This thesis explores the concepts of “voice” and “influence” through the case studies of two famous English-speaking Canadian women writers, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. The “voice” is multiple, ambiguous and influenced, but it is also apparently unique. How, therefore, is it constructed and where does it come from? I examine, work with and adapt Harold Bloom’s paradigmatic study of influence to a feminist context, exploring the idea that a literary voice can be developed and influenced by Atwood and Shields. I discuss how these writers searched for an appropriate literary role model, exemplified by nineteenth-century English-Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, at the moment when Canadian nationalism and feminism coincided. Atwood and Shields are now canonical writers themselves and important in both the nationalist and women’s tradition, but have they gone on to influence new Canadian women writers? I test the pleasures and the anxieties of Shields’ influence with regard to her creative writing students and her own daughter, Anne Giardini, who has published her first novel. I compare Shields with Atwood, who has achieved a high level of fame, and examine what kind of influence each exerts. I discuss whether literary influence is politically different for women than men and whether there is any jealousy or power struggles between the sexes. Rivalry and competition between writers are not purely caused by the aesthetic issues that Bloom discusses, therefore I contextualise his concept of influence using literary celebrity studies to consider the economic basis of cultural production. This is in order to show that tensions are determined by market conditions, just as much as the new poet’s desire to overthrow a literary precursor. Finally, I examine fan letters to Atwood and Shields as another important source of literary influence. I discuss how fans are constructed through a commercial relationship and how they can also provide an amateur literary voice. Atwood and Shields have helped to create a network of writers across the globe. I explore whether both authors can be role models who will inspire the next literary generation.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à un changement de paradigme dans l’imaginaire de la filiation tel qu’il est donné dans la littérature des femmes et les écrits du féminisme. L’hypothèse de travail est la suivante : à l’imaginaire d’une filiation déployée uniquement dans la latéralité des liens sororaux, se substitue au tournant des années 1990 un imaginaire mélancolique de la filiation, corollaire de la posture d’héritière désormais occupées par les auteures et penseures contemporaines. Parallèlement au développement d’une troisième vague du féminisme contemporain, la France et le Québec des années 1990 ont en effet vu naître ce qui est qualifié depuis peu de « nouvelle génération d’écrivaines ». « Premières », à l’échelle de l’histoire de la littérature des femmes, « à bénéficier d’un riche héritage littéraire féminin » (Rye et Worton, 2002 : 5), les auteures appartenant à ces « nouvelles voix » s’avèrent en effet doublement héritières, à la fois d’une tradition littéraire au féminin et de la pensée féministe contemporaine. Alors que la génération des années 1970 et du début des années 1980, se réclamant en un sens des discours d’émancipation des Lumières (liberté, égalité, fraternité), refusait l’héritage des générations antérieures, imaginant une communauté construite dans la sororité et fondée sur le meurtre des figures parentales, la génération actuelle n’est plus, quant à elle, dans la rupture. Située dans l’appropriation du passé et de l’histoire, elle réinvestit l’axe vertical de la généalogie. Or, c’est dans un récit familial mortifère ou encore lacunaire, morcelé, troué par le secret, ruiné par le passage du temps, toujours en partie perdu, qu’avancent les auteures, tout en questionnant le généalogique. Celui-ci ne s’entend pas ici en tant que vecteur d’ordre ou principe d’ordonnancement hiérarchique, mais se pose plutôt comme un mouvement de dislocation critique, « dérouteur des légitimités lorsqu’il retrace l’histoire des refoulements, des exclusions et des taxinomies » (Noudelmann, 2004 : 14) sur lesquels s’est construite l’histoire familiale. En d’autres termes, l’interrogation filiale à l’œuvre chez cette génération héritière participe d’une recherche de l’altérité, voire de l’étrangement, également présente dans les écrits théoriques et critiques du féminisme de la troisième vague. Cette thèse, en s’étayant sur l’analyse des récits de femmes et des écrits féministes publiés depuis les années 1970 – moment qui coïncide avec l’émergence de ce qu’il est désormais convenu d’appeler le féminisme de la deuxième vague –, a ainsi pour objectif de cerner les modifications que connaît l’imaginaire de la filiation à travers ce changement de paradigme. À l’aune de cette analyse menée dans la première partie, « De la sororité aux liens f(am)iliaux. Imaginaires de la filiation et représentations du corps », il s’agit, dans les deux parties suivantes intitulées « Des fantômes et des anges. La filiation en régime spectrale » et « Filles et mères, filles (a)mères. La filiation en régime de deuil » et consacrées plus précisément à l’étude des récits sélectionnés, de dégager les modalités filiales explorées par les auteures depuis le tournant des années 1990. / This thesis studies a change of paradigm in the way women’s literature and feminist writings imagine filiation. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that at the turn of the 1990s, the imagination of a lateral filiation, which takes the form of a sorority, is replaced by a melancholic filiation, corollary to the heiress’ posture of contemporary writers and thinkers. Parallel to the development of the Third Wave feminism, France and Quebec of the 1990s observe the emergence of a new generation of women’s writers. « [F]irst », in regards to the history of women’s literature, « to benefit from a visibly rich female literary heritage » (Rye and Worton, 2002: 5), the authors belonging to these “new voices” are doubly heiresses: of this female literary tradition and of the contemporary feminist thought. While the generation of the 1970s and early 1980s, in a sense reclaiming the discourse of the Enlightenment (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), refused all the legacy from the former generation and imagined itself as a sorority founded upon the murder of the parental figures, the “new” generation is not breaking with the past anymore. On the contrary, it seeks to appropriate this past as well as history. Therefore these authors identified with this new generation investigate the vertical axe of genealogy. However, the family plot they explore through a genealogical gesture is whether baleful, whether partial, parceled out by secrets or by the passing of time and always appears, in any case, to be already lost. Yet, genealogy is not to be understood here as a mere vector of order or hierarchy but is rather related to a critical movement of dislocation that aims to “divert legitimacies by retracing the repressions, exclusions and taxonomies” (Noudelmann, 2004: 14) upon which any familial history is constructed. In other words, this generation of heiresses explores inheritance and filiations as a way to encounter otherness, not to say the uncanny. A similar search is also at stake in the critical and theoretical writings of the Third Wave feminism. Based on the analysis of women’s writings and feminist thinking published since the decade of 1970s – that sees the Second Wave feminism growing bigger and more influent – this thesis’ main objective is to circumscribe how the imagination of filiations is modified throughout the change of paradigm. By the light of this analysis lead is the first part of the thesis entitled “De la sororité aux liens f(am)iliaux”, it becomes possible in the two others parts, “Des fantômes et des anges. La filiation en régime spectral” and “Filles et mères, filles (a)mères. La filiation en régime de deuil”, both dedicated to the reading of the selected writings, to identify new forms of kinship explored by women’s writers since the 1990s.

This dissertation assesses rage and its utility for fictional Black girls and adolescents in asserting their humanity, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to their identity formation. Through analyses of six novels: 1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath, Eyes, Memory, 3) The Hate U Give, 4) The Bluest Eye, 5) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 6) The Poet X, this research presents rage as a canonical theme in Black women’s coming-of-age narratives and presents connections between rage, rights, and resistance. The connections, revealed through stimuli and adaptations associated with rage, frame an argument for North Americas as an arbiter of anger. The novels construct an “arc of anger” that places them in conversation about Black girl rage and presents a tradition of Black women crafting Black girl protagonists who are conduits for counternarratives of rage. This dissertation also examines how history, memory, and culture contribute to Black girls’ frustrations and knowledge bases. By looking to works published between the angry decade (the 1960s) and the age of rage (the 2010s), the research presents ways Black women novelists and their characters return to rage to combat social institutions and critique social constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood.

Cette thèse porte sur Sainte-Beuve et ses Causeries du Lundi, et notamment sur les annotations effectuées sur certains de ces textes. Dans l'introduction à ces annotations, nous avons développé plusieurs points qui aideront à mieux comprendre qui était Sainte-Beuve, et son immense travail critique. Considéré comme le plus grand critique du XIXe siècle, Sainte-Beuve a développé minutieusement, une méthode critique bien à lui. Un des éléments importants du travail critique de Sainte-Beuve est la littérature qu'il a accordée aux femmes, que ce soient des figures célèbres ou bien des personnes peu connues. C'est dans les salons littéraires auxquels il était convié que Sainte-Beuve a trouvé une grande partie de son inspiration, ce qui lui a permis de fonder son discours sur l'oral, la conversation et l'observation sur le terrain, cela a dû largement contribuer à l'élaboration de sa méthode critique. Les salons littéraires étaient devenus pour Sainte-Beuve tel un laboratoire scientifique, un espace dynamique de travail interactif. Une des caractéristiques principales de cette méthode est de ne pas séparer l'écrivain de son œuvre littéraire, afin de le saisir dans son actualité, dans sa contemporanéité. Sa méthode est dotée d'un caractère naturel, dans la mesure où il part de l'écrivain et de l'œuvre. Sainte-Beuve, dans son travail de critique, avait aussi un rôle social. Il a tenté de décrire, à travers ses portraits, les rapports sociaux entre les individus de son temps ou d'une époque passée. Il était un personnage très sensible, écrivant avec une grande liberté d'esprit. / This thesis deals with the Causeries du Lundi of Sainte-Beuve, and in particular with the annotations made on some of these texts. In the introduction to these annotations, we have developed several points that will help to better understand who Sainte-Beuve was, and his immense critical work. Considered the greatest critic of the nineteenth century, Sainte-Beuve has developed a unique critical method. One of the important elements of Sainte-Beuve's critical work is the literature he has dedicated to women, be they famous figures or not. It was in the literary salons to which he was invited that Sainte-Beuve took much of his inspiration, allowing him to base his speech on the oral language, conversations and field observation, which has contributed greatly to the elaboration of his critical method. For Sainte-Beuve, literary salons had become a scientific laboratory, a dynamic space of interactive work. One of the main features of this method is not to separate the writer from his literary work. His method has a natural character, insofar as it starts from the writer and the work. Sainte-Beuve, in his critical work, also had a social role. He has attempted to describe, through his portraits, the social relations between individuals of his time or those of a bygone era. He was a very sensitive character, writing with great freedom of mind.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à un changement de paradigme dans l’imaginaire de la filiation tel qu’il est donné dans la littérature des femmes et les écrits du féminisme. L’hypothèse de travail est la suivante : à l’imaginaire d’une filiation déployée uniquement dans la latéralité des liens sororaux, se substitue au tournant des années 1990 un imaginaire mélancolique de la filiation, corollaire de la posture d’héritière désormais occupées par les auteures et penseures contemporaines. Parallèlement au développement d’une troisième vague du féminisme contemporain, la France et le Québec des années 1990 ont en effet vu naître ce qui est qualifié depuis peu de « nouvelle génération d’écrivaines ». « Premières », à l’échelle de l’histoire de la littérature des femmes, « à bénéficier d’un riche héritage littéraire féminin » (Rye et Worton, 2002 : 5), les auteures appartenant à ces « nouvelles voix » s’avèrent en effet doublement héritières, à la fois d’une tradition littéraire au féminin et de la pensée féministe contemporaine. Alors que la génération des années 1970 et du début des années 1980, se réclamant en un sens des discours d’émancipation des Lumières (liberté, égalité, fraternité), refusait l’héritage des générations antérieures, imaginant une communauté construite dans la sororité et fondée sur le meurtre des figures parentales, la génération actuelle n’est plus, quant à elle, dans la rupture. Située dans l’appropriation du passé et de l’histoire, elle réinvestit l’axe vertical de la généalogie. Or, c’est dans un récit familial mortifère ou encore lacunaire, morcelé, troué par le secret, ruiné par le passage du temps, toujours en partie perdu, qu’avancent les auteures, tout en questionnant le généalogique. Celui-ci ne s’entend pas ici en tant que vecteur d’ordre ou principe d’ordonnancement hiérarchique, mais se pose plutôt comme un mouvement de dislocation critique, « dérouteur des légitimités lorsqu’il retrace l’histoire des refoulements, des exclusions et des taxinomies » (Noudelmann, 2004 : 14) sur lesquels s’est construite l’histoire familiale. En d’autres termes, l’interrogation filiale à l’œuvre chez cette génération héritière participe d’une recherche de l’altérité, voire de l’étrangement, également présente dans les écrits théoriques et critiques du féminisme de la troisième vague. Cette thèse, en s’étayant sur l’analyse des récits de femmes et des écrits féministes publiés depuis les années 1970 – moment qui coïncide avec l’émergence de ce qu’il est désormais convenu d’appeler le féminisme de la deuxième vague –, a ainsi pour objectif de cerner les modifications que connaît l’imaginaire de la filiation à travers ce changement de paradigme. À l’aune de cette analyse menée dans la première partie, « De la sororité aux liens f(am)iliaux. Imaginaires de la filiation et représentations du corps », il s’agit, dans les deux parties suivantes intitulées « Des fantômes et des anges. La filiation en régime spectrale » et « Filles et mères, filles (a)mères. La filiation en régime de deuil » et consacrées plus précisément à l’étude des récits sélectionnés, de dégager les modalités filiales explorées par les auteures depuis le tournant des années 1990. / This thesis studies a change of paradigm in the way women’s literature and feminist writings imagine filiation. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that at the turn of the 1990s, the imagination of a lateral filiation, which takes the form of a sorority, is replaced by a melancholic filiation, corollary to the heiress’ posture of contemporary writers and thinkers. Parallel to the development of the Third Wave feminism, France and Quebec of the 1990s observe the emergence of a new generation of women’s writers. « [F]irst », in regards to the history of women’s literature, « to benefit from a visibly rich female literary heritage » (Rye and Worton, 2002: 5), the authors belonging to these “new voices” are doubly heiresses: of this female literary tradition and of the contemporary feminist thought. While the generation of the 1970s and early 1980s, in a sense reclaiming the discourse of the Enlightenment (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), refused all the legacy from the former generation and imagined itself as a sorority founded upon the murder of the parental figures, the “new” generation is not breaking with the past anymore. On the contrary, it seeks to appropriate this past as well as history. Therefore these authors identified with this new generation investigate the vertical axe of genealogy. However, the family plot they explore through a genealogical gesture is whether baleful, whether partial, parceled out by secrets or by the passing of time and always appears, in any case, to be already lost. Yet, genealogy is not to be understood here as a mere vector of order or hierarchy but is rather related to a critical movement of dislocation that aims to “divert legitimacies by retracing the repressions, exclusions and taxonomies” (Noudelmann, 2004: 14) upon which any familial history is constructed. In other words, this generation of heiresses explores inheritance and filiations as a way to encounter otherness, not to say the uncanny. A similar search is also at stake in the critical and theoretical writings of the Third Wave feminism. Based on the analysis of women’s writings and feminist thinking published since the decade of 1970s – that sees the Second Wave feminism growing bigger and more influent – this thesis’ main objective is to circumscribe how the imagination of filiations is modified throughout the change of paradigm. By the light of this analysis lead is the first part of the thesis entitled “De la sororité aux liens f(am)iliaux”, it becomes possible in the two others parts, “Des fantômes et des anges. La filiation en régime spectral” and “Filles et mères, filles (a)mères. La filiation en régime de deuil”, both dedicated to the reading of the selected writings, to identify new forms of kinship explored by women’s writers since the 1990s.

My thesis explores how female writers of the Golden Age of children’s literature used their domestic stories to convey their visions of a more desirable society to their child readers, and thus to widen their influence beyond the homely sphere. My first chapter reconsiders the nineteenth-century historical circumstances wherein the woman and the child came to be constructed and enshrined as the domestic woman and the Romantic child within the home, and excluded from the public discourses. I then consider how in domestic stories women writers tried to overcome this shared deprivation of autonomy with the child, focusing on the works of Charlotte Yonge, Juliana Ewing, and Mary Louisa Molesworth. It emerges that these women writers were all keen to encourage their young readers to question the boundaries that separate home from the public realm, and to imagine a society wherein these dividing lines would be mitigated and even be extinguished. The thesis argues that these female writers’ literary efforts to exhaust the potential of the domestic story, and that their motivation to provide their child readers a sense of agency were integral in the development of Golden Age children’s literature. Charlotte Yonge’s technique of evoking sympathy for the child characters forged a more intimate relationship between adult author and young reader, and initiated the unsettling of the hierarchy between old and young, and author and reader. Juliana Ewing’s experiments with child narrators and her mingling of adventure and fantasy stories with domestic stories showed successive writers the various directions the domestic story could go. Mary Louisa Molesworth’s nursery stories realized the purpose of Ewing’s literary experiments, as her stories’ natural interweaving of quotidian nursery and fairy tale elements not only alleviated the hierarchy between fantasy and domestic realism, but also opened an era in which the blending of these two modes would become one of the most popular genres in children’s literature.

Orientador: Cleide Antonia Rapucci / Banca: Altamir Botoso / Banca: Antônio Roberto Esteves / Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é demarcar o espaço da escritora Nélida Piñon na literatura de autoria feminina, refletindo sobre as vias de acesso que se abriram quando ela retomou uma das personagens mais conhecidas e míticas da história da Literatura Universal, Scherezade, no romance Vozes do deserto (2004). Este estudo permitiu que se realizasse uma reflexão mais acurada sobre a construção desta personagem a partir da perspectiva da critica feminista (SHOWALTER, 1994) e que se revelasse a condição feminina em um sistema hegemônico, coercivo e patriarcal que legitima as situações de poder, submissão, opressão e violência em relação às mulheres. Sendo assim, este trabalho é um convite para que se conheça a contribuição de Nélida Piñon à luz da evolução contemporânea e da emancipação consciente das mulheres que ousaram transgredir os limites do tempo e espaço em prol de sua visibilidade, independência, liberdade e reconhecimento como sujeito da história. Esses aspectos permitem contemplar as três fases: feminina, feminista e mulher, da literatura de autoria feminina estabelecidas por Elaine Showalter. Apesar de esta obra de Nélida Piñon ser ainda pouco estudada pela crítica brasileira, ela é importante também para os estudos da ginocrítica devido ao discurso crítico especializado sobre os textos produzidos por mulheres. Esta dissertação pretende valorizar o ser mulher que protagoniza não somente a história, mas a ascensão do seu próprio destino no mundo. Em conclusão, a escritora é nome de relevo para o universo literário brasileiro, sendo uma profunda conhecedora da história das mulheres e, portanto, atenta e comprometida com o atual cenário sócio-político cultural brasileiro / Abstract: The genesis of this work is to demarcate the area of the writer Nélida Piñon in the female authorship literature reflecting about the access roads that were opened when the author retook one of the most well-known and mythical character of the Universal Literature - Scherezade - in the novel Voices of the Desert (2004). So, this study allowed to realize a more accurate reflection about this character's construction from the perspective of feminist criticism (SHOWALTER, 1994) bringing out the feminine condition in a hegemonic system, coercity and patriarchal that legitimizes the power situations, submission, oppression and violence against women. Therefore, this work is an invitation to know Nélida Piñon's contribution in contemporary evolution and women's emancipation awareness who dared to transgress the boundaries of time and space to promote their visibility, independence, freedom and recognition as a subject of the history. These aspects allow to gaze on the three phases: feminine, feminist and female of the Women's literature established by Elaine Showalter. Although this novel has been little researched by Brazilian criticism yet, it is also important to the gynocritical studies because the gynocriticism speech is a critical and specialized speech about texts written by women. So, this dissertation intends to enhance (value) the female who stars not only the history but makes possible the rise of her own destiny in the world. To conclude, the writer is outstanding name for the Brazilian Literary Universe and she demonstrates a deep knowledge about women's history and, therefore, attentive and compromised with the current social political and cultural Brazilian scenery / Mestre

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.

The novel Agnes von Lilien by Caroline von Wolzogen, although celebrated during the period of Weimar Classicism, was not generally well known to English-speaking readers and researchers until recently. This project aims to address this situation by creating an easily accessible English translation of the novel complete with critical annotations for the benefit of researchers and lay readers alike. The annotated translation presented in this work is an excerpt of the full translation of the work drawn in particular from the first third of the novel. This novel, first published in 1798, reflects many ideals of the Enlightenment, as well as opinions on women's roles and women's education. In the introduction, I trace the way that the novel seeks to gently persuade the nobility and educated middle class to change the world around them. This is done through the ever-present contrasts filling its pages alongside the novel's emphasis on ideal possibilities. Rather than serving as a revolutionary critique, I assert that the story conveys a quiet call for a level of social reform that still assures the nobility their power while nevertheless challenging them to use that power for the betterment of society. Women are urged to extend their reach to the outer boundaries of womanhood rather than being content with the confinement imposed by traditional society. I conclude that the strength of Wolzogen's text and the trait that draws readers back even centuries later is the fact that, under the cloak of intrigue, adventure, and romance expected from the novel form, the ideals of the Enlightenment shine clearly. In spite of social and political changes over the past two centuries, the call to virtue, industry, reason, and self-improvement, regardless of gender or social class, still maintains its relevance and power for readers in the modern era.

Historically vilified, the vocalizing woman developed a stereotyped image with the emergence of the prima donna in eighteenth-century opera. By the nineteenth century, the prima donna became the focal point for socio-cultural polemics: women sought financial and social independence through a career on the operatic stage while society attempted to maintain through various means the socio-cultural stability now threatened by women's mobility. The prima donna represented both a positive ideal for women as well as a great threat to western patriarchy. A discourse emerged in which the symbol of female independence and success ”the prima donna" became the site of tactical control and containment. The prima donna stereotype, opera plot and music, and literature all presented the vilified image as a warning of the disaster awaiting women who overstepped the social boundaries established in the patriarchal image of ideal womanhood. Pauline Viardot confronted this attempt at containment by fulfilling society's expectations of her as a woman and simultaneously confounding its presentation of women opera stars. Viardot performed the role of social woman: she married young, she raised a family, she held a salon, and she engaged in other approved social activities. Madame Viardot's acceptance and fulfillment of the roles established for her by her contemporary society provided her a unique freedom within society in which she could maintain a career on the operatic stage without succumbing to the traditional detritus of the popular press, literature or social ostracizing. She crafted her own image rather than allow society to stigmatize or vilify her. Her success was chronicled in contemporary literature written by women who viewed prima donnas as spokespersons for the female plight. Much of this literature explores women's hopelessness and despair in the face of highly restrictive social codes. Prima donnas engaged in a very public career through which they established financial independence, professional success, and an identity literally shaped by their own voices. George Sand briefly explored the artist-woman's search for freedom and independence in her 1833 Lélia, but it was not until Sand met Pauline Viardot that she was able to create a heroine who could gain a respected position in society, enjoy lasting personal happiness, maintain social and financial independence, and who lived to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Consuelo stands as a permanent record of Viardot's impact on her contemporary society. Pauline Viardot successfully revised the image of the prima donna and that of women in the process. Viardot navigated the centuries-old tradition which demonized publicly vocalizing women and created a new image of the woman-artist. An accomplished actress among other things, Viardot successfully performed the roles of social woman, inspiration of a literary heroine, and prima donna. It is her successful negotiation of these roles which allowed her to carve out a unique position in her contemporary society, a position that allowed her to teach at the Paris Conservatory, support the careers of budding male musicians, garner the respect of royalty, publish and perform her own musical compositions, and live a long, fulfilling life. Letters addressed to Viardot, contemporary accounts by male musicians, and her immortalization in Sand's Consuelo all record the new image Viardot created: that of a respected member of society and operatic performer of great artistic and musical genius.