"Re-centering Central America: Women Writers Undisplaced" endeavors to unpack and unravel the meaning, genealogy and implications of the US's patriarchal relationship with Central America, formative of a jumble of misconceptions of "otherness" on a global scale. This legacy is mirrored in the region's cultural production. Central American discourse itself has long ignored or marginalized "other" subjectivities. I trace a genealogy of Central American narrative discursivities by women to interrogate questions of female subjectivity and the inadequacy of hegemonic identitary formulations that often elide gender, ethnicity, and other regulatory trajectories in subject-formation. My dissertation is the first project in the US to examine how an undercurrent in which colonially derived social relations underwrite contemporary Central America is interrogated and re-visioned in literature produced by women. I focus on six Central American authors: Yolanda Oreamuno (Costa Rica), Claribel Alegría (El Salvador), Carmen Naranjo (Costa Rica), Rosario Aguilar (Nicaragua), Gloria Guardia (Panamá), and Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador). No systematic study has looked at how literary techniques and representations by these authors articulate a literary counter-statement to the patriarchal legacy informing Central American modernity between 1949 and the present, as well as to traditional formulations of subordinate subjectivities in which norms, rhetorics and assumptions of machismo and social exclusion of women inhabit and still animate the US's understanding of its inhabitants. My dissertation tracks the continuity between these authors' work to establish a problematization of sovereign subjectivity by refiguring the nature of the speech act as in flux, so as to eliminate authoritativeness and open up space for contestatary speech and agency. Judith Butler establishes that agency is achieved when the subordinated subject expropriates the "sovereign conceit" of the speech act, revealing discourses capable of destabilizing and even dismantling the epistemologies of the so-called "sovereign subject." By establishing a broad definition of sovereignty as any identitary construct that presupposes integral subjectivity or that attempts to impose such myths on subordinate subjects, I analyze the implications of these authors' narratives in destabilizing and revealing the farce of sovereign subjectivity. / text

This dissertation is primarily concerned with women's writing in the mid-seventeenth century, comprising the years from 1624 to 1686. It covers the period immediately following Martin Opitz's vernacular literary reforms in Germany and takes as its primary subject the resultant increase in female authorship. It arises out of an interest in two separate but interrelated issues. The first is out of an interest in female literary production in Germany during the seventeenth century, specifically between 1624 and 1686, dates demarcated by the publication of Martin Opitz's Buch von der deutschen Poeterey and the publication of Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler's collection of poetry, Jungferlicher Zeitvertreiber. The second is the question of women's self-concept within a patriarchal society and the discursive strategies of female authors struggling "against complex odds" to "com[e] to written voice" (Olsen 9). In order to fully explore this subject, I have chosen to focus on the work of two poets, Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638) and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler (1657-1706?). Writing at different stages in this period and from dissimilar social positions, the two poets offer contrasting strategies of self-representation and self-authorization. By negotiating the demanding terrain of female authorship in a period inhospitable to female learning in different ways, they illustrate the tensions faced by female poets and the various strategies for overcoming the challenges they faced. I look first at the construction of female gender in the early modern period and the ways female writers could subtly shift the prevailing ideas and definitions to include the act of writing as an acceptable component of female identity. The analysis and comparison of the works of Schwarz and Zeidler also offers a glimpse into the changes in self-awareness and self-concept of female poets across the period. / text

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider that heroines find pleasure in deploying fashionable objects – such as dolls, clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry – which garner access to public space typically off limits for Victorian women. In the first chapter, girls use dolls to play in wilderness spaces, fostering female friendships. Muted dress provides a cloak of invisibility, allowing the heroine to participate in the pleasure of ocular economies in the second chapter. The third chapter features a female detective who uses cosmetics to disguise her infiltration of men’s private spaces in order to access private secrets. Finally, the project culminates with jewelry’s re-signification as female success in the publishing world. Tracing how female characters in Victorian fiction use self-fashioning as a pathway, this study maps the safe travel heroines discover through wild landscapes, urban streets, and professional arenas. These spaces were often coded with sets of conditions for gendered interactions. Female characters’ proficient self-styling provides mobility through locations guarded by the voices of neighbors, friends, and family who attempt to keep them in line with Victorian gender conventions. Female characters derive an often unexplored pleasure: the secret joy of being where they should not and going against what they are told. In the novels I examine, female protagonists navigate prolific rules and advice about how to arrange and manage their appearances, not to aspire to paragons of Victorian beauty and womanhood but in order to achieve physical and geographic mobility outside domestic interiors.

Scholars describe fin-de-siècle Paris as a city of dualities, and examine its past as a series of crises or a tale of burgeoning optimism and opportunity. Historians of women and gender have noted the limitations of this dualistic approach, and have explored new avenues of interpretation. Specifically, they have shown how the combination of positive and negative impulses created a dynamic space in which women could re-imagine and re-articulate themselves. While this approach illuminates the possibilities that existed for women in a complex urban landscape, it also indicates that fin-de-siècle Paris was a contested city, one fraught with challenges for women living in the French capital. If the mingling of crises and belle époque culture had stimulating results for women’s emergence into urban spaces, it had confusing and conflicting effects as well. My thesis shows how fin-de-siècle Paris was a contradictory city for women artists, at a time when both opportunities and constraints in their profession were at a premium. I examine the ways in which several notable women in the arts – painters Gwen John, Suzanne Valadon, and Romaine Brooks, sculptor Camille Claudel, and writer Rachilde – traversed this unsettling path, and evaluated their experiences through artistic representations of private life. Far from portraying the traditional sphere of domesticity, however, which was considered an important form of artistic expression among women at this time, I argue that their depictions of intimate spaces, bodies, children, and female selfhood, were complex and often ambiguous, and part of a larger attempt to grapple with the shifting nature of identity, both as women, and as professionals. John and Claudel created interiors that were signs of independence and artistic innovation, but also reflections of hardship; Valadon and Brooks invested images of the female and child’s body with strength and power, but also with pain and suffering; and Rachilde developed heroines who were unsuccessful in their attempts to create a unique sense of self. Taken together, these representations demonstrate that women artists did not easily articulate a vision of modern female identity at the turn of twentieth century, but rather, highlighted the inconsistencies of this experience. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2008-11-28 10:48:28.537

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.

Criticism that involves the linkage of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘literature’, or ‘ecocriticism’, has focused largely on texts such as nature writing or on fiction that is set in rural or wilderness settings. This project attempts to widen the scope of ecocriticism by analysing the contemporary British novel, in which nature conceived in such stereotypical ways is largely absent. However, in my analysis of the fifteen texts selected here, I demonstrate that British women writers employ new discursive constructions of nature in order to contest deterministic formulations that subjugate both women and nature. My focus on female textual bodies enables me to explore representations of the fluid interfaces of nature and culture. In my analysis of novels from an environmental standpoint, `environment' is reconceived to refer to `where we live, work, and play' and may include not only the countryside and urban nature, but also the female body itself. Thus, the nature of my title is an inclusive term that includes contemporary discourses of nature employed by the sciences of biomedicine, genetics and technology. This project examines the ecofeminist premise that discourses of mastery not only affect subjugated others such as women, animals and others, but also influence the treatment of the natural environment. Analysing novels that employ forms of embodiment that foreground extreme bodily conditions such as pregnancy, monstrosity and death, I employ the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin (the grotesque body, carnivalisation and dialogism) and Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as tools of analysis to provide a new conception of ecological bodies. Novelists such as Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Margaret Drabble, Kathy Lette and Eva Figes provide a wide range of viewpoints from which to gather evidence of the insistence of the recurring trope of the endangered body within the troubled landscape of contemporary Britain.

This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

This dissertation offers a new literary history of the tradition of the “sister arts” in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While previous scholarship has explored how canonical male poets conceived of their poetry in relation to painting, this project demonstrates that female poets also engaged in various forms of literary pictorialism. By attending to the work of these women writers alongside their male contemporaries, we gain a richer and more complex understanding of how poets evaluated the boundaries between verbal expression and visual composition. In line with my aim to offer a more nuanced historical account of the sister arts by including the contributions of women writers, I also examine the gendered conventions of this tradition. In my first chapter, I contend that poetry written by Anne Killigrew and Anne Finch calls into question common critical assumptions about the power dynamics of ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art). The second chapter explores how Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, and Amelia Opie respond to the influential model for verse epistles on the sister arts established by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, which assumes that poets and artists are male while the muses and objects of representation are female. In the third chapter, I argue that concepts derived from visual art animate the elegiac practices of Thomas Gray and Anna Seward, as they explore how acts of gazing can manifest same-sex desire. My final chapter shows how the concept of fancy, represented either as a mental creative process contrasted with imagination or as a personified female figure, comes to be associated with both visual power and femininity. I trace this poetics of fancy from essays by John Locke and Joseph Addison to Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, the odes of William Collins, the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake. The qualities that lead some writers to denigrate fancy—its association with femininity rather than masculinity, dreams rather than reality, and temptation or liberation rather than constraint—are precisely the same qualities that lead the major pictorial poets to seek to internalize it. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z