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Despite the recent increase in scholarship on the subject of the female experience in exile, there is still much to be done. Exile scholars now have at their disposal an abundance of broad, general overviews of the circumstances and fates of displaced women writers, but a dearth of scholarship that considers specific literary works in an individualised fashion still exists. This is especially true of those female writers who have only recently been 'rediscovered', such as the three under discussion in this thesis. This thesis explores in detail the exile writings of Veza Canetti, Anna Gmeyner, and Lili Korber, about which little scholarship exists, and uses them as case studies to illuminate the situation of exiled women writers in general The exile works of these three authors repay study both for their own literary merits and for what they can tell us about the individual experience of exile. In their broad similarities, these writers also provide us with case studies of the larger experience of authorial exile - particularly, but by no means exclusively, the gendered experience - that allow us to derive more general lessons about the influence of forced flight on literary art. By giving due consideration to work produced in exile, this thesis calls into question some of the generalisations commonly found in recent scholarship and demonstrates that, despite hardsrnps and setbacks and contrary to common scholarly contention, all three women continued to write well into their exile years and that in those years they took their writing in new, skilful, and creative directions.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal. / Dans un élan collectif, les écrivaines des années 1970 et 1980, en Europe et en Amérique, s'approprient le thème de la folie jusque-là exploité par les écrivains masculins. Pourquoi? Nous appuyant sur la pensée de Michel Foucault et de Roland Jaccard selon laquelle la folie est une construction sociale, nous suggérons que les romancières, influencées par le mouvement anti-psychiatrique, la crise du sujet humaniste, les théoriciennes féministes françaises et américaines ont l'audace d'inventer un sujet féminin qui devient fou en réponse à des situations sociales ou historiques oppressantes pour les femmes. Pour ce faire, les romancières mettent de l'avant des stratégies d'écriture qui participent à une prise de conscience féministe. Le chapitre I porte sur la place du sujet féminin et de sa folie dans l'histoire littéraire. Les chapitres II, III et IV sont consacrés à l'étude de stratégies romanesques, telles que la déconstruction de l'histoire ou de figures mythiques, la critique de l'institution familiale et la démystification du personnage de la mère dans la relation mère-fille. Ainsi, nous étudions la représentation de la folie combinée à ces stratégies dans cinq romans mettant en scène des héroïnes issues de cultures et de sociétés différentes. Ce sont Songs My Mother Taught Me d'Audrey Thomas (Canada anglais), Les Enfants du sabbat d'Anne Hébert et Les Jardins de cristal de Nadia Ghalem (Québec), The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts de Maxine Hong Kingston et The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison (États-Unis). La méthode utilisée est celle de l'analyse des discours, laquelle fait appel à plusieurs champs du savoir, celui de l'histoire littéraire, de la philosophie, de la littérature, de la psychanalyse, de la psychiatrie, de certaines études de pratiques culturelles (cultural studies) et du féminisme. Le thème de la folie aura permis aux écrivaines étudiées d'exprimer la réalité des femmes largement ignorée dans les romans et de dénoncer des conditions de vie encouragées par des systèmes répressifs. Le thème de la folie aura également rendu possible un nouvel imaginaire et une écriture qui, repoussant les limites imposées par la logique, est libre et puissante.

This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.

In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.

This thesis investigates the prevalence of religious themes in the work of several prominent contemporary women writers—Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A.L. Kennedy. Relying on Luce Irigaray’s recent theorisations of the religious and its relationship to feminine subjectivity, this research considers the subversive potential of engaging with religious discourse through literature, and contributes to burgeoning criticism of feminist revisionary writing. The novels analysed in this thesis show, often in violent detail, that the way the religious dimension has been conceptualised and articulated enforces negative views of female sexuality, justifies violence against the body, alienates women from autonomous creative expression and paralyses the development of a subjectivity in the feminine. Rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority, as previous studies have done, I argue that these writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that subvert the binary logic that dominates Western religious discourse. Chapter I contextualises this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlines existing work on feminist revisionist literature. The remaining chapters offer close readings of key novels in light of these theories: Chapter II examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Chapter III explores two novels by Roberts that expose the violence inherent in religious discourse and deconstruct the subjection of the (female) body to the (masculine) Word. Chapters IV and V analyse the fiction of Kennedy and Walker respectively, revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity. Evident in each of these fictional accounts is a forceful critique of religious discourse, as well as an attempt to more closely reconcile foundational religious oppositions between divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit, and body and Word.