This thesis participates in a reconsideration of English-Canadian literary critical history through a reading of the critical construction of Sheila Watson's novel, The Double Hook. The thesis examines the rhetoric by which Watson's novel has been read as central to and representative of Canada's literary cultural maturity. That maturity has been measured by such modernist formal principles as the objective correlative and the mythical method, formalist standards and tastes valorized by New Criticism and by the synchronic mythographies of Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and structuralist literary criticism (such as Frye's mythopoeics). The thesis argues that a structural mechanism of sacrifice is central to the literary critical narrative about this novel; that the myth-making by which violence becomes sacred and thereby marks the establishment, redemption, or survival of culture, is founded specifically on the sacrifice of women in The Double Hook.

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Criticism of Michael Ondaatje's prose emphasizes the author's deconstruction of familiar binary oppositions as he challenges history and authority. The criticism, however, neglects the opposition between men and women. This omission is surprising, considering the remarkable transition in the representation of women throughout Ondaatje's prose. Women in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976) are objectified: lacking the tools for self-representation, the women are framed as sites of sexuality, negativity, and darkness. In Running in the Family (1982), however, the narrator finds community with female family members, recognizing in himself the penchant for storytelling of his female relatives. Running bridges the earlier texts with the later In the Skin of a Lion (1987), where the narrator grants a more complex subjectivity to the women, empowering them with ability equal to that of men to take "responsibility for the story"(Skin 157).

This thesis offers a feminist analysis of women and gender in the novels of Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Ba, Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head. My analyses appropriate and rethink western feminist theories of gender and post-colonial literary theory. I maintain that the texts analyzed are also theoretical, since feminist theory is embedded in the polysemy of the texts themselves. The study demonstrates that identity and sexuality are not static sites of oppression for women. They are contesting terrains where the subversion of difference, and the construction of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, are interlocking issues. Women's positional perspectives and varying subject positions are shown to be their strengths.

Andre Langevin's novels, Evade de la nuit (1951), Poussiere sur la ville (1953), Le temps des hommes (1956), L'elan d'Amerique (1972) and Une chaine daps le parc (1974) show numerous lonely characters. Abandoned, secluded or uncivilized, they remain unable to communicate with others: "C'est ce rapport difficile et jamais termine de l'individu avec "autrui" qui constitue la trame essentielle et la continuite de l'oeuvre romanesque d'Andre Langevin", wrote Jean-Louis Major in 1977, in an article about the author. / The purpose of this study is to look at the representation of the "Other" when it refers specifically to a woman. The feminine characters in Langevin's novels are shown as strangers: obviously different from men, women are struck by passions that are unknown and incomprehensible to the male heros or to any other man of her environment. In the first part, this study will demonstrate that the majority of heroines lived a painful chidhood with an absent father and an unkind mother. The second part will look at the love relationships of the female protagonists, unions that remain disappointing and are doomed to failure. Finally, the conclusion will examine the tragic death of several heroines (suicide, death in child-birth...). / This study of Andre Langevin's feminine characters relies on the feminist critic, using, among others, the work of Barbara Godard and Lori Saint-Martin. This model will offer an innovative perspective of a literary work that has been greatly studied, but for which one important aspect appears to have been neglected: women who inhabit it.

This creative project has examined the craft involved in the writing of a series of thirteen original short stories based on the mythic faces of woman. The stories deal with woman from puberty to old age and are concluded with a look at the myth of the Earth Mother in the final story "Alma Mater."This study analyzes five major devices of the craft: setting, dialogue, person, theme and symbol. Each of these aspects is shown as it operates in the stories. Although every effort has been made to utilize the craft, it is possible to include these five elements in a short story which still does not jell into a coherent and successful creation. An error in judgment in the rigid selectivity necessary to the craft may result in a failure. Two stories rewritten to demonstrate the effect of changes in point of view should clearly establish the permutations which may occur through a variation in only one of the five elements.

This thesis has studied the woven of George Eliot's Middlemarch in order to demonstrate the author's concern with and understanding of the dangers inherent in lives lived in provincial surroundings with severely limited options for exercise of capabilities and fulfillment of goals. Eliot's questioning of the nineteenth century's attitudes towards women's roles has been examined by studying the imagery used to characterize the women in the novel, by analyzing the folk "wisdom" which the inhabitants of Middlemarch use to define women, by interpreting Eliot's presentation of Dorothea Brooke's attempts to escape her provincial setting, by discussing the novel's criticism of the traditional role of wife and mother.In addition, this paper has surveyed important critical studies of Middlemarch., noting various scholarly interpretations of the novel, especially of the parts played by the women characters.

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The central thesis of this work is twofold: (1) contrary to the images perpetuated in works of criticism, there exists no sustained misogyny in the text of exemplar epics by Ferdowsi and Homer, or antagonism toward women rooted in the poets' attitude, and (2) using the principle of androcentric (rather than gynocentric) feminist literary theory we have tried to prove the existence of a "systematic inconsistency" in the roles and images assigned to the women of The Shahnameh, the Iliad, and Odyssey. We have identified the presence of a double structure concerning the question of women. Instead of endlessly praising the female characters, or fully condemning the portrayal of such figures, we have instead tried to turn the issues around and examined opposed aspects in female roles and images. We have examined the conflict of opposites and the systematic inconsistency within each text in which a double structure splits the female image in two directions: one force is represented by exalted, praiseworthy, and positive images endowing women with powerful characteristics such as prowess, courage, wisdom, insight, fearlessness, and a host of other attributes. Yet within the same text, the same woman, through another force, is not only relegated to a subservient role, but also finds imposed upon her the condition of not being taken seriously, severe handicaps regarding her full integration in the social fabric of the story, and not being allowed to use her considerable abilities. Within this paradoxical double structure, it is not that one structure eventually cancels out the other, rather the coexistence of both structures in the same work results in the readers' suspension between the conclusions each of them separately urges. / The dichotomy in the characterization of women in epic literature is not limited to a single culture; a consistent thread runs through the universal inconsistency in the make-up of women in epic. The thread runs across the border between the East and the West, wherever that border may be drawn on the map geographically, historically, or culturally.

This Master thesis examines the main characteristics of the 'New Objectivity' (Neue Sachlichkeit) appearing in Irmgard Keun's first novel, Gilgi---eine von uns (1931). The author uses in fact some stylistic elements of this movement to trace a portrait of her time, especially of trends emerging in the large city Cologne. The Weimar model of the emancipated woman, the so-called 'New Woman', serves as basis for Keun's depiction of her protagonist. Her representation was influenced by the image of the white-collar worker and of the Flaneuse (in the figure of her best friend). The comparison with other women figures emphazises Gilgi's emancipation. This paper aims at demonstrating, that her status as white-collar worker enables Keun's protagonist to criticize the social norms. In fact, she rejects the patriarchy of this society and proved herself being more emancipated than the other 'New Women' in taking on some men's roles.