The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World War II attracted scholars, scientists, and literary figures with disparate political and social agendas. One of the most significant impacts of eugenic thought was the position in which it placed women who, as a result of the various women's movements, were beginning to forego marriage in favor of education and careers. Eugenicists reconfigured motherhood as a tool for preserving and improving the race, seeking to return educated bourgeois women to the home and forcing them to choose between enjoying their newly won emancipation and "saving" the human race. This project examines the works of G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and Emily Lawless, who all participated in the discourse of motherhood and eugenics, though from very different political perspectives, each infusing their literature with eugenic language that reflects both the larger eugenic ideas of their era and their own separate social visions. / Graduation date: 2002

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-92).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-288).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-92). Also available in print.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 442-472). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Throughout history, women have suffered from the mind/ body dualism, a major component of Western patriarchal ideology, which has consigned the body to women and the brain to men. Women's role is relegated to procreating, a "natural" act of the body that produces offspring, while men create, a conscious undertaking of the mind that brings something new into being. Women artists frequently confront continuous challenges to their creativity having to choose between mothering and artistic creation. Theorists like de Beauvoir saw the two as incompatible, three novels by Nancy Huston: La Virevolte (1994), Instruments des tenebres (1996) and Prodige (1999), seem in some ways to confirm that dilemma. Yet elsewhere this bilingual author affirms not only the possibility of combining them, but the importance of doing so to produce works that are feminine. Her work challenges the view of motherhood as metaphor in French feminist theory, as Huston relates that theory to practical concerns more often associated with anglophone feminist theory. A range of feminist works on maternity will be employed to examine the changing positions adopted in these novels, where the division between creation and maternity is primordial, but this split implies different results in each case. Instead of the traditional or feminist figure of motherhood, based on maternal love or instinct, the reader is confronted with specific types of conflict between mother and child.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 180-200.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 2007.

Throughout history, women have suffered from the mind/ body dualism, a major component of Western patriarchal ideology, which has consigned the body to women and the brain to men. Women's role is relegated to procreating, a "natural" act of the body that produces offspring, while men create, a conscious undertaking of the mind that brings something new into being. Women artists frequently confront continuous challenges to their creativity having to choose between mothering and artistic creation. Theorists like de Beauvoir saw the two as incompatible, three novels by Nancy Huston: La Virevolte (1994), Instruments des tenebres (1996) and Prodige (1999), seem in some ways to confirm that dilemma. Yet elsewhere this bilingual author affirms not only the possibility of combining them, but the importance of doing so to produce works that are feminine. Her work challenges the view of motherhood as metaphor in French feminist theory, as Huston relates that theory to practical concerns more often associated with anglophone feminist theory. A range of feminist works on maternity will be employed to examine the changing positions adopted in these novels, where the division between creation and maternity is primordial, but this split implies different results in each case. Instead of the traditional or feminist figure of motherhood, based on maternal love or instinct, the reader is confronted with specific types of conflict between mother and child. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate