This project examines mystical discourse in medieval India and medieval England as a site for the construction of new images of women and the feminine. I study the poems of three women mystics from western India, Muktabai (c. 1279-1297), Janabai (c. 1270-1350) and Bahinabai (c. 1628-1700) in conjunction with the prose accounts of the two most celebrated women mystics of late medieval England, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-after 1413) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373-after 1438). My principal areas of inquiry are: self-authorizing strategies, conceptions of divinity, and the treatment of the domestic. I find that the three Hindu mystics deploy a single figure, the guru, as their primary source of spiritual authority. In contrast, the self-authorization of Julian and Margery is more diffuse, for the two mystics record testimony from a variety of sources, including Christ himself, to prove their spiritual credentials. The texts under scrutiny offer variously gendered models of the divine; three of the five mystics show preference for a feminized god. Julian and Bahinabai invest their deities with physical and mental attributes that were labelled feminine, such as feeding and nurturing. However, both women accept God’s sexed body as fundamentally male. Janabai is the most innovative of the mystics in her gendering of the divine; her deity Vitthal’s sexed body can be either male or female, although (s)he typically undertakes chores that were the province of women. Janabai is not the only mystic to attempt a reconciliation of the domestic and the spiritual. As narrated in the Booke, Christ expresses willingness to help Margery with her baby, although the text is silent about whether this offer was accepted or not. In addition, Margery undertakes domestic tasks for God and his family, thus investing them with a new dignity. My study demonstrates that as the mystics address questions of women’s relationship with the divine, they go beyond binary frameworks, positing fluid boundaries between male and female, body and spirit, and mundane and spiritual. Thus, these texts can be harnessed to engage creatively with the model of inclusive feminine spirituality expounded by feminist thinker Luce Irigaray, particularly in Between East and West (2002). / text

Mary Wollstonecraft’s ghost haunts women’s writing of the Romantic period. After her untimely death in 1797, and the publication of William Godwin’s candid biography in 1798, Wollstonecraft’s reputation was besmirched by the reactionary press in an attack on radical support for revolutionary ideals. Wollstonecraft’s campaign for women’s rights was conflated with a representation of her as sexually promiscuous, politically dangerous and religiously unorthodox. For women writing after Wollstonecraft’s death, an engagement with her political ideals risked identification with her lifestyle, deemed both improper and impious. My thesis explores how women writers negotiated Wollstonecraft’s scandalous reputation in order to discuss her influential feminist arguments and develop their own positions on these pressing issues in post-revolutionary Britain. In the early nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s life and work gets elided with the figure of the female philosopher, already popular in both pro- and counter-revolutionary writing of the 1790s. After Wollstonecraft’s death, fictional female philosophers echo elements of her biography whilst voicing an often caricatured version of her arguments. By rejecting these satirically overblown feminist positions, women writers could adopt a more moderate form of feminism, often closer to Wollstonecraft’s original polemic, to critique cultural restrictions on women, revealing how these warp female behaviour. My project modifies our understanding of the origins of modern feminism by focussing on Wollstonecraft’s reception across a range of socially and politically diverse texts, and the ways in which the process of reading itself is treated as potentially revolutionary.

“Women’s Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011” is equal parts cultural history and literary analysis. It examines the cultural contexts and conditions that shaped the emergence and development of modern celebrity in English Canada, focusing in particular on the role of mass media and bureaucratic policy in the production, dissemination, and consumption of celebrity by Canadians across the twentieth century. Reading celebrity as a function or mode of being and moving in the public sphere, this project historicizes women’s access to that sphere: it examines how ideological constructions of gender and fame have shaped how women in Canada have been able to access and use the tools and technologies of celebrity, and it argues that these conditions have had an impact on how women represent themselves in public life-writing texts. These celebrity autobiographies, this project demonstrates, not only narrate gendered experiences of celebrity but, in their rhetorical strategies and publication conditions, reveal the cultural climate of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures. In tracing the trends, tactics, and experiments in self-representation over the century, this project is able to uncover and examine the ideological and cultural pressures exerted on public women to perform particular identities and how these women attempted to manage, contest, and negotiate these conditions. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / "Women's Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011" examines the autobiographies produced by famous Canadian women across the twentieth century. It contextualizes the production of these texts by documenting the conditions under which women cultivated fame in Canada. The autobiographies of these women are read as tools for managing celebrity and their form and content is examined for what they can tell us about the condition of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures.

No description available.

This thesis aims to investigate the experience of travel and the representation of Italy in the works of British women writers of the nineteenth century. A close reading of literary texts by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot will help establish a connection between their journey to the Peninsula and their development as women and writers. The separation from their homeland and the confrontation with Italian culture were indeed pivotal for Shelley, Barrett Browning and Eliot in gaining a new perspective on their native land, breaking free from the rigid codes of behaviour expected from English ladies, and acquiring the authority and the confidence to write. It will be shown that in contrast to other Grand Tourists, Shelley, Barrett Browning and Eliot went beyond a mere description of Italian beauties and moved into the realm of social commentary. By avoiding stereotypical representations of the Peninsula and engaging in an authentic dialogue with the country and its inhabitants, they broadened the scope of travel narrative and explored matters of public importance to provide insight into national ideologies, while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere. The research will reveal that the experience of travel was not only essential in their journey to become professional writers, but it also increased their desire for the liberation of Italy as well as their own. / Questa tesi si propone di indagare l’esperienza di viaggio e la rappresentazione dell’Italia nelle opere delle scrittrici britanniche del XIX secolo. L’analisi di alcuni testi letterari di Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning e George Eliot aiuterà a stabilire una connessione tra il soggiorno nella Penisola ed il loro percorso individuale di emancipazione come donne e come artiste. Il distacco dalla madrepatria e il confronto con la cultura italiana furono infatti determinanti per Shelley, Barrett Browning ed Eliot per acquisire una nuova prospettiva sulla loro terra d’origine, per liberarsi dai rigidi codici di comportamento che contrassegnavano la vita delle donne in Gran Bretagna e per acquisire l’autorità necessaria per scrivere. Verrà dimostrato che, a differenza di altri viaggiatori del Grand Tour, Shelley, Barrett Browning ed Eliot andarono oltre la mera descrizione delle bellezze italiane, soffermandosi su temi di carattere sociale e politico. Evitando rappresentazioni stereotipate della Penisola e impegnandosi in un dialogo autentico con il Paese e i suoi abitanti, esse contribuirono ad espandere i confini della narrativa di viaggio fino ad esplorare questioni di importanza pubblica in linea con le emergenti ideologie nazionali e, allo stesso tempo, ad oltrepassare i confini della sfera femminile. La ricerca rivelerà che l’esperienza del viaggio non fu solo essenziale nel loro percorso per diventare scrittrici, ma contribuì ad accrescere il desiderio di liberazione per loro stesse e per l’Italia.

<p>This dissertation takes the paradoxical role of Colette in the canon of French and women's writing, from her earliest works to present, as an entry into a radically new interpretation of her life and literary oeuvre. This work is distinguished from previous works on Colette both in its approach and in the scope of its research, relying on extensive archival research revealing unpublished and unstudied aspects of Colette's biography and reception, and using a variety of modes of analysis to interpret this research. </p><p>This dissertation shows, in its first two chapters, how the myth of Colette as the incarnation of a particularly French brand of femininity, a spontaneous, natural writer, in no way literarily self-conscious, neither contributing to nor influenced by literary innovations, whose writing expresses her instinctive femininity, was constituted, from the earliest reviews of Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école (1900), through feminist interpretations of Colette from the 1970s to present. Because Colette was understood to be a feminine writer of women by both misogynist conservatives of 1900 and radical feminists of the 1970's, their understanding of this writer remained remarkably homogenous and durable. The third chapter relies on contemporary celebrity theory in order to investigate Colette's own agency in the creation and policing of this durable public image, tracing both ways that Colette maintained her image, and ways that she profited from it, focusing in particular on her eponymous literary collection, the Collection Colette, and her "produits de beauté" cosmetics line and a beauty salon. This understanding of Colette's agential role in her public image inspires a new reading of the 1910 novel La Vagabonde and the relationship Colette depicts between the protagonist, Renée Néré's stage persona and her life when she is not in front of an audience.</p><p>The next two chapters suggest new ways of approaching Colette, beyond the durable myth of the spontaneous feminine writer that she worked so hard to maintain: as a consummate professional and as a literary innovator. The fourth chapter focuses on Colette's professionalism: using a Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of Colette's correspondence to uncover her role in the literary field, tracing the full extent of her social, artistic, and professional networks with other writers, journalists, and artists. This chapter then explores concrete examples of her manipulation of these networks, studying in particular her collaboration with Maurice Ravel in L'Enfant et les sortilèges and her management of the literary department at the newspaper Le Matin. The final chapter of this dissertation reads Colette in terms of discourses of modernism, from which she has long been excluded due to her imagined marginality to the literary field, focusing in particular on French conceptions of the harmonious reconciliation of classicism and literary innovation which reached their height in the 1920's, and which I have termed the "classique moderne." This dissertation makes a contribution to trends in French literature, literary history, the sociology of literature, women's studies, women's history, feminist literary criticism, and celebrity theory.</p> / Dissertation

For centuries utopian and science fiction has allowed women to engage with dominant discourses, especially those which have been defined as the “domain” of men. Feminist scholars have often characterized this genealogy as one which begins with the destabilization of Enlightenment ideals of the rational subject in the Romantic Revolution, with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in particular. This thesis demonstrates that there has in fact been an enduring history of women’s cognitive and rational attempts to explore key discourses such as science, technology and architecture through Reason, as opposed to rage. This is a genealogy of women writing utopian science fiction that is best illuminated through Darko Suvin’s of the novum. Chapter One reveals how the innovative utopian visions of Margaret Cavendish (1626-1673) proffer a highly rational and feminist critique of seventeenth-century experimental science. Chapter Two demonstrates how Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) explored the socio-political significance of the monstrous-looking “human” body some fifty years before Shelley’s Frankenstein. Following this, Chapter Three re-reads Frankenstein in light of the early nineteenth century zeitgeist of laissez-faire economics, technological advancement and global imperialism and argues that these were also the concerns of other utopian science fiction works by women, such as Jane Loudon’s The Mummy! (1827). Chapter Four analyses how the function of the novum is integral to L.T. Meade’s (1854-1915) depictions of male/female interaction in the scientific field. Chapter Five considers how important it is to acknowledge the materialist concern with popular science that informs texts such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk novel Synners (1991). This is the history of how women have used the form of utopian science fiction as a means with which to present a rational female voice. In addition to the historical works by women, it employs a range of utopian and science fiction theory from Suvin and Fredric Jameson to historical and contemporary feminism.

Dorothea Herbert was an Irish provincial writer who did not publish during her lifetime. Only three of her manuscripts are now extant: a collection of poetry, Poetical Eccentricities Written by an Oddity (1793), an illustrated memoir, Retrospections of an Outcast (1806) and a Journal which covers the years 1806-7. All three manuscripts were missing for long periods and some doubts as to their existence and authenticity made many scholars reluctant to study her work. There is almost no documented historical evidence of her life and our only access to her is through her writing. The internal evidence of her writing suggests that by 1806 she was suffering from a serious mental illness. Nevertheless, her works reveal a relatively hidden world of literary practice in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Studied alongside the manuscripts and printed works of a range of contemporary writers, Herbert’s extant manuscripts uncover a complex and informal literary culture. This textual world is dependent on print culture but operates independently of it in a closed system of gift-giving and manuscript circulation. In this thesis I explore the influence of print culture on the writing and reading practices of Herbert and her contemporaries. The thesis is divided into five chapters which examine: the history of Herbert’s manuscripts and those of her contemporaries, their writing as material practice, the cultures in which they read the writing and circulation of manuscripts and the history of the print trade in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This study offers a narrative comparison of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, the two texts created by the first known English woman writer, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c. 1416). It focuses Julian as a storyteller rather than as a theologian, mystic or visionary, concentrating particular on her narrative strategies, that is, on the strategic use of formal narrative features and the changes in these between Vision and Revelation. This dissertation therefore examines Vision and Revelation in terms of three narrative features: plot, characterization and perspective or point of view (termed ‘focalization’ here). These three narrative features are brought into dialogue with Julian’s theology. Three analytical angles help shed more light on Julian’s innovative use of these structures in her works: modern narratology, Middle English literary theory and practice, and the texts’ own literary concepts and self-referential comments. Two central narratological methods are used throughout. The first is to make a distinction between narrator Julian, who tells about the events, and character Julian, who experiences the events. The second is distinguishing several hermeneutic layers or levels of signification in a narrative. Following narratologist Mieke Bal, this discussion distinguishes between fabula (the raw material), story (the content of the text) and text (the linguistic construct). On the basis of this exploration, this study argues that Revelation includes, expands and transforms the narrative structures of Vision, and thereby consciously draws more attention to the structures themselves. At the same time, however, within Revelation a similar narrative reshaping can be seen as between Vision and Revelation. That is, Revelation reshapes its own new narrative structures, in order to hint at God’s greater structure and envelop its own in His. This greatest structure, however, is only glimpsed. As regards these narrative structures, this study argues that linear finite narrative desire driving the plot of Vision is taken up into an endless, greater narrative desire in Revelation, creating a circular plot. At the same time, narrator Julian constructs an omnitemporal, non-sequential plot. Moreover, this analysis shows that the focalization already found in Vision is made more demonstrative in Revelation, while the narrator directs this gaze more towards the apophatic and what is always hidden. Finally, this study explores how many of the characters from Vision are made twofold in Revelation, while Revelation at the same time foreshadows the union this doubleness will achieve at the end of time. Revelation, in short, utilizes Vision’s structures and its own to implode structure.  Julian’s poetics thus is one of continuous developing and enveloping, which allows her to depict God, herself and the reader as characters in each other’s narratives and as participating in each other’s storytelling: she authorizes her own story by making it God’s and the reader’s as well. This more conscious structuring and simultaneous reshaping of the new structure in Revelation forms Julian’s most innovative narrative strategy and the most striking interaction between her art and theology: narrator Julian depicts her own storytelling as simultaneously participating in that of God and foreshadowing God’s ultimate storytelling at the end of time.

This dissertation examines lived experiences of mental disability and neurodivergency in contemporary women’s writing. It demonstrates that social forces and identifications across race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability mediate experiences with mental disability in the contemporary era. I draw from disability studies, feminist cultural studies, feminist philosophy, critical race studies, and affect studies in order to explore interdisciplinary questions about mental illness, neurodivergency, and mental disability in contemporary literature and culture. I bring an intersectional feminist disability studies methodology to the archetype of the “madwoman,” theorized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their groundbreaking 1979 work, The Madwoman in the Attic. Moving away from “madness” and toward “mental disability” in order to focus on how social logics and medical industrial systems produce mental disability, I argue for literary study as a way to better understand disability as a lived experience. I read Claudia Rankine’s poetry, Joyce Carol Oates’s and Dorothy Allison’s novels, and Amy Bloom’s and Esmé Weijun Wang’s short stories in order to investigate race, class, and sexuality across a range of feminine and nonbinary experiences with mental disability and neurodiversity in the contemporary era. I choose women as a primary category of analysis because they, in particular, have been hystericized, pathologized, and even incarcerated due to disabilities. These violences and inequities disproportionally affect women of color. I reveal how social logics, such as racism, and systems, such as the medical industrial complex, cause harm to those with mental illnesses and neurodivergencies. In some ways, mental disability may be an identity; in other ways, it may be a trauma; in other ways, it may be a stigmatizing force.