Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.

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This study examines the use of the fairy tale intertext in contemporary Canadian womens fiction. In using specific fairy tale plots, themes, motifs, and/or characters within their works of fiction, women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries purposefully express their goal for the revival and continuity of the female narrative voice and sense of agency. To explore the fairy tale-fiction relationship, Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace and Anne Hberts Kamouraska are approached from what fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes has constructed as the theory of contamination of the fairy tale genre. The fairy tale genres integration into contemporary fiction represents an important development where fairy tale narratives are critically reread so as to bring out deeper meanings for the contemporary audience. / Comparative Literature

This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency. Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories. My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature. Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination. In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction. Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

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This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics.

五四時期，在改造社會背景下蓬勃開展的婦女解放運動，鼓舞了知識女性們擺脫舊社會的束縛，迎向新時代開放的潮流。然而，崛起於現代文壇的這第一代女作家，卻較少受到研究者的關注。本研究是以陳衡哲、冰心、廬隱、馮沅君、凌叔華、石評梅六位已為當時人知悉的、也較具代表性的女性小說作家們，在五四時期的小說作品為取材範圍，而論題所謂「女性小說」乃廣義的說法，是指女作家創作的一切小說，而非專指女作家之反映女性生活，或表現女性意識的小說作品。研究上是針對作家與作品，在作家研究上，除了從時代變遷、社會影響來探討五四時期女作家養成的社會背景與刺激創作的動因外，也從作家個人之家庭環境、學習經歷與人世遭遇來探索她們的人格特質與創作之間的關係。在作品研究方面，是以小說的思想內容與藝術形式為分析對象，在思想內容上是探討女性小說中所呈現的三大主題︰社會關懷、婚戀主題與人生意義的追求；在藝術形式上，首先是研究五四小說中大量出現的背離傳統情節中心而改以人物性格作中心的小說之敘事結構與觀點，再來是專節分析女作家中最具藝術技巧的凌叔華小說。

Tato diplomová práce se zaměřuje na současnou českou literaturu pro ženy psanou ženskými autorkami, a to zejména z hlediska čtenářů jejího dominantního žánru, červené knihovny. Cílem je popsat, jak dané autorky pracují s tradičními schématy žánru, nakolik realizují tradiční narativní schémata a jak tato schémata vnímají čtenářky preferující tento žánr. , Práce je rozdělena na teoretickou a výzkumnou část. V teoretické části jsme popsali stručný vývoj žánru jako součásti populární literatury a jeho charakteristické rysy. Základem výzkumné části je sociologické čtenářské šetření rozdělené na kvantitativní a kvalitativní. V kvantitativní části jsme provedli širší čtenářský průzkum formou dotazníků. Kvalitativní část je založena na analýze děl vybraných autorek, kterou jsme vedli pomocí volného hloubkového rozhovoru s úzkým okruhem respondentek. Tímto způsobem jsme analyzovali knihy Otcomilky od Simony Monyové, u knihy Bestiář od Barbary Nesvadbové a Tajné knihy Ireny Obermannové. Klíčová slova: současná česká literatura, červená knihovna, próza, čtenářský výzkum, Simona Monyová, Barbara Nesvadbová, Irena Obermannová Abstract My Diploma thesis is devoted to contemporary Czech literature for women. This type of literature write czech womens authors. We analyze this literary genre (women's fiction) in...

Set in an imagined pre-colonial/ medieval southern African kingdom, A Smoke that Thunders or Godtouched is an epic fantasy novel that tracks the lives of three magical Black girls taking on the gods and the patriarchy.