Not available / text

This research is a quantitative content analysis and qualitative rhetorical analysis of U.S. Mennonite women’s rhetoric in two prominent Mennonite publications, The Gospel Herald and The Mennonite, between 1963 and 1977. During this time period 150,000 Mennonites considered themselves members of the church. The context of each paper was identified through content analysis Women who chose to submit articles to the church press faced enormous obstacles when promoting gender equality. Gender equality was a direct challenge to Mennonite’s traditional view of "divine order," which is a hierarchy of God, man, then woman. Due to the these obstacles Mennonite female authors who were supportive of gender equality took on a facilitating tone and a double identity persona comprised of both Mennonite and feminist. Mennonite women who supported a more traditional view of gender roles had an instructional tone and a "selfhate" persona. Invitational rhetorical theory helps to explain the rhetorical choices made my female rhetors during this time period. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Elliott School of Communication / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 85-99) / "May 2006."

This thesis is a study of the Korean woman poet Ho Kyongbon (1563-1589) and her poetry. In it, I investigate Ho's two brothers' active involvement in her literary life, particularly her younger brother Ho Kyun's publication of her poetry collection, the Nansorhon chip and promotion of her literary works to Chinese scholars. I also examine late Ming and Qing anthologies which include Ho's poetry to disclose how late Ming and Qing scholars evaluated her poetry and represented her life. I argue that the attention these critics paid to Ho's literary works and talent reflected a blossoming of women's literary culture and a rapid growth in the anthologizing of women's poetry. I also undertake an analysis of Ho's poetry, with particular emphasis on the influence of Tang poetry on her poetic practice. This analysis is accompanied by a discussion of Ho's relationship to the "Tang revival movement" in which her two brothers were fervently engaged. This relationship provides a context through which to better understand not only Ho's particular interest in emulating Tang poetry, but also the very textual qualities of her poetry.

As women's literature emerged in late nineteenth-century Italy, female authors encountered many obstacles. Foremost among them was the near-total absence of Italian female literary role models. Female writers often expressed ambivalence towards the writing of other women, which was considered inferior to male writing. However, their reverence for male writers revealed how conflictive their identities as writers were, and it was an impediment to the establishment of a serious women's literary tradition. In addition to such personal conflicts, these writers also faced the challenge of gaining acceptance by the male-dominated literary community and by their readers. These two groups expected that women's writing conform to a moral code which did not apply to men's writing. This thesis is an analysis of the specific problems that female novelist Bruno Sperani and others faced as they strove to establish themselves in Italian literature.

This thesis is concerned with inscriptions of gender and space in the novels of two African women writers, Mariama Bâ and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, particularly Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981) and Scarlet Song (1986) and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The exploration of representations of gendered identity is thus integrated with an awareness of space/place. By exploring the demarcation and enunciation of space within my chosen texts, I hope to provide new perspectives on the question of gendered identities and relations. The theorizing of gender identities and relations thus gains a new orientation from its application in relation to the theorizing of space and spatiality. As many theorists have argued, space is an important aspect to consider because it is not a neutral site: it becomes invested with meanings and encodes particular values and relations of power which can be contested and negotiated. This is particularly evident when looking at questions of gender identity, roles and relations. ‘Geographies of gender’ are established not only in the coding of spaces as ‘masculine’ and feminine’ but also in the kinds of sociality which they encourage and the power-relations they encode. If space is central to masculinist power, it is also important in the development of feminine resistance. Drawing on a range of theorists, I endeavour to pursue a gendered analysis of space/place through a reading of particular locations (the home, the street, the village) as expressive of power relations, gender identities and roles. I also consider how space/place is differently experienced and inhabited by men and women as well as how dominant constructions of space/place, which are also invested with meaning and power relations, come to be negotiated or contested. In all four novels explored in this thesis, the home is revealed as a dominant site of inscription, a space which tends to reflect and reinforce dominant social identities and roles. In this sense, the home is often figured as a site of patriarchal and gendered oppression, a central domain in which normative definitions of gender are established and reinforced. What is also clear, however, is that way in which the home also becomes a site for the contestation and renegotiation of gender identities and roles, a place where conventional identities can be challenged and new identities explored. In this sense, the home is revealed as a major site of contestation in which the tensions between different experiences and interpretations of space based on contrasting cultural definitions of power relations, gender identities and roles are played out. If the ordering of space is an important means of securing dominant gender relations, it also provides the means for negotiation and resistance. This is reflected not only the alternative ii examples of home explored in these novels but also in liberating spaces such as the school, the beach and the university. In the destabilisation and destruction of the home, the links between self and place becomes apparent as new identities are formed and conventional roles are redefined.

This dissertation examines the complex and multi-faceted ways in which contemporary minority women's fictions may be thought of, both generically and individually, as practices of bearing witness to silence---practices of giving testimony to the presence of lives, experiences, events and historical realities which, otherwise, have been absented from the critical terrain of North American literary studies. For the most pact, the texts included in this study all tell tales of various, and often extreme, forms of sexual, racial, gender, colonial, national and cultural violence. Through readings of select works by Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Arundhati Roy, Louise Erdrich, M. K. Indira, Mahasweta Devi and Leslie Feinberg, I argue for the ways in which these fictions may be understood as situated within the bounds of a genre---a genre that attempts to provide an account of what we might call "the half not told." I examine these fictions, both generically and specifically, as texts which have the ability to make several important critical interventions in the field of literary studies. Firstly, these texts have the potential to negotiate the impasse that feminist and postcolonial literary scholarship finds itself in around debates about the relationship between theory, activism and experience---as well as in debates about the relationship between violence, beauty, culture, subjectivity and desire. Secondly, the fictions under study help to challenge our very definitions of witnessing. Witnessing, in these works, is not simply a matter of "speaking out" against violence, but rather the issue of making space for the affective and emotive dimensions of various kinds of silences and silencings. Finally, in attempting to chart more precise vocabularies with which to assume readings of these narratives, my thesis also helps to think about the ways in which reading, writing and storytelling may, themselves, be seen as profoundly ethical undertakings that seek to give evidence

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-250). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 2006.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 343-355). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR29339

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Virginia, 1998. / Description based on content as of June 1999. Title from title screen.