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This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical selfreinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time.

This essay uses feminist theory to examine whether the female narrator in Joanna Russ science fiction novel We who are about to… can be viewed as a personification of women’s struggle against an oppressive male society. The thesis of the essay is that the female narrator’s struggle against the male oppressors in the novel represents the struggle for women’s rights in Western society. The essay will also examine if teaching feminist theory and including women science fiction writers in the classroom will promote gender equality and thus fulfil the requirements of the Swedish curriculum.

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This study sets John Milton’s Paradise Lost in dialogue with Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, concentrating on each poem’s portrayal of the Christian redemption narrative as interpreted through typology. Specifically, I focus on the absence of a positive feminine type in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost and relocate it in Order and Disorder in the characters, Sarah and Rebecca. In regard to typology, Milton adheres to a traditional typology steeped in patriarchy, which devalues women’s participation, whereas Hutchinson recognizes both paternal and maternal types. Furthermore, Hutchinson views Sarah and Rebecca as vital to the redemption narrative and shapes them as types for Mary, therefore making an original contribution to typology. This study concludes with a reading of Hutchinson’s use of typology through twentieth-century contemporary feminist theology and suggests that Hutchinson’s role as theologian challenges that of Milton’s.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This dissertation investigated whether women's traditional work, that is, the work of nurturing others, could rightly be classified as a form of creative expression. This was achieved through a theoretical analysis of the concept of creativity and a qualitative study of Virginia Woolf's creative identity as articulated in her female character, Clarissa Dalloway, in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925/1993) and coeval diary entries (1978, 1980). Five historical epochs were identified in the history of the concept of creativity, which were thematically determined, including, 1) ancient philosophies, 2) philosophies of the 4th to 15th centuries, 3) philosophies of the 16th to 18th centuries, 4) philosophies of the 19th century, and, finally, 5) philosophies of the 20th century. Whereas men's evolving conceptualizations of creativity were largely categorical, and appeared to value rationalism, individualism, control, mastery, and even superiority, women's generated systems of thought were more characteristically integrative, systemic, practical, and intent on the interpersonal. The study of Virginia Woolf's narrative revealed the same. In the process of writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925/1993), Woolf and her character, Clarissa Dalloway, were simultaneously recreated. Both of these women's creative identities, in fact, were inherently relational, as opposed to individualistic and isolated-a creative identity that is consistent with traditional models of men's development. Findings revealed from both the theoretical study of the concept of creativity and Virginia Woolfs creativity identity were used to construct a more universal theory of creativity that acknowledged the developmental strengths of both men and women. Additionally, findings were discussed relative to optimism, the narrative construction of a woman's creative identity, and education. / 2031-01-01

This project examines the representation of architectural and metaphoric spaces in the works of four nineteenth-century American women writers: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Edith Wharton. I focus on what I call interstitial spaces: spaces that are neither wholly public nor private but that exist somewhere in between the public and private realms. Interstitial spaces are locations that women writers claim to resist the predominantly private restrictions of the family or the predominantly public conventions of society. Interstitiality becomes a border space that enables women writers?both for themselves and for their fictional characters?to redefine, rearrange, and challenge the expectations of public and private spaces in the nineteenth century. This dissertation investigates how nineteenth-century American women writers create interstitial spaces. Further, it demonstrates how they use such spaces to express their views, manipulate the divisions between the public and private realms, and defy societal and familial conventions. Since the mid-1970s, critics have been analyzing public and private under the assumption that the boundaries between the spheres were more porous than originally thought. This project adds to the critical dialogue concerning the separation of public and private realms as the conceptual framework of criticism shifts from an increased awareness of gender, race, and class. My project responds to the growing trend of analyzing literary works through architectural and spatial theories. While applying such theories, I focus on how race and class affect a writer's ability to create interstitial spaces. I further respond to this trend by considering authors who have not yet been included in this way, namely Wilson and Phelps. By analyzing the physical and rhetorical ways these authors manipulate space, I offer an account of gender, race, and class along with architectural and spatial concepts that juxtaposes authors who have not yet been considered together. My dissertation offers a new critical vocabulary to consider writers' representations of spaces by employing the word interstitial, which no other critic uses. I specifically use interstitial to describe spaces that exist between the public and private realms and describe the transformation in space that occurs through spatial and rhetorical manipulation.

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