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The work of nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary presents a complex puzzle of exigence and purpose that combines social structure, political climate, and personal history. Known for her somber and spiritual sentimental poetry, Cary shocked readers and reviewers alike when she published her collection Poems and Parodies in 1854, which contained a series of scathing and hilarious parodies based on popular sentimental poetry. In my thesis, I work to untangle the various contextual elements surrounding Cary’s writing in order to gain a better understanding of the dual nature of the poet and her work. Through an examination of nineteenth-century American culture, sentimentalism, Cary’s career, and a close reading of selected parodies, I argue that by intentionally undermining patriarchal, sentimental conventions, Cary both reinstates agency and plurality to women through her female speakers and asserts her own agency as an autonomous artist.

This thesis studies the progressive nature of women’s writing and the various factors that helped and hindered the successful publication of women’s written works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis interrogates culturally encoded definitions of the term “success” in relation to the status of these women writers. In a time when success meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “attainment of wealth or position”, women could never achieve a level of success equal to the male elite. The dichotomous worldview, in which women were excluded from almost all active participation in the public sphere, led to a literary protest by women. However, the male-privileged binary system is seen critically to affect women’s literary success. Hence, a redefinition of success will specifically refer to the literary experience of these women writers and a long-lasting recognition of this experience in the twentieth century. An examination of literary techniques used in key works from Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen suggests that there was a critical double standard with which women writers were constantly faced. The literary techniques, used by the earlier writers, fail in overcoming this critical double standard because of their emphasis on revolution. However, the last two women writers become literary successes (according to my reinterpretation of the term) because of their particular emphasis on amelioration rather than revolution. The conclusion of the thesis suggests that despite the “unsuccessful” literary attempts by the first three women authors, there is an overall positive progression in women’s journey toward literary success. Described as the ‘generational effect’, this becomes the fundamental point of the study, because together these women represent a combined movement which challenges a system of patriarchal tradition, encouraging women to continue to push the gender relations’ boundaries in order to be seen as individual, successful writers.

This thesis explores how the celebratory figure of the hysteric as imagined by proponents of écriture féminine is developed and complicated in more recent representations of hysterical female bodies in contemporary women’s writing in French. With the aim of understanding the evolution of the hysteric from a traditionally negative embodiment of patriarchal parameters of femininity to a potentially revolutionary female figure, this thesis undertakes single-chapter studies of the most telling contemporary representations of hysterical bodies. The first chapter focuses on the physicality of Lorette Nobécourt’s writing in La Démangeaison (1994) and La Conversation (1998), and argues that the abject subject matter of the former coupled with the innovative and experimental form and style of the latter constitutes an almost physical performance of ‘madness’. The second chapter focuses on Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996) and argues that Darrieussecq’s hybrid narrator harnesses the anti-establishment carnival force of the hysteric in a shifting and grotesque body which forms the epitome of all that threatens order. The final two chapters focus on anorexia as a contemporary equivalence of Victorian hysteria. The first of these deals with Petite (1994) by Geneviève Brisac and Thornytorinx (2005) by Camille de Peretti and examines how these writers recreate the fragmentation of the anorexic self through a realist, performative ‘rhetoric of anorexia’. The second deals with Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres (2002), Biographie de la faim (2004) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000), and argues that Nothomb privileges a disembodied aesthetic that presents a masculine fantasy of the female body which all but erases the feminine. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to discover how and why selected contemporary female authors choose to engage with – and reject – 1970s models in which writing by women was presented as a means of finding one’s own voice, as well as a platform for politically significant action. It argues that new configurations of the hysteric nevertheless achieve a certain social and political impact.

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Review of A to Z of American Women Writers, Revised Edition. New York: Facts on File, 2007. 398p. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8160-6693-3.

This thesis compares the autobiographic work of Esmeralda Santiago and Emine Sevgi Özdamar focusing on the aspects of ethnic identity, gender, as well as history and memory. The argument is that both authors' work not only reflects the cultural origins of each writer and her trauma of loss, but also each host country's social realities and conflicts. In spite of alienation and loss of home and language, both protagonists create "touching tales," a phrase coined by Leslie Adelson that refers to the entanglement between cultures, stressing more the common ground between them than the differences. Santiago's work stresses the dividedness of American society along racial and ethnic lines, but also the opportunity for the immigrant to reinvent herself and overcome racial and social boundaries. Özdamar on the other hand reflects on the dividedness and traumatization of Germany through World War II, the Holocaust, the East-West division, and the terrorism of the 1970s. She compares it to the political and social division within Turkey as results of the Armenian genocide and military coups. While Santiago views American culture with distance, Özdamar displays an enthusiastic reception of leftist writers like Bertolt Brecht and German literature in general. Both autobiographical subjects find a way to reconcile their own inner divisions through theater work, which combines universal and multicultural elements.

In 1541, writing under the pseudonym Hélisenne de Crenne, the French noblewoman Marguerite Briet produced a translation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid that remains largely unknown. As a female author, Hélisenne provides a sixteenth-century woman’s perspective on the Aeneid, an on classical literature more generally, and the uniqueness of her translation in this respect makes her work extremely significant, particularly given the relatively recent interest in women and other marginal voices within the field of classics. This thesis contributes to an understanding of the need for a holistic approach to Classical Reception Studies, through a thorough examination of Hélisenne’s translation not only with regard to her gender but also the social, historical and literary climate in which she writes. Focussing on the mise en livre, as well as the text, my approach also stresses the need to reevaluate the relationship between the author and the text that we often assume in classics is more direct than is actually the case. Through such an examination of her Eneydes, Hélisenne emerges as a serious participant in the humanist tradition who engages with classical literature in such a way as to question masculine textual authority and the notion of an objective truth, whilst deliberately implicating herself through her translation in a web of authorities who are not to be trusted.

The eighteenth century saw a remarkable increase in the number of works written by women, and also the number of women who made a living by writing. For the first time, being a writer was a viable career choice for a woman, and it was possible to support a family by writing, despite the backlash some individual writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, faced for their work. This thesis focuses on the work women did in the eighteenth-century theatre, and how they reconciled the demands of being a professional writer with their society's gender expectations. By analysing a variety of play texts written by different women, I show that they engaged critically with ideas about female virtue, the marriage market, and women's participation in the literary scene, the working world, and national politics. The plays of this period are relatively under-researched, and often do not appear at all in critical studies of eighteenth-century literature. My aim, therefore, is to rectify this situation, and to join other critics in rediscovering this interesting and vital era of female playwriting.

During the period of economic expansion and openness to personal expression and individuality following Deng Xiaoping's reforms, the Chinese avant-garde women writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the female body, image, and voice. This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously construct a private space in their fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that this space is created by presenting alternative forms of female sexuality, in contrast to the heterosexual wife and mother, and by adding details of their own personal histories in their writing. Key to this argument is the Chinese concept of si (privacy) and how the female avant-garde writers turn its traditionally negative associations into a positive tool for writing the self. While male appropriations of images of the female body for political or state-authored purposes are not new to the contemporary period or even the twentieth century, the female avant-garde writers are particularly conscious of the ways in which their bodies are not their own. Moreover, contemporary criticism that labels the works of the female avant-garde writers as self-exposing, titillating, and trite overlooks the difference between authorial intent and commercial or political appropriation, which has led to a profound misunderstanding of these works. In addition, it has also led to a conflation of the female avant-garde writers' works with those of the later body writers. Therefore the purpose of this dissertation is to provide a closer look at the concept of si-privacy and how it intersects with various forms of self-writing, as well as how it is used as a narrative strategy by three contemporary female authors, Xu Kun, Lin Bai, and Hai Nan. Specifically, I consider the similarities and differences in the ways that these authors create and orient themselves in both their memoirs and their self-referential fiction.