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This project concerns various 20th-century rhetorical strategies for sexual liberation. First, I examine the work of Alfred C. Kinsey through the theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. In the second chapter I look at Kinsey's Female volume and argue that he uses the mid-century concern for marriage as a strategy for sexual liberation. Next, I trace the ways in which four female, post-Kinsey writers use Kinsey (explicitly or implicitly) for their own particular strategies for sexual liberation. Finally, my conclusion asks how we can develop an effective strategy for this new century. / Master of Arts

The American author Jane Goodwin Austin published 24 novels and numerous short stories in a variety of genres between 1859 and 1892. Austin’s most popular works focus on her Pilgrim ancestors, and she is often lauded as a notable scholar of Puritan history who carefully researched her subject matter; however, several of the most common myths about the Pilgrims seem to have originated in Austin’s fiction. As a writer who saw her work as her means of entering the public sphere and enacting social change, Austin championed women and religious diversity. The range of Austin’s oeuvre, her coterie of notable friendships, especially amongst New England elites, and her impact on American myth and culture make her worthy of in-depth scholarly study, yet, inexplicably, very little critical work exists on Austin. This dissertation provides the most comprehensive biography of Austin to date, compiled largely from archival sources, and examines two of her novels, the 1865 Dora Darling: Daughter of the Regiment, one of the only Civil War-era adventure novels featuring a young girl who engages directly in the war, and the 1889 Standish of Standish, a carefully researched novel of the first few years of the Pilgrim’s Plymouth settlement, based on primary sources, popular culture, and family lore.

In this thesis I present prose works of contemporary Japanese women writers, who made their debut at the beginning of the 21st century. For a better understanding of the transition that a position of Japanese women and women authors has gone through - and how it prepared the way for their successors, I provide a summary of women's literature of the last two decades. To make the context clear, I also included an outline of significant changes within the realm of women's rights and the image of the role of women in society. Presentation of themes, that contemporary women writers focus on in their works and that reflect recent trends in modern Japanese society, follows. I also analyze aspects of language that are shared in works of young women writers. Lastly, considering the diverse range of critical reception of contemporary Japanese women writers, I would like to think about the future of Japanese modern literature. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This thesis explores the ways selected American women writers utilize spatial imagery to convey their female characters' internal and external situation. In the introductory, theoretical chapter, attention is at first paid to the representation of space in literature. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space and Marilyn R. Chandler's Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, space is presented as playing a role equal to that of characters and plot since it is perceived as both a production shaped by its inhabitants and a force that is, in turn, shaping them. Furthermore, the difference between female and male spatial awareness as depicted in American fiction written both by men and women is scrutinized with the result that, arguably, male characters have a tendency to regard their houses as mere tokens of their social status, whereas female characters tend to have a more intimate and emotional relationship to their living space. This passage is inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Finally, it is argued that women characters tend to develop their personalities in respect to the space they inhabit, and that domestic space can be for them either a space of confinement (the section dealing with this phenomenon is based on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in...

Healing the Wounds of the Colonised Body: Writing Back in Twenty-first-century Works by British Caribbean Women Writers Thesis abstract Veronika Vítková Black women`s position within the world of male superiority and white supremacy came to be characterised by the term "double colonisation". Both patriarchal and imperial social order focused on their corporeality to justify their subjugation. Accordingly, black women writers came to conceptualise their experience of colonisation and slavery as wounds suffered by the black female body. They thereby use the master`s tools to dismantle the master`s house. Their "writing back" - a means of healing the body - constitutes a multi-level response to both sets of mythologies as well as other types of marginalisation and othering, which the two involved, such as sexual, territorial or discursive. It results in the construction of a complex space - a healing vision - which is not dissimilar to Homi Bhabha`s empowering theoretical concepts. However, while providing such progressive literary vision, black women writers also maintain connection with reality, where, as Gayatri Spivak argued, there is no space from where the subaltern sexed subject can speak. Their broad historical and geographical perspective, which is a product of the multi-levelness of their oppression,...

A number of Lebanese women writers of the period of 1950s and 1960s have received considerable attention by scholars. This is not the case, however, for Laylá Ba‘albakī, whom the field has failed to address in any substantive manner. In not paying sufficient attention to Laylá Ba‘albakī, the field has failed to appreciate the distinctly feminist dimension of her work. To date, most scholars have only repeated commonly held views about her and her fiction. By addressing Ba‘albakī’s biography and fiction, this thesis hopes to contribute to a fuller understanding of Lebanese women writers of 1950s and 1960s. It shows that Ba‘albakī joined the group Shi‘r, but none of the Lebanese or Syrian political parties; and that she faced conflict not only with her parents, community and the state, but also, unexpectedly, with the Lebanese women’s groups. This study discusses the reasons why Ba‘albakī was brought before the courts, supporting the view that the underlying reason was political, not moral; and it further explores the reasons why the writer ceased publishing. It now seems probable that she will soon release a new work, after a long hiatus, which may be controversial within Muslim and Arab society. Moreover, this thesis shows that throughout her novels and short stories there is diversity in styles and techniques, and the use of poetic and figurative language which displays the influence of several Arab and Western poets (including her father’s own zajal poetry). Furthermore, the study focuses in particular on feminist themes in her work, and the various literary devices she employs for advancing her feminist agenda. The study of these devices further supports the claim that the court case against her was motivated by politics, not ethics. This thesis opens the doors for new discussions such as the impacts of her being Shiite as and when sources become available.

The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century. These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism. This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.

Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.