This thesis addresses some of the extant gaps in law and literature criticism using an historical cultural criticism of law and literature that focuses on the Jacobean female legal subject in cases of divorce and adultery. It examines the intellectual milieu that constructs law and literature in this period to contribute to research on female subject formation, and looks specifically at how literature and law work to construct identity. This thesis asks what views Jacobean literature presents of the female legal subject, and what do those views reveal about identity and gender construction? Chapter one offers some essential historical contexts. It establishes the jurisprudential conditions of the period, defines the ideal female legal subject, touches on recent historical scholarship regarding women and law, explores how literature reveals law's artificiality, and links the Inns of Court to the theatres. Chapter two focuses on women and divorce. The first sections discuss the theology and ideology which impacted on divorce law. The latter sections examine Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, ca. 1609, and two manuscript accounts of Frances Howard's 1613 divorce trial, William Terracae's poem, A Plenarie Satisfaction, ca. 1613, and The True Tragi-Comedie Formarly Acted at Court, a play by Francis Osborne, 1635. These texts reveal the legal construction and frustrations of married women, and illustrate a gendered divide in attitudes towards women's legal position. Chapter three examines women and adultery law. It then juxtaposes representations of women justly accused of adultery, like the real-life Alice Clarke, and the fictional Isabella in John Marston's The Insatiate Countess, 1613, and unjustly accused, like the virtuous wives in Marston's play. This chapter reveals how male anxiety creates the stereotypes that constrain the female legal subject within systems of patrilineal inheritance. As a whole, this thesis uses literature to explore the Jacobean female legal subject's relationship to her husband and to the law, and, in some cases, it challenges the assumption that women were effectively constrained by legal dictates which would keep them chaste, silent and submissive. Literature, in some cases, works alongside law to sustain constructed identities, but radical literature can undermine law by challenging the stereotypes and identities law works to maintain.

閨秀是清代文壇的一股新興力量，她們以獨特的女性寫作風格和視角為清代文學乃至整個中國文學注入了新鮮的水源。清代閨秀作家相較於前代，在詩詞創作方面出現一個不容忽視的特點，即在前代女作家重複傳遞的閨情閨怨之外，開拓了對日常生活的書寫。然而目前學界未有圍繞清代閨秀詩詞日常生活書寫的專著，涉及清代閨秀詩詞日常化的論文也十分稀少。有見於此，本文圍繞「清代閨秀如何書寫日常生活」這一問題展開論述，試圖彌補前人之不足。本文包含七章，除第一章「緒論」及第七章「結論」之外，二至六章的主要內容分別如下: 第二章主要通過史料文獻還原清代女性的日常生活樣貌。清代閨秀的日常生活，既有中饋理家和侍親課子等方面對於婦德的順從，又有讀書吟詠和閨外行旅等傳統婦德之外的內容。第三章以清代女性詠物詩詞為重點研究文本，主要分析詠物詩詞中大量湧現的日常化吟詠對象；同時探討詠物詩詞的日常化寫作手法和情志表達。第四章重點分析自清代才大量出現的女性家務詩詞。一方面與男性文人筆下對勞動女性的書寫作對比研究，另一方面探討家務書寫對於閨秀的意義。第五章從三個方面對清代閨秀書寫日常生活的方式進行梳理，包括拓展選材範圍、增添日記元素和關注現實生活。第六章考察清代女性詩詞日常化的原因。清代女性詩詞出現日常化的趨勢，是創作主體的改變、儒家禮儀道德規範的引導，以及文壇風氣等多重因素共同作用的結果。Elite women writers (guixiu 閨秀)were are vitalizing force in the literary field of the Qing Dynasty. With their unique gendered writing style and perspective, they brought fresh blood to Qing Dynasty literature, and in a broader sense, to Chinese literature as well. Compared with the previous generations, Qing elite women writers had a prominent feature in their writing of poetry. That is, in addition to the lyrical themes already repeatedly dealt with by earlier female writers, they started writing about their daily life. However, no monograph has been published on the writing of daily life in Qing elite women's poetry and little has been discovered on how their attention turned to the writing of daily life. This thesis fills this research gap through addressing the following question: how did Qing elite women write about everyday life? This article is divided into seven chapters, flanked by an introduction in Chapter One and a conclusion in Chapter Seven. Abstracts of Chapters Two to Six are as follows: Chapter Two outlines a reconstruction of the daily life of women in the Qing Dynasty through historical texts. It touches upon the expansion of Qing elite women's living space through comparison with previous generations. Besides taking on familial and parental responsibilities, Qing elite women expanded their living space by writing poetry and traveling. Chapter Three focuses on poems on objects (yongwu shici詠物詩詞) written by women in the Qing Dynasty. It analyzes the daily objects that appeared in a large number of poems. It also discusses the writing techniques and artistic expressions of these poems. Chapter Four focuses on women's poems on housework, a genre which did not appear until the Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, the chapter compares such poems with working women depicted by male literati; on the other hand, it discusses the significance of writing about housework for elite women of the time. Chapter Five organizes the approach Qing elite female writers had taken in writing about daily life from three aspects, namely, broadening their scope of topic selection, adding diary-like elements to their works and showing interests in family livelihood. The Sixth Chapter investigates the reasons behind the popularization of writing about daily life in Qing women's poetry. This trend is the result of a number of reasons: the change of writing subject, the guiding of Confucian moral norms and the climate of the literary circle at the time.

The main purpose of this study is to provide a re-assessment of the early twentieth century women's suffrage movement, thereby challenging much of the existing historiography of this subject. The approach is based upon the premise that it is not possible to understand the nature and significance of the women's suffrage movement through accounts of the lives of a few of its charismatic leaders. A far broader analytical framework is necessary. This begins with the nature of the arguments about women and their place in society, which were utilised in support of votes for women. It then extends to an analysis of the success gained in conveying such ideas to a wide body of women, who in the case of Britain, if not elsewhere in Europe and North America, were drawn from all social classes. The final step is to assess the impact of the women's suffrage movement upon the broader political system in which it operated. For the eventual success of the movement in gaining votes for women cannot be explained solely in terms of its own internal dynamics. Rather it is necessary to examine the inter-action between the way the various suffrage organisations viewed and related to the current political environment, and the way political leaders and parties viewed and acted in response to suffrage activities. This analytical framework unites two strands of historical research which at present seem to have developed in isolation from each other. That is, it combines the concern of the new feminist historiography with the evolution of modern sex-roles, with the more traditional political and constitutional historians' interest in women's suffrage as a problem for party politics and public order.

This thesis explores the construction of masculinity in novels written by New Women authors between the years 1881-1899. The fin de siècle was a period during which gender roles were renegotiated with fervour by both male and female authors, but it was the so-called New Woman in particular who was trying to transform the Victorian notion of femininity to incorporate the demands of the burgeoning women's movement. This thesis argues that in their fiction, New Women authors often tried to achieve this transformation by creating male characters who were designed to justify and to mitigate the New Woman protagonist's departure from traditional structures of heterosexual relationships. The methodology underlying this thesis is the notion that men and women were perceived as binary opposites during the Victorian period. I refer to this as the binary code of the sexes. This code assumes that men and women naturally possess diametrically opposed character attributes, and also that “masculine” attributes are perforce better than “feminine” ones. In the body of this work, I argue that New Women authors attempted to contest both of these assumptions by creating, on the one hand, traditional male characters whose masculinity is corrupted in crucial and recurring ways, and on the other, impaired male characters who cannot assume the traditional role of man. The comparison of the New Woman protagonist with the corrupt traditional man elevates her feminine attributes, while the impaired man's dependency legitimises her acquisition of what were otherwise considered “masculine” attributes and privileges, thereby contesting the notion that men and women possess sex-specific attributes at all. The second part of my thesis examines contrasting examples, in which this way of characterising masculinity – as traditional or impaired – is questioned and manipulated. It examines the limitations of the New Women authors' specific approach to reconstructing the binary code.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-03T19:29:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 15 / Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos / Amélia Hartley de Brito Antunes Maciel – a Baronesa de Três Serros – escreveu um total de cento e cinqüenta e uma cartas, no período compreendido entre 1885 e 1918. A maioria delas foi remetida por Amélia após sua viuvez e transferência para o Rio de Janeiro e teve como destinatária a filha mais velha Amélia Aníbal Hartley Maciel, mais conhecida como Sinhá, que permaneceu em Pelotas (RS), morando no solar da família. A análise que empreendemos dessa “escrita de si” – e que apresentamos nesta Dissertação – fornece valiosas informações sobre como Amélia mantinha e estreitava seus vínculos familiares, sobre como administrava seu patrimônio e o orçamento doméstico, sobre seus sentimentos diante da doença, da morte e da velhice, sobre seus posicionamentos políticos, sobre suas leituras e vivência social, bem como sobre suas crenças e espiritualidade. As linhas escritas por Amélia, no entanto, mais do que reconstituir a trajetória de sua vida, revelam as nuances do modo de vida e do pensamento de um segmento social / Amélia Hartley de Brito Antunes Maciel – Baroness of Três Serros – wrote 151 letters between 1885 and 1918. Most of them were sent by Amélia after becoming a widow and being moved to Rio de Janeiro, to her oldest daughter Amélia Aníbal Hartley Maciel, known as Sinhá, who remained in Pelotas (RS) in her family’s manor. Our analysis of these “writings of herself” – which are shown in this work – provides valuable information about how Amélia kept her family links and made them closer, about how she ran her properties and her household budget, about her feelings towards her illness, death and old age, her politic positions, her readings and social life, as well as her beliefs and spirituality. However, more than reconstructing her life, these writings show us the shades of the way-of-life of privileged people in the beginning of the 20th Century focusing on the private and personal aspect, which is of little interest in historiography. In this perspective, we believe that our investigations contributes in a inn

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On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, Souza and Staël – re-appropriate nature in order to reclaim the voice denied to them and to their sex by the society in which they lived. The five chapters of this thesis are structured to follow a number of critical junctures in the life of an adult woman: marriage, authorship, motherhood, madness and mortality. The opening sections to each chapter show why these areas of life generated particular problems for women at this time. Then, through in-depth analysis of primary texts, the chapters function in two ways. They examine how female novelists craft natural landscapes to expose and comment on the problems male-dominant society causes women to experience in France at this time. In addition, they show how female novelists employ descriptions of nature to highlight women's responses to the pain and frustration that social issues provoke for them. Scholars have thus far overlooked the natural settings within the works of female novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, a re-evaluation of these natural settings, as suggested by this thesis, brings a new dimension to our appreciation of the works of these women writers and of their position as critics of contemporary society. Ultimately, an escape into nature on the part of female protagonists in these novels becomes the means by which their creators confront the everyday reality faced by women in the turbulent socio-historical era which followed the Revolution.

In this thesis, I examine representations of women and gender in British ‘Golden Age' crime fiction by writers including Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. I argue that portrayals of women in these narratives are ambivalent, both advocating a modern, active model of femininity, while also displaying with their resolutions an emphasis on domesticity and on maintaining a heteronormative order, and that this ambivalence provides a means to deal with anxieties about women's place in society. This thesis is divided thematically, beginning with a chapter on historical context which provides an overview of the period's key social tensions. Chapter II explores depictions of women who do not conform to the heteronormative order, such as spinsters, lesbians and ‘fallen' women. Chapter III looks at the ways in which the courtships and marriages of detective couples attempt to negotiate the ideal of companionate marriage and the pressures of a ‘cult of domesticity'. Chapter IV considers the ways in which depictions of women in schools, universities and the workplace are used to explore the tensions between an expanding role in the public sphere and the demand to inhabit traditionally domestic roles. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the image of female victims' and female killers' bodies and the ways in which such depictions can be seen to expose issues of gender, class and identity. Through its examination of a wide variety of texts and writers in the period 1920 to the late 1940s, this thesis investigates the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in Golden Age crime fiction written by women, and argues that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe' solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the complexities of daughterhood as portrayed by nine contemporary women writers: from former West Germany(Gabriele Wohmann, Elisabeth Plessen), from former East Germany (Hedda Zinner, Helga M. Novak), from Switzerland (Margrit Schriber) and from Austria (Brigitte Schwaiger, Jutta Schutting, Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch, Christine Haidegger). Ten prose-works which span a period of approximately ten years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, are analysed according to theme and character. In the Introduction, we trace the historical development of women's writing in German, focusing on the most significant female authors from the Romantic period through to the rise of the New Women's Movement in the late sixties. We then consider a definition of 'Frauenliteratur' and the extent to which autobiography has become a typical feature of such women's writing. In the ensuing four chapters we highlight in psychological and sociological terms the mourning process a daughter undergoes after her father's death; the identification process between daughter and mother; the daughter's reaction to being adopted; and the daughter's decision to commit suicide. We see to what extent the environment in which each of these daughters is brought up as well as past events in German history shape the daughter's attitude towards her parents. Since we are studying the way in which these relationships are portrayed, we also need to take into account the narrative strategies employed by these modern women writers. In the light of our analysis of content and form we are able to examine the possible intentions behind such personal portraits: the act of writing as a form of self-discovery and self-therapy as well as the sharing of female experience. We conclude by suggesting the direction women's writing from German-speaking countries may be taking.

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