The importance of the letter as a means for social, personal and intellectual expression for humanists has been highlighted in various studies. For those studies, its value resides in its effectiveness in responding more directly to the presence of a new pool of readers giving rise to a new cultural type, transforming it into the emblematic genre of the humanists. I am interested in considering the influence of epistolary models in the New World, because, as these models were transferred to a new context, they acquired new forms that responded to the needs of communication, representation, symbolization and, finally, a new rhetoric. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will depart from the conception of the letter in the New World as a "polysynthetic" genre; that is to say, inasmuch as I wish to respond to the plurality of communicative needs that arose from the new contexts that were unforeseen by the humanist rhetoric, I will consider the letters from the New World as emerging from and forming part of other genres: accounts, petitions, diaries, among others. The starting point for this dissertation is the thorough reading and analysis of eleven unpublished letters, all written by women, currently located at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and sent from the Rio de la Plata during the XVI and XVII centuries. In my investigation, I intend to demonstrate how the authors used the writing of such documents as an empowering practice. Secondly, I will prove that these first epistles, written from America, do not necessarily belong to the ars epistolandi, but to the ars dictaminis. Furthermore, this change in distinction requires a critical review of the current state of classical letters. Finally, I maintain that these letters provide a space for the emergence of the authors' identity. In other words, I understand and ground the conclusions of this work on the fact that space culturally shapes gender, but that gender acts in the production of such spaces as well. The participation of female authors by means of these letters merges them with that spatiality in a process both of production and reproduction, since, as a conscience building act, the "I" is turned into text in order to discuss on/about the space.

This dissertation positions South African "colored" author Bessie Head as a political novelist. The dissertation also explores the nature of Head's art-form and content situating her achievements in the context of African traditions. The dissertation further highlights elements which distinguish Head as a political writer who both participates in and resists male-defined political discourse. Head's work appears to be an exploration of the possibility of defining "a new code of honour which all nations can abide by." This venture, which she seems to approach from an original angle in every text, leads her to embrace a redemptive kind of politics which is not readily recognizable as "political" writing because of its reliance on African spirituality. A Question of Power in particular, as this dissertation proposes, reveals what I have named the concept of consciousness-invasion, a notion which seems to be informed by African spirituality. Additionally, the thesis analyzes the critical reception accorded Head in the last two decades. It explains two discoveries: that, in general the attempts of Headian scholars to articulate the author's novelistic vision has yielded limited results because they have not seen her work as primarily political; that the view of Head's texts as political exposes the complexity of her canon as represented by her ability to simultaneously depict, with a fine balance, colonialism, racism, sexism, tribalism, and the self-interest which lies in every character who champions these oppression devices. In its redefinition of "political" writing the dissertation further argues that Head's novels exhibit the power dynamics of "macropolitics" in relation to those apparent in "micropolitics" and in "metapolitics". ("Macropolitics" and "micropolitics" are terms adopted from the work of linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff while "metapolitics" is my own coinage.)

This dissertation is a study of the religious and ethical influences on the lives of three American Jewish women: Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1880-1970), immigrant-born author from the Lower East Side who gave poignant voice in her fiction to immigrant Jewish women's lives; Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), immigrant-born political activist and an early member of the American Communist party; and Maud Nathan (1862-1946), an upper-class, American-born Jew who fought for female enfranchisement and better working conditions for store clerks and sweatshop women. In a thematic approach drawing comparisons among the three women, this study explores the role and impact of Jewish religion and values on their personal and professional life choices. Related to this main question are the following secondary questions: As deviant women--women who did not fulfill traditional gender and religious prescriptions for home-bound domesticity--how did these women negotiate their deviance within the Jewish and larger American communities? In their autobiographies, how did they present their lives, and to what extent did they reveal any awareness of the impact of their Jewish birthright upon their life choices? And how did their relations with the significant people in their lives--friends, families, and mentors--influence both their gender and Jewish consciousness? Through close reading of their writings, especially their autobiographies, augmented by selected theoretical work in the presentation of self, I examine how they each defined their Jewishness in ways consonant with their personal and professional aspirations, and how they all drew on their cultural, religious, and class values to play an active public role in their time.

Informed by object-relations theory (as formulated by Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas), this study explores the emotional impact upon children of parental unavailability in a sequence of four Cather novels published between 1915 and 1923--The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, One of Ours, A Lost Lady. However varied the scenarios or parental absence in these texts (whether inscribed as parents' dying, as parents' relocating and leaving children behind, or as parent's failing to recognize their children's emotional needs), their absence bears strikingly similar consequences in the lives of their children. What may be those children's most far-reaching loss is a psychic one: namely, that of the parental mirror, to adopt the language of object-relations. What recurrently characterizes the adulthoods of Cather's child-protagonists is the quest for a surrogate mirroring-object in which they seek a glimpse of a part of the self that plagues them by its half-detected presence--suggesting that in Cather, realization of self must be preceded by recognition by another. As Cather's protagonists attach themselves to various objects (another family, a social cause, an art), so do they characteristically elide an emotionally injurious past by erecting in its place an idealized past which becomes the object of a most intense nostalgia. This dynamic--by which the image of one's childhood (at the center of which often figure one's parents) is preserved at a cost to the integrity of the self--underwrites depression, as that concept has been defined by object--relations theory.

This dissertation looks at representations of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recovery in works by post-colonial women writers, specifically Bessie Head, Anita Desai, Le Ly Hayslip, and Medbh McGuckian. In examining the roles colonialism and patriarchy play among the forces which lead to mental breakdown, these postcolonial women writers depict a variety of manifestations of mental illness and a variety of traumatized characters. These authors identify the patriarchal equation of female sexuality with madness, and repressive and brutal attempts to control female sexuality as aspects of colonial and patriarchal worlds which are particularly devastating for women. At the same time racism, motherlessness, dispossession, disconnection from the feminine, and a hatred for hybridity are also identified as destabilizing conditions for both men and women. Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery explicates in detail the similarities between the trauma experienced by men in combat and the trauma women experience in patriarchal societies. The symptoms of PTSD as described by Herman find striking parallels in the Frantz Fanon's work on colonized peoples. The mental breakdowns and neuroses depicted in post-colonial women's writing match these clinical descriptions and can frequently be traced back to the traumatic experiences of war, colonialism, and patriarchy. Chapter one focuses on Head's When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power, and their prescriptions for healing. Chapter two focuses on Desai's Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner's Bombay, with particular emphasis on Partition. Chapter three focuses on Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War: Woman of Peace, and the interplay of Hayslip's Buddhist philosophy and her attempts to find safety and healing. Chapter four focuses on poems from several of McGuckian's works, but especially Captain Lavender and Shelmalier. I attempt to show connections not only among traumatic experiences in colonized countries, but also to other historical traumas, such as the Holocaust. I use concepts from Kalí Tal's Worlds of Hurt and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History to show these connections.