This project explores the ways in which early modern English women writers engaged with the rhetoric of ideal male friendship. Early modern writers on friendship, drawing from classical texts such as Cicero's De Amicitia, most often defined friendship as a relationship of equality between two virtuous men. Women writers revised this dominant discourse by arguing for their own ability to practice virtuous friendship, thus investing women's friendships with the political significance long carried by the male tradition. In this dissertation, I discuss Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Katherine Philips as writers who depict friendships that overcome class or gender differences through the common virtue of the participants. Placing these works alongside those of male writers on friendship such as Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare, I demonstrate the ways in which early modern women writers created a space for their own participation in an often exclusionary discourse.

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This thesis sets out to investigate, and concludes by defining, a genre of modern women's writing. This genre, which 1 have called 'intimatopia' for its depiction of fictional worlds which centre around intimacy, explores close relationships between men, I use this thesis to elucidate the ideological assumptions which underlie this genre, as well as to consider the textual features which are commonly used to support them. My investigation is facilitated by my choice to focus on the appropriative fictions which form a significant part of the intimatopic genre. The appropriative text is particularly apposite to any project which, like this one, seeks to investigate distinctive ideologies, for in a comparison between the text and its source the ideological perspectives of the writer can be glimpsed. As a result of this approach one of the central features of this thesis is a comparison between hegemonic and intimatopic ideologies, which are found to be markedly different. Central to the intimatopic text, which may be sexually explicit, sexually discreet, or sexually ambiguous, is the assumption that there exists a fluid link between love, friendship and intimacy. This ideological perspective is one which many theoreticians, in fields as diverse as literary criticism, psychology and biology, have connected to feminine, rather than masculine, ways of thinking. Although it is therefore unsurprising to find that this is a feature of a predominantly feminine genre, its application to relationships between men runs counter to ideological assumptions about masculine interaction. From examining a variety of appropriative literature 1 move on to less overtly appropriative texts in which the by now familiar intimatopic features can be identified. Following this, 1 discuss the interpretive communities which produce intimatopic texts, using the example of slash fiction, where the interpretive community is readily accessible, I begin to investigate the ideological assumptions about human interaction which underpin the interpretations typical of intimatopic writing. Finally, I consider the genre's antecedents, and mention other texts which, although they do not take male intimacy as their theme, nonetheless share intimatopic features. Thus this thesis offers an insight into an area of women's writing which has received little critical attention and which I have been able to crystallise into the genre of intimatopia. Whilst it is clearly inaccurate to describe all women's writing as intimatopic, this genre accounts for a significant number of texts by women and should be recognised alongside other feminine genres as part of the varied field of women's literature.

The works I examine in this thesis for Egyptian women’s narrative liberation strategies span from the nationalist-feminist works of the 1920s in Egypt throughout the twentieth century. I include works by Huda Shaarawi, Zainab al-Ghazali, Nawal El Saadawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, the post-1970s generation such as Ibtihal Salem, Alifa Rifaat and Salwa Bakr and finally, Ahdaf Soueif. The works for examination are organised chronologically and surround anti-colonial independence struggles in Egypt. I argue that writing corporeality for contemporary Egyptian women complicates the modern national space and histories. Qasim Amin (1863-1908) is deemed Egypt’s feminist founding father. His modernist reformist discourse is one of the attempts to create the interstitial space for Egyptian women’s liberation in Homi Bhabha’s concept. Amin’s ‘imitative’ Western gender equality discourse renders the heterosexual relationship complex within Egyptian nationalist heteronormative discourses. It kindles numerous debates about Islamic definitions of womanhood. Not only does this cause the tension between Islam and Egyptian feminism but it also makes Islamic culture open to changes and a plethora of discourses. This thesis aims at assessing narrative strategies through female bodies, which form an interstitial space in Egypt’s histories. Romantic love narratives in contemporary Egyptian women’s writing re-signify national space. Re-writing heterosexual relationships in El Saadawi’s (1931-) secular gender politics unsettles heterosexual constitution in Egyptian modern fiction, which disrupts a sense of a linear time in inventing national identities. Writing against Freudian masculine discursive power, El Saadawi distinguishes her feminist stance from Western feminist colonialist discursive hegemony. Her strategy renders an instantaneous frame of time, to use Bhabha’s concept. It targets the assumption of tradition as a nationalist discourse. Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996), through the creation of Layla in The Open Door, suggests that female sexuality can articulate historical perspectives of Egyptian modernity which has been dominated by male-centred views. The central space conferred on female sexuality in The Open Door reveals the symbolic representation of female sexuality in the male-led nationalist and nationalist-feminist debates. In Return of the Pharaoh, al-Ghazali (1917-2005) demonstrates her body to be able to endure tortures better than men; it involves a complication of the nationalist invention revolving around feminine ‘spirituality’, dependent on women’s roles of respectability. Her autobiographical writing is fluid between the personal and political and it becomes a vehicle for negotiating the national and female selves. Therefore, writing corporeality constitutes strategies for creating narrative time and space in Egypt as a nation. Also, Egyptian women’s writing techniques bring forth narratives of the lower class in Egyptian women’s movement. In the writing of the post-1970s generation, Ibtihal Salem’s (1949-) daily description of women’s lives disrupts the masculine national linear time. For Salem, sexual life expresses disillusionment toward Jamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist nationalism, lament for neo-colonialism and the fundamentalist revival. Alifa Rifaat’s (1930-1996) representation of female genital mutilation integrates suturing, i.e. healing, and infibulations. Rifaat’s writing renders nationalist discourse split by demonstrating this practice as a sense of belonging and a wound, and thus, she creates an alternative space for nationalist discourses. The short story genre is a strategy of conveying Egyptian women’s culturally mixed daily life. Salwa Bakr (1949-) devises female madness as a strategy to create new space within the domestic sphere. Her approach is based on revisiting Islam. She describes female psychological problems and carves out a representational possibility for Third World urban female subalterns. The zar ritual and psychoanalytic institutions introduce feminine circular time in Bakr’s works. Ahdaf Soueif (1950-) adopts the feminine romance genre to seek narrative possibility for female sexuality and for formulating space for historical subalterns. I suggest that women’s corporeality in Egyptian modern fiction articulates a series of performative ever-changing national identities.

<p>The following chapters access kitchen narratives through the lens of the Bildungsroman to help bridge an important gap in the reception and criticism of the theme. In particular, I examine the trope of food and the kitchen space in texts that also deal with coming of age, and how the criticism surrounding these texts has helped or hindered critical understanding of female experiences.</p> <p>In my Introduction I conduct a survey of the way literary criticism has approached culinary texts and women’s writing about kitchen spaces. I propose that viewing kitchen narratives in Latina authors’ texts as a form of female Bildungsroman serves as a platform for women to communicate their own stories in a way that highlights their contribution to a literary genre through their own personal experiences. In parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 2 I investigate further into the history of culinary writing in Latin America as well as how the Bildungsroman and the kitchen intersect in women’s writing respectively. In Chapter 3 I conduct a critical analysis of one of the most widely studied culinary fictions, Laura Esquivel's <i>Como agua para chocolate</i> (1989), and examine how this text and its scholarship have set the stage for food narrative criticism for women across Latina texts. Chapter 4 focuses on kitchen narratives in texts and how they can be viewed through the lens of the Bildungsroman utilizing Judith Ortiz Cofer's <i>Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood </i>(1991)<i>.</i></p>

In this project I explore the creation of female community in the novels of four contemporary feminist writers: Nicole Brossard, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau. I contend that in their diverse representations of female community, these women writers provide collaborative feminist models of resistance, creative transformation, and renewal. Building on Judith Butler's articulation of agency as variation on repetition, I argue that these writers transform the space of the novel in order to tell these stories of community, revitalizing this form as a potential site of collaborative performance of identity. They offer an alternative vision that is not only feminist and collective, but also transnational, translinguistic, historical, and epistemological - challenging and reconfiguring the way in which we understand our world. I develop the project thematically in terms of coming-of-age through and into female community (what the communities in these novels look like and the relationship between individuals and communities, seen through the process of individual maturity). I then consider the formal construction of female community through the collective narrative voice (both within the novels and outside them, in the form of each writer's collective body of engaged feminist dialogue in interviews and theory). Finally, I explore female community through alternative genealogies and quests for origin (demonstrating the implications of these novels' vision for transforming a more traditional worldview, with transnational communities and the transmission of historical knowledge across generations of women).

This dissertation provides a critical assessment of Laura Terracina (1519-c.1577) and her works. It argues that she was a consummate product of her age, embodying the tensions which ruled the Italian peninsula. Terracina published eight books and left a ninth in manuscript at the time of her death, winning legions of admirers and making her sixteenth-century Italy's most commercially successful female author. Yet in spite of her enormous popularity amongst her contemporaries, scholarship has largely neglected Terracina. This dissertation will open up an overdue field of enquiry into her life and works, exploring the significance of her role as a sixteenth-century female poet through the lenses of gender and class. By mapping her place in the literary landscape, it is hoped that this thesis will encourage scholars to afford Terracina the attention she so richly deserves. The first chapter of the dissertation situates Terracina as a poet of Naples, seeing her as a product of her family's political standing within the city, her academician status, and her own construction of an urban coterie of supporters. The second chapter considers the mechanics of the journey into print, assessing Terracina's own input and her close collaboration with male editors and publishers. It proposes a greater attribution of agency to Terracina than has thus far been made, arguing that she is, in fact, an important figure in the process of her texts reaching the hands of readers. The third chapter considers how the poet used her printed books as social tools, employing them to gain social and literary capital. The second section of the dissertation looks at two thematic strands within Terracina's poetry. Chapter four considers her political poetry, including her attitude towards the harm done to civilian populations across Europe. Chapter five looks at the religious dimension to Terracina's work, the spiritual poetry written in her later years, and the relationship this bears to her secular lyric. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a chapter on the contemporary reception of Terracina's texts, providing preliminary thoughts on how she was read, before closing with a consideration of her literary afterlife in the centuries that followed.

In the history of medicine "from below," religious language has been sidelined as a convention that interfered with the expression of peoples genuine experiences and feelings. This thesis uses the autobiographical writings of three well-known seventeenth-century women, Lady Anne Halkett, Lady Ann Fanshawe, and Alice Thornton, to explore how religious language actually facilitated the expression and preservation of their illness experiences. Having suffered considerable loss during the Civil War and Interregnum, these women relied on familiar religious scripts to present their life stories, including many illness experiences, as persuasive apologies for their difficult situations as widows after the Restoration. Considering their individual expressions of thanksgiving, the good death, and balance within a broader literary context reveals the extent to which each woman not only employed but also adapted convention to suit her particular purpose for writing. The womens illness narratives must therefore be read with due attention to their religious language, and both need to be interpreted in light of how the womens particular social situations and writing habits related to the cultural conventions of their time.

In the history of medicine "from below," religious language has been sidelined as a convention that interfered with the expression of peoples genuine experiences and feelings. This thesis uses the autobiographical writings of three well-known seventeenth-century women, Lady Anne Halkett, Lady Ann Fanshawe, and Alice Thornton, to explore how religious language actually facilitated the expression and preservation of their illness experiences. Having suffered considerable loss during the Civil War and Interregnum, these women relied on familiar religious scripts to present their life stories, including many illness experiences, as persuasive apologies for their difficult situations as widows after the Restoration. Considering their individual expressions of thanksgiving, the good death, and balance within a broader literary context reveals the extent to which each woman not only employed but also adapted convention to suit her particular purpose for writing. The womens illness narratives must therefore be read with due attention to their religious language, and both need to be interpreted in light of how the womens particular social situations and writing habits related to the cultural conventions of their time.