynaz utiliza su textualidad poetica para disenar un Imaginario o identidad femenina basado en la liberacion de los presupuestos patriarcales que lo configuran tradicionalmente. Su estrategia reside en la metaforizacion acuatica, desde la que el yo lirico, paradojicamente, al adquirir una posicion marginal alcanza la integridad deseada. En una combinacion con imagenes de aire se desarrollan instancias misticas que contribuyen a la ausencia de limites. Lo inefable de la experiencia mistica se textualiza en el poema a traves de la liquidificacion. Al recuperar la voz a traves de la metafora, la voz lirica lleva a cabo un des-exilio, una ruptura de la especularidad que le hacia ser imagen de otro. Se copia la mimica del proceso mistico pero se transgrede pues, al alejarse del silencio, se lleva a cabo un proceso de des-histerizacion en la voz lirica. El pensamiento binario se suspende y se pasa a la fluidez. En la asimilacion de la tradicion literaria femenina que le precede, Loynaz recoge el misticismo de La Avellaneda, de Juana Borrero y de Emilia Bernal, para innovarlo a nivel estructural y otorgarle la dinamicidad de los enclaves liquidos en la constitucion del Imaginario femenino.

The Machiavels of tragedy are back-stabbing villains who manipulate events and who murder for their own self-aggrandizement. The comedies and romances, however, employ another kind of manipulator, a female "Machiavelle," who is cunning and dissembling, though for benign reasons. Like the traditional Machiavel, these women employ "rare tricks," but of a different order and for different ends. The movement of comedy is toward social and familial reconstruction and the reformation of character, and it is clear from a number of Shakespearean comedies that the office of reconstruction, to paraphrase Paulina in The Winter's Tale, becomes a woman best (2.2.29-30). The reasons why women are best suited for this role are conventional and traditional. Women have traditionally been seen as creators and nurturers both as mothers and in the healing tradition of witchcraft. "Match-making," a favorite intrigue of comedy, has historically been assigned to women. The medieval convention of "Processus Belial" held that, despite the devil's claim of mankind on the grounds of justice, the Blessed Virgin advocated and obtained mercy, just as Portia and Paulina manipulate other systems of "justice" to obtain mercy. There is also a long line of historical and literary women who are strong, yet good, stretching from Boedicia to Britomart, from the Virgin Mary to the Virgin Queen, who provide a model for the Machiavelle. Shakespeare weaves together traditional notions of women with the tradition of the stage Machiavel and the traditions of comedy to create a supreme class of comic dissemblers.

Born in Juticalpa, provincial capital of the Department of Olancho, Honduras in 1902. Clementina Suarez left her hometown at age twenty-one. Once on her own, she began to publish her poetry and to develop a life-style unique for a Central American woman in the early decades of the twentieth century. She lived and worked throughout Central America, in Mexico, New York and Cuba, gaining notoriety for her rebellious, woman-centered poetry, her bohemian life-style and her activities as a dedicated promoter of Central American art and literature. She gradually became a living legend in Honduras, in part because of the numerous verbal and visual portraits of her created by writers and artists from all the countries where she has lived. This is the first full-length biography of this matriarch of Honduran letters. It differs from other portraits of Ms. Suarez in its length, its point of view and its narrative strategy. Told from the perspective of an outsider observing and interacting with another culture, it begins with a brief history of the Suarez-Zelaya family, followed by a retelling of Ms. Suarez' life that is broadly chronological but that weaves together her past, present and future with a reading of her work that foregrounds her use of poetry as a workshop in the construction of herself. The theoretical concerns that inform this biography question the representational possibilities of language, particularly that discourse intended to describe one's self to another, while the biographical praxis responds to the feminist imperative to attend to the female subject and reinscribe her in her many contexts--social, historical, geographical, literary, feminine. Consequently, the narrative constructs an inconclusive portrait of the subject, drawing on such sources as personal interviews, gossip, autobiographical texts and poetry-as-autobiography, as well as the more conventional material found in archival and bibliographic sources. The result is a life-story that attempts to leave the legend intact while bringing the woman to life.

This dissertation examines the themes of regionalism, feminism and traditionalism as discussed by Camille Lessard-Bissonnette in her journalism, from 1906 to 1938, and in her novel, Canuck, published in 1936, in order to determine if the experience of immigration influences the treatment of these three themes. An immigrant herself, Lessard-Bissonnette was poised between two cultures. Moreover, her writing spans a period of burgeoning feminism. As a result, her depiction of her two homes,--Quebec and the United States,--her views on the rights and roles of women, and her maintenance of traditional perspectives and values from her culture of origin comprise the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, a biography outlining the writer's life and contextualizing her work, and a comparative study of the novels of three other Franco-American women writers round out this dissertation. The methodological approach is one which encompasses a variety of disciplines: sociology and anthropology illuminate a discussion of the effects of industrialization upon the institution of the family; research in women's studies informs an examination of female fictional development, women's part in labor history, and the role of gender specificity in the elaboration of nationalism, and; the field of ethnic studies sheds important light on recurrent themes in immigrant literature. The result of this dissertation is the revelation that Lessard-Bissonnette's regional loyalty eventually shifts from French Canada to be extended primarily to her pays d'adoption. Synchronous with this development is the author's increased participation in American public life, including the feminist movement. At the same time, however, the influence of her pays d'origine's traditionalism continues to be reflected in her preoccupation with family life, the preservation of language, faith and culture, and the expression of loyalty to the Quebec homeland. The conclusion of this dissertation, therefore, is that Lessard-Bissonnette's views, as expressed in her fictional and non-fictional work undergoes an evolutionary process. This is the result of an immigrant's slow but steady acculturation and is indicative of social change in the Franco-American community of which the writer is a member.

Esta disertacion busca, interdisciplinariamente, un material y un nuevo contexto, desde una perspectiva feminista, como base para analizar, las obras escritas por mujeres y en especifico, las de poetas espanolas del siglo XX, esperando entrar en dialogo con la tradicion poetica patristica. Asi, el Capitulo 1 sirve de marco y guia al material provisto en los capitulos siguientes.El Capitulo 2 narra procesos interdisciplinarios realizados por investigadoras feministas, quienes desde los anos 60 encuentran nuevas narraciones y diversas categorias de analisis producidas por la presencia de mujeres en la historia.El Capitulo 3 sintetiza las diversas etapas y las respectivas prioridades de la critica literaria feminista, especialmente la anglo-americana, desde sus origenes en grupos heterogeneos pro derechos civiles, hasta la organizacion de grupos exclusivamente de mujeres, a la par con la entrada de intelectuales feministas a la Academia.El Capitulo 4, es una bibliografia de 223 poetas espanolas, que presenta su incursion en otros generos literarios y la recepcion inmediata a sus obras en resenas, antologias, prologos, revistas de poesia, anuarios y textos criticos.El quinto capitulo se dedica a poetas y antologias, tanto generales como especificas, representativas del quehacer poetico en la Espana del siglo XX.El Apendice consiste de dos Cuadros antologicos. El primero incluye poetas que aparecen en antologias generales. El segundo, poetas en antologias tematicas, nacionales y/o regionales representativas. Es una nomina de 825 poetas incluidos en 75 de las antologias mas importantes que presentan y/o marginan poetas a la vez que establecen el canon, y su relacion con obras de las poetas rescatadas. Esta disertacion se cierra con una bibliografia (alfabetica y cronologica) de las antologias senaladas.Los trabajos de referencia, dedicados a las escritoras espanolas, han aumentado en los ultimos anos. En ellos, como en este, se busca fomentar el analisis de la amplia participacion de las mujeres no como fenomenos literarios aislados sino como evento que amplia la esfera separatista de cualquier proceso en el que participan las escritoras, o que la integran a un espacio mas amplio que permita ver sus obras dentro de otra nueva historia-literaria.

<p> The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from <i> within</i> the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation.</p><p> The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo&rsquo;s <i> Farabeuf</i> (1965), locating in the novel&rsquo;s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese <i>Leng Tch&rsquo;&eacute;</i> execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik&rsquo;s <i>La condesa sangrienta</i> (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cambio de armas&rdquo; (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik&rsquo;s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory&rsquo;s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela&rsquo;s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime&rsquo;s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit&rsquo;s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel <i> Lump&eacute;rica</i> (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures&mdash;official and unofficial&mdash;are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>2666</i> through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.</p>

This dissertation is a comparative study of the work and ideas of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) and the American Willa Cather (1873-1947). Their mutual admiration and written correspondence began in the 1920s and culminated during Undset's World War II refugee years in New York, when the two women met and developed a warm friendship. While several scholars are aware of their personal connection, no one has ever examined it. I do not claim that the writers influenced each other's work. Instead I examine the thematic and historical issues that most influenced them and attracted them to each other. Both had a very early devotion to nature, and both contemplated a career in science. At puberty both suffered a traumatic loss--death of a parent for one, removal from Virginia to the prairie for the other--which had a profound impact on their personal and artistic development, particularly around issues of sexuality, commitment, and love. I then explore the ways Undset's and Cather's early writing wrestled with the power of the erotic impulse, its effect on the artist's need for autonomy, and the conflict between the artist's life and socially expected female roles. I discuss the significance of their personal choices--which were reflected in choices made by heroines of their early novels--and place them in the context of Symbolist responses to the social disruptions of the late Victorian era. These include changing attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, art, and idealism, particularly the effect of thinkers like Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud on social attitudes; the apotheosis of Romanticism in the Decadent movement; the emergence of an increasingly mystical politics as the authority of religion waned; and the moral shattering of Western civilizations by World War I. The dissertation concludes at this point, when both women were faced with ruptures in their personal lives, both formally changed their religious affiliations, and both entered the decade in which they produced their most powerful work. Appendices include previously untranslated and unpublished texts (in both languages) of tributes each woman wrote about the other during the last years of their lives.

This dissertation explores the many-faceted, and somewhat elusive question: "What is American Jewish feminine literary identity?" Working from the premise that no one set of writers, themes, or literary forms constitutes a centralized identity, I suggest that Jewish feminine "collective" identity is heterogeneous and involves multiply-voiced debate. Drawing on feminist criticisms that emphasize both form and social context, as well as on Bakhtinian dialogism and theories of Otherness, I approach the problem by focusing on three prominent, yet diverse writers--Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and E. M. Broner--who construct multiple and mutable selves rather than fully-integrated personae. Rejecting rigid dichotomies, I probe the tensions both among and within their identities as Jews, women, and Americans. I first illustrate how Paley, resisting any firm or didactic explanation of her Jewishness, widens American Jewish identity by depicting diverse immigrant women's voices--all too often subsumed in a "world of our fathers." For Paley, Jewish identity is inextricably enmeshed in feminism, social activism, and empathy with the Other. Next, I explore how Ozick employs literary strategies rooted in what she terms forbidden, "pagan" magic in order to carve a place for herself in male-dominated Jewish literary and religious traditions. I argue that despite her resistance to the term "woman writer," Ozick's identity as a woman is a major driving force shaping her identity as an American Jewish writer. I then examine how Broner rebels vehemently against Jewish patriarchal frameworks and at the same time patterns her Jewish feminism after them. While the dissertation focuses on issues specific to Jewish women writers, the same problems of dual (or multiple) identities also bear upon the work of other women who identify both as feminists and members of ethnic groups. Thus, my last chapter offers a comparison between black and Jewish women's literary identities, showing that frameworks which attempt to essentialize race almost inevitably break down when viewed across borders of ethnicity. Seen in a broader perspective, the dissertation serves to integrate further the fields of Jewish, feminist, and ethnic studies.

The power of the system we call whiteness, as Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark, has long resided in its invisibility—or, more specifically, in the invisibility of its reliance on the racialized Other in order to articulate what we take to be “the norm.” All of the issues and themes that we take to be particularly “American” rely upon the presence that Morrison names “Africanist,” and that embodied presence carries the burden of our culture's anxiety about the unpredictable, explosive, vulnerable and mortal condition of all bodies. Further, our conception of the U.S. as a nation and of whiteness as a racial category both rely upon fictionalized instances of racial contact that the reader finds sentimentally “touching.” In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary ethnic American novelists Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee and Philip Roth have designed their narratives to revise the terms of that contact and revise the nature of that “touching.” In so doing, they seek to revise our ability to incorporate their narratives into a U.S. nationalism that valorizes whiteness. Generally speaking, works by “minority” authors are read in terms of what I call “ethical content”; that is, they are used to explain or elucidate historical injustices or consequences of difference such as “double-consciousness.” Such readings, ostensibly presented to “touch” the reader with a sense of outrage at the consequences of racism, often inspire much less feeling than that and always leave the structure of “whiteness” intact. I read Morrison, Lee and Roth as challenging this use of their narratives by structuring them in such a way as to make “ethical contact” with the reader. This contact is designed to translate the sympathetic relationship historically set up between whiteness and the racial other into a phenomenological relationship wherein whiteness is revealed to be not only visible, but touchable. In other words, these narratives reach out to the reader in order to implicate each of us in the material histories and racialized present that the characters (and authors) must contend with, and that includes the ghosts and the grief that attach themselves to racialized bodies.