Le parti-pris de la présente recherche consiste à récuser l’autonomie de l’œuvre littéraire, afin de tenter une lecture des textes de trois auteurs féminins français du XXe siècle à la lumière des représentations de la femme qui écrit dans l’imaginaire collectif de l’époque. Ce parti-pris définit non seulement l’angle de vision de la chercheuse, mais aussi sa manière de présenter les résultats de ses réflexions, lesquelles ont en effet pris la forme de trois amples allers-retours entre, d’une part, l’analyse des réseaux discursifs (médiatiques, scientifiques, littéraires) contemporains de la période examinée dans chacune de trois parties de la thèse et, d’autre part, les textes des femmes-écrivains qui relèvent de la même période. S’inspirant de l’approche conceptuelle et des méthodes du nouvel historicisme, de la sociologie de l’art et des études de réception, ce travail cherche à saisir ce que le fait de débuter une carrière d’écrivain dans la première moitié du siècle dernier pouvait impliquer pour un auteur féminin. L’examen des opinions accréditées et des idées reçues qui circulaient à l’époque au sujet de la littérature féminine permet ainsi de relever que les divers avis concernant les particularités du style des auteurs-femmes convergeaient tous en un point crucial : l’image de la femme-écrivain est avant toute celle d’une autobiographe contre son gré. En effet, la femme – censée être spontanée, sensuelle, émotive, narcissique et naïve – semblait prédisposée à ne traiter dans ses écrits que les expériences qu’elle avait elle-même vécues. Cette mise en contexte nous permet d’éclairer les conditions de construction de l’identité d’écrivain de ces femmes à qui il est échu par le sort d’écrire – c’est-à-dire de se publier, de se placer sous le regard du public, ou encore de se faire (re)connaître – dans la France du XXe siècle. Il s’avère ainsi que le consensus général sur la nature de la créativité féminine et sur les limites du génie créateur de la femme a beaucoup joué non seulement dans leur refus de toute filiation avec écrivaines des générations précédentes, mais aussi dans l’identification qu’elles font de la littérature avec, d’une part, la conquête et l’affirmation de la singularité, et d’autre part, avec les plus audacieuses transgressions. / Eschewing the most wide-spread conventional ways of exploring the subject (feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and traditional linear pattern of writing literary biographies), this study undertakes instead to construct a “personal genealogy” of the three French women writers and intellectuals of the past century, using the notions derived to a considerable extent from the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, as well as from the critical approaches elaborated by the new criticism and the reader response literary theory. This manner of reading the 20th century French women’s writers leads the researcher to examine the stereotypes of the “feminine literature” prevailing at that time in order to explain the complex play of different kinds of power involved in the emergence of the interwar women writers generation refusing any collective identity, as well as any filiation with their feminine predecessors (George Sand, Rachilde, Colette, Anna de Noailles, Marcelle Tinayre, etc.). Not surprisingly, the women writers of the “new wave” promote instead the idea of making oneself: the human subject is therefore viewed as a product of social and discursive forces that every single individual’s choice is to confirm or to reject. Thus, the inferiority assigned to the women’s writing is neither called in question nor denounced: it is simply passed over, evaded considering this generic identity irrelevant to the exceptional cases of the striking personalities - the influential (women) intellectuals and the successful (women) authors.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of the more nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among Arab British women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue and cross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their Arab American counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resist stereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popular culture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arab immigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looks at how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir's My Name is Salma and Arab American novelist Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light of the precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and in the United States. Chapter Two examines how Arab British women writers Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela valorize trans-cultural and cross-ethnic dialogues and alliances in their novels The Map of Love and Minaret respectively through engaging with the two (interlocking) strands of feminism in the Arab world: secular and Islamic feminisms. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how the two novels of Arab American women writers Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and Laila Halaby's West of the Jordan explore the contradictions of Arab American communities from within and employ strategies of intertextuality and storytelling to subvert stereotypes about Arabs. As this study is interested in exploring the historical and socio-political contexts in which Arab women writers on both sides of the Atlantic produce their work, the conclusion investigates how the two sets of authors have represented, from an Arab perspective, the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in their novels.

This paper examines the interconnections of nature, magic, and violence in the Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales) of the Countess of Ségur and their illustrations. It focuses on the ways in which the Countess reappropriates the framework of the literary fairy tale and subtly breaks with the traditions established by past fairy-tale authors, encouraging a return to nature and a movement away from the perceived corruption of the nineteenth-century city within the context of a timeless magical world. Close study of the Countess’s multiple perspectives on violence as either a motivating form of punishment or as a display of pure malice reinforce the dichotomy of good vs. evil as it is developed in the text, reflecting the author’s desire to create an ordered world in which obedience is rewarded and cruelty is justly punished.

The Romantic era, from roughly the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a period of rapid and revolutionary social change. Progressing in parallel was the form of the novel, which rose from relative disrepute to the foremost literary genre. While neither a prolific writer nor one that was very popular during her lifetime, I argue that Jane Austen and her inimitable style can be figured at the nexus of these two transitions. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of Austen’s style across her body of work, from her early manuscripts through her published novels and ending with her unfinished draft. Using historical, digital, sociological, and narratological methods, I interrogate Austen’s style on three interrelated levels—moving from the most insular effects to the broadest applications of her narrative technique. First, I explore the progression of Austen’s style across her canon, particularly focusing on the development and maturation of her free indirect discourse. Second, I locate Austen’s style in the evolution of the novel. I begin with constructing her literary lineage, which I argue is tied to female writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and move towards understanding how her use of free indirect discourse was necessary for the emergence of the novel’s modern form. Third, I consider Austen’s style as a means of imagining and critiquing the changing social spaces of her contemporary moment, specifically in terms of how the layered vocality of her narrative technique reflected Britain’s movement from the rigid structures of rank and honour to the fluid categories of class and dignity. / Graduate

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This thesis attempts to reconcile a feminist with a contextualist approach. It enquires into the historical origins of the emergence of women as writers in the seventeenth century. At the same time, it places this women's movement in the context of a profoundly complex revolution in thought, thereby discovering that women's intellectual contributions to the destruction of the hierarchical world view and to the search for new, just alternatives were as diverse and as problematic as men's were. The women who wrote in the seventeenth century were all preoccupied, implicitly or explicitly, with the question: By what authority do I cast off the traditional silence of women and dare to speak out? They gave different answers. Part One uses the lives of Gertrude More and Mary Ward to illustrate the subtle ways in which the Catholic Church's concept of grace required the submission of women despite their conflicting inner voices. In contrast, Part Two explores the challenge of the seventeenth-century chariasmatic movement to the traditional notion of grace. The radical female Protestants made a significant step towards modern feminism both because they appealed to their own experience as a source for truth and because they initiated an autobiographical form which dramatizes the convinced woman in revolt against patriarchal structures. Part Three demonstrates that, despite the decline in the authority of the prophet's experience which came with the trliumph of the perspective and methods of science, Jane Lead's writings continued a mystical counter-tradition which would nourish the Romantic alternative to scientific reductionism. Part IV analyzes the views of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn who argued the natural right of a woman to write. Both challenged neoclassical aesthetic ideals--Cavendish by writing to delight herself, Behn by writing to delight her audience. Part V concludes by contrasting the approaches of two women who appealed to the authority of rational argument to justify their views. Mary Astell emerges as an early theorist for enlightenment feminism, Anne Conway as a theorist for holistic feminism. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Latina women have been made to believe that their lives and desires are always secondary to the needs of men and children. As a result, many women have developed a martyr complex wherein the measure of their value is how much suffering they can endure in service to their family. There is subsequently a culture of self-sacrifice best exemplified by the archetype known as "la sufrida." This thesis explores the sufrida role in literature while using the history of the author's mother—a woman whose life can be "read" as that of a real sufrida— as a bridge between literature and reality. This thesis discusses works of prominent Latinx and Caribbean women writers such as Judith Ortiz Cofer and Nicholasa Mohr and further analyzes the social and religious constraints that instill self-sacrificial mentalities in women. Through the use of womanist and cultural criticisms, this thesis highlights the complex social paradigms that cause so many Latinas to internalize self-limiting thinking patterns. The author's goal is to expose the sufrida role as valueless for contemporary women.

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