Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2005. / Typescript.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed July 12, 2007). PDF text: vi, 87 p. UMI publication number: AAT 3252822. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

This thesis examines recent theories in feminist mythopoeic reconstruction and in contemporary theology, and considers their application to three English-Canadian women poets: Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Phyllis Webb. It compares gendered theories about heroic and spiritual quest paradigms, concluding that the work of all three poets illustrates the difference of women's spiritual journeys. These journeys follow a pattern distinct from the male heroic quest of the divine, one of a dialectical series of encounters with the world of nature whereby the heroines resist normative restrictions to their spiritual liberty by imitating Daphne's retreat into the green world, following the model defined by Annis Pratt (1981). Writing both within and outside of the Canadian literary tradition, MacEwen, Wilkinson, and Webb challenge the structures of and rocentric belief --literary, spiritual, political, mythical. All three poets refute the validity of the manmade version of Paradise because they find it too abstract and impoverished. Instead of the ascetic approach to the divine, each substitutes her own aesthetic approach; poetry, spirituality, and a love of what Wilkinson calls the Green World become inseparable. MacEwen connects the poet giving birth to herself with the rebirth of nature. All three poets are suspicious of the transcendent artist-god, replacing him with an immanent deity. All employ metaphors of engulfment and resistance to suggest interiority and a sense of connectedness between nature, their bodies, and themselves, denying disembodied concepts of the divine. Each of the three poets elevates the private domestic sphere, debased as a result of the sexual division of labour. By shifting the discursive centre, they publicize and politicize the domain of women, embodying and elevating everyday experience, and simultaneously redefining the sacred. To break with the ideological habits of our society results in marginalization. This thesis examines "the extent to which all or some women, by virtue of their marginalized relation to discourse, also write as feminists" (Meese 6). Each poet develops a strategy for imagining herself as powerful and nurturing, elevating some aspect of her experience as a woman living on earth. For Wilkinson, the symbol of the divine is not the god-man of the Gospels, but a nursing mother who sings lullabies to her children. For MacEwen, the body is given new strength and eroticism, enrobed in vivid colour and sensual texture. For Webb, the encounter with suicide and despair yields a new understanding of the creative force of destruction. MacEwen and Webb elevate the domestic and the personal above the universal. Canadian women poets articulate their spiritual difference and describe their visions from an original perspective, arguing for the recognition of a female mystical tradition in Canadian poetry. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (doctoral)--Australian National University, 1984.

No description available.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Women's poetic writing in modern China, its context and position in literary history as well as its ideological and social constitution are at the root of this thesis' subject. Having stated my intellectual and personal limitations regarding its writing as an introduction, examples of contemporary women's poetic text will serve to broaden its conclusion. My analysis begins with a reflection on its own terminology in philosophical debate, followed by a study of the modernist background that from 1977 leads to what is termed as neo-modernity in literature. A paradox in the women's avant-garde of antipatriarchal antagonism against the literary institution will be illustrated by examples of critical text on women's poetic production. My point is to address this paradox with the identification of false values placed from the very beginnings of poetic modernity on women's poetry within the avant-garde.

Although many in the contemporary academic world would avoid themes such as solitude, love, and, in the context of “francophone” literature, exile, I have decided to give these all the attention they deserve based on the importance they hold in the works themselves, and based on the depth they possess. It is thus from the perspective of the renewed light they bring on these topics that the following three works will be analysed: À vol d’ombre (1966) by Jacqueline Beaugé, Transparence en bleu d’oubli (1979) by Renée Marie-Ange Jolicœur, and La Fidélité non plus… (1986) by Yanick Jean. In order to contextualize these three works, I first provide a brief history of Haitian poetry in which particular attention is given to the contributions of women writers. This overview illustrates how Jean, Jolicœur and Beaugé use very general themes such as love and solitude, but also how they manage to set themselves apart. Indeed, their works are unparalleled in Haitian literature because they constantly play with the conventions of love poetry and redefine the notion of absence. In order to establish how every absence contains traces of presence, my analysis bases itself in part on the theories of Derrida. I also explore how, in each of the collections of poems under consideration (although for different reasons), absence stifles any possibility of contact with the other. In order to understand this problem and underscore its importance, I refer to Hegel’s conception of the relationship to the other. Based on these premises, I conclude by showing how exile is a space that is at once filled with absence and with presence, and how the staging of the act of writing, in all three works, makes poetry and absence inseparable. / Thesis (Master, French) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-26 15:50:00.063