L. T. Meade (1844-1914) was one of the most popular and industrious writers of the Victorian fin de siècle. She is remembered as the creator of the modern girls’ school story, but over the course of a professional career that spanned four decades, Meade wrote close to three hundred books and countless short stories in a variety of genres for readers of all ages. She also edited the highly regarded middle-class girls’ literary magazine Atalanta from 1887 to 1893. She was considered a literary celebrity by the influential Strand Magazine where her innovative medical mysteries and sensational stories of female criminals competed with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But Meade was more than a successful author. She was also an influential participant in London’s literary circles and an active member of numerous literary professional, and feminist associations. Despite the scope of Meade’s career and her significant presence in the literary marketplace, her name has now passed into relative obscurity. Assessments of Meade in the twentieth century have been limited, dismissive, and generally negative. But as I demonstrate in this dissertation, many of these assessments are based on a narrow reading of her girls’ fiction and an incomplete sense of her professional activity. This dissertation, based on a historically contextualized reading of a broad selection of Meade’s works, focuses on the author as a professional woman writer and editor and highlights some of her significant contributions to popular literature and popular culture generally. The chapters in this study are organized into sections that reflect the trajectory of Meade’s career. Part I, “Meade and the Market,” introduces Meade as a professional writer. It includes biographical information, a discussion of Meade’s self representation, and an examination of a selection of her texts to show how she identified literary trends and used topical issues to frame her stories and market them to publishers and the reading public. Part II, “Meade and Atalanta,” focuses on Meade as a professional woman editor. It consists of three linked chapters on Meade and the girls’ literary magazine Atalanta and includes an examination of Meade’s contributions to juvenile periodical literature as well as a discussion of Atalanta as a family literary magazine. Part III, “New Markets and New Genres,” focuses on Meade as a popular professional woman writer and examines her involvement with the popular press in the years following her departure from Atalanta. It shows how Meade’s involvement with the Strand Magazine signalled a new direction in her literary style and market orientation and highlights her significant contributions to detective and mystery fiction. Throughout this study, I argue that Meade was more than a popular girls’ author; she was also a successful professional woman writer and editor, a shrewd businesswoman, and a significant participant in the literary marketplace. I also argue that Meade’s career merits consideration because it offers important insights into the way fin-de-siècle women writers shaped their careers and positioned themselves in the literary marketplace. / Graduate / 10000-01-01

No description available.

This thesis argues for a full recognition of the significance of Elizabeth Carey and her literary works by offering new theoretical and critical approaches to her life and her two major works, The Tragedy of Mariam and The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II. The Introduction offers an assessment of the recent critical works on Elizabeth Carey and ultimately rejects the prevalent tendency to interpret her works simply in terms of her life. Chapter 1 constitutes a biographical study of Elizabeth Carey which focuses upon the roles she played: as wife, recusant and writer. Chapter 2 examines Carey's use of two sources of "patriarchal" authority - Seneca and Flavius Josephus - in her composition of The Tragedy of Mariam. It explores the ways in which she manipulates these sources in order to create a text which offers resistance to patriarchal authority. Chapter 3 is a reading of The Tragedy of Mariam which eschews the traditional critical opposition between "virtuous" and "vicious" characters in the text. Rather, the text is viewed as a set of competing discourses which, by their very competition, effect a de construction of patriarchal ideology. Chapter 4 seeks to re-establish Carey's claim to the authorship of The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II. This issue of authorship has been confused by the existence of the text in a longer, folio form and a shorter, octavo form. Here, I argue against a recent publication to show that Carey is the author of the folio but not the octavo. Chapter 5 focuses upon the historical and literary contexts of The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, beginning by exploring the possibility that the text is a criticism of Buckingham's role in the courts of James I and Charles I. The chapter then focuses upon the ways in which Carey rejects the characterisation of Queen Isabel by Drayton and Marlowe and constructs her own version of the history in which Isabel is both powerful and sympathetic.

No description available.

The purpose of this project is to establish the connections between southern women writers, autotheory, and grotesque descriptions of disability in Gothic Literature as a significant subset of literature. Southern women writers transform their bodily experiences through the language of the grotesque in testimony to re-create a life that has been unmade by pain. Their autobiographical narratives serve as an expression for the inexpressible, affirm their experiences for themselves, and call upon others to join in witnessing their impact. The introduction uses prominent theories from various critical fields to establish a new theory, and the following chapters reflect on that theory from the lives and literature of three disabled southern women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Zelda Fitzgerald. As demonstrated in these women’s lives and literature, in a society which others odd, obscure experiences, using the testimonial voice is necessary to the personal and social survival of disability. Writing offers the opportunity for disabled people to make a permanent impact by creating from the knowledge of personal suffering to impact the world and its perceptions surrounding life with disability. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / Ana Caro de Mallén (c.1600-1645) wrote primarily comedias, autos sacramentales, and relaciones. Since she received monetary compensation for her autos and relaciones, Caro is arguably one of the first female professional writers to appear in Spain as well as in Europe as a whole. After exploring Caro's personal life and contextualizing her situation as a female cultural producer within early modern Europe, this study presents new readings of her plays and an examination of her relaciones in order to reveal Caro's consistent, albeit subtle, challenge to the patriarchal structures so deeply ingrained in the Spain of her day. In the play entitled Valor, agravio y mujer, the role of the gracioso as male friend to the protagonist Leonor is explored, showing how their relationship diverges from that commonly found in the comedia. In El conde Partinuplés, the use of the "invisible-mistress" plot is examined as a parody of certain elements of the typical "wife-murder" drama. While the relaciones are studied as independent texts, they are compared to other texts written by male writers about the same events, thereby revealing some of the ways Caro diverges from dominant representational practices. Although not a feminist in the modern sense of the word, Caro is certainly partial in her stance toward women in that her plays consistently highlight the dilemmas, frustrations, hopes and aspirations of her female characters. Likewise, in her relaciones , Caro does not refrain from commenting on the qualities of good leadership, the economic crisis in Spain, and the political tensions between Spain and countries such as France and Portugal. In this way, Caro succeeds in inserting her voice into a public sphere that often cultivated women's silence. Unlike Spain's other early modern women writers--who largely wrote either lyric poetry or religious texts from within the confines of convents--Ana Caro intervened in public and male-dominated areas by writing plays for the commercial stage and selling relaciones about major events.

Women’s fictional narratives, besides influencing the process of nation building, also served to redefine the feminine gender and its incontrovertible contribution to the processes involved in imagining their communities. Although the systematic oppression suffered by women was effective, there were women writers who through negotiation gained access to male-dominated circles and achieved recognition. These women had a fundamental role in defying the stratification of gender in their society. They opposed every limitation imposed upon their gender, particularly the construction of the maternal role from a patriarchal perspective. In the works selected for this analysis, the authors reject the institutionalization of motherhood using as a narrative device motherless heroines who redefine femininity in their own terms and defy the patriarchal construct that confines motherhood to the seclusion of the home. Written in times of political upheaval, these novels emphasize the importance of women’s participation in the public sphere. In this dissertation I analyze four novels situated in or written during authoritarian regimes. The introduction provides the theoretical framework in which the definition of gender is discussed as well as the process of nation building in Latin America. I also include critical views on the topic of motherhood as women writers struggle with the representation of the maternal role and its implications in the construction of gender. In chapter one I discuss Argentinean writer Juana Manuela Gorriti’s La hija del mashorquero (1865); the second chapter analyzes Brazilian novelist Julia Lópes de Almeida’s A familia Medeiros (1892); chapter three is dedicated to the study of Argentinean Elvira Orpheé’s Uno (1961); the fourth chapter analyzes Brazilian Lygia Fagundes Telles’s As meninas (1973), so as to outline periods in which the patriarchal discourse concerning the role of women in society revolved around the traditional concepts of femininity and to reveal the insistence of women to obviate such concepts, specifically in terms of nation building. Through the detailed textual analysis of these novels, I aim to demonstrate the strategies used by these authors to openly defy the constructions of femininity through their critique of the socio-political systems of their times. / text

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation discusses contemporary U.S. women’s literature in the context of women’s struggles with nation and nationalism, examining how Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Naylor, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Nora Okja Keller contest articulations of gender, ethnicity, and cultural affiliations in terms of the dynamics of national inclusion and exclusion. Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985), Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) were written at the crossroads between contemporary feminisms and nationalisms and reveal women’s centrality to national projects. Approaching these four literary texts not only as cultural narrations of nation but also as critical engagements between feminism and nationalism, this dissertation argues that postnational and/or transnational politics are manifest in these women writers’ articulation of women’s liminality between their cultural nations and the U.S. The chapters that follow analyze how women writers narrate the nation in various contexts while reinscribing women as subjects of national agency and the U.S. as a transnational and postnational site of contending memories and national narratives. Chapter II examines a possible women’s nationalist attempt to de-essentialize the nation by reading Silko’s Ceremony. Silko provides a hybrid narration of the nation that challenges the full blood subjects’ hegemonic model of Native American cultural nationalism. Silko, however, uses the gendered rhetoric of nation-as-women and denies women as national subject. Chapter III moves to a critical standpoint on cultural nationalism through reading Naylor’s Linden Hills. Tackling the unmarked status of masculinity in Silko’s project, chapter III examines how Naylor problematizes the gendered foundations of the African American cultural nation and deconstruct her contemporary African American cultural nationalism. Chapter IV discusses Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as a literary supplement to hegemonic history of the U.S. and Asian America and as a feminist corrective to masculinist narrations of the nation. The last chapter discusses the possibilities of transnational feminist coalitions through reading Keller’s Comfort Woman. In their feminist, transnational, or postnational critiques of nationalisms, women writers demonstrate that it is not possible to reimagin the nation without feminism and textually embody the significant contributions of feminism to contemporary liberatory movements.