This dissertation has examined the narrative genre of tanci in late imperial China while keeping a close eye on the theme of women's self-empowerment. I have analyzed three voluminous tanci works, Destiny of Rebirth; Dream, Image, Destiny; and A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men, respectively published in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. I have proposed that these tanci works, by depicting women's crossdressing, self-portraits, and homoerotic sensitivities, presented a transgressive potential to disrupt dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. Particularly, tanci works present women who leave their cloistered lives and travel while crossdressed as men. These women are the very opposite of the Confucian feminine ideal (the filial, chaste, and obedient woman who follows the prescribed codes required of a daughter, wife, and widow). Writing such challenging stories was itself a transgressive act for late imperial women authors, whose literary practices were under strict social regulation in the patriarchal society. For women readers of the time and for those of the contemporary period, reading these stories was and is an empowering experience. By identifying with the heroic protagonists, historical and contemporary readers alike may be inspired to envision a life of autonomy and freedom outside the domestic space. Tanci works, I propose, validate women in their immediate historical and cultural landscapes and project rich possibilities for women to reform social reality. The historical task of contemporary readers of tanci is therefore three-fold: to retrieve the voices of earlier authors from obscurity, to empower themselves with the help of these voices, and to integrate the predecessors' insights into a vision of new possibilities of social change.

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, like maps of the New World, reveal disjunctures in representation that disseminate deceptive portrayals of the New World. Such discrepancies open a rhetorical gap, or a thirdspace, of inquiry to analyze the gaze at work within these cartographic and women’s narratives. The representations of women’s geographic and social mobility remain constricted within the selected narratives of women’s travel. While the heroines do travel, in most cases they travel as captives or in some form of escape. These narratives include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), among others. However, these narratives do highlight similarities of an emergent “American” identity as Native American, hybrid, and fluid as represented in contemporaneous maps. Literary Landscapes also addresses the narrativity of maps as auto/biographical and even satirical expressions as related to the women’s narratives analyzed in this study. For, J. B. Harley discusses how a map conveys his own life and contains his memories in his essay “The Map as Biography,” while Roland Barthes argues that mapping is a sensorial experience in his brief essay “No Address.” Furthermore, allegorical maps like Jean de Gourmont’s The Fool’s Cap Map of the World (ca. 1590) and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de tendre (1678) reflect aspects of the human condition such as folly and friendship.

African-American and Zimbabwean women live and do theology from different cultural and contextual worldviews, although they share the same skin colour. The narrative stories of three Zimbabwean and one African-American Christian women and how they share inter culturally the struggle of identity, identity-formation and survival/liberation while maintaining their cultural uniqueness form die basis of this research project. These shared experiences can offer significant contributions to the broader feminist liberation theology. The Christian faith has served as a shared source of sustenance, resilience, healing and renewal as well as a shared source for constructive and affirming identity-formation for Zimbabwean and African-American women. Consequently, building strong relationships that address contextual issues facing women of Africa and the Diaspora, as suggested by this research, offers significant opportunities for eliminating some of the barriers and boundaries that prevent Zimbabwean and African- American women from enjoying the quality of life that God meant for everyone. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M.Th. (Missiology)

African-American and Zimbabwean women live and do theology from different cultural and contextual worldviews, although they share the same skin colour. The narrative stories of three Zimbabwean and one African-American Christian women and how they share inter culturally the struggle of identity, identity-formation and survival/liberation while maintaining their cultural uniqueness form die basis of this research project. These shared experiences can offer significant contributions to the broader feminist liberation theology. The Christian faith has served as a shared source of sustenance, resilience, healing and renewal as well as a shared source for constructive and affirming identity-formation for Zimbabwean and African-American women. Consequently, building strong relationships that address contextual issues facing women of Africa and the Diaspora, as suggested by this research, offers significant opportunities for eliminating some of the barriers and boundaries that prevent Zimbabwean and African- American women from enjoying the quality of life that God meant for everyone. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M.Th. (Missiology)