The figure of the grandmother is a rhythm which repeats itself throughout Caribbean literature. The Caribbean literary grandmother owes a great deal to a history of hardship under slavery and post-emancipation struggles for self-realisation and empowerment. This thesis explores the repeating theme of theme of the grandmother-headed-household in literary works from Guadeloupe to Jamaica. The novels of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Joseph Zobel, Cecil Foster, Zee Edgell, Alvin Bennett, Cristina Garcia and Pablo Medina are interrogated in this space to reveal the importance of the grandmother character as the backbone of the works. Other novels from the region will also be utilised as secondary texts to further demonstrate the timeless nature of the grandmother's primary role in cultural retention and in the writer's imagination. Social-history provides an invaluable backdrop for understanding some of the dynamics involved in the West Indian family relationship and family structure. Theories as produced by theorists from within the region will be drawn upon alongside theories produced outside the Caribbean. These theories are included because they allow for a culturally distinct reading of Antillian literature that does not imprison the subject as reductionist, Eurocentric theory does. The combination of these theories , will thereby allow the importance of the grandmother character to come through, not as a dysfunctional copy of European models, but rather as a character constructed within a unique cultural contexts on distinct cultural codes. The premise of this thesis is the deconstruction of boundaries by highlighting the repeating grandmother rhythm. The established barriers serve to segregate works into groups based on language, nationality, gender, and ethnicity. Therefore, reading along the restrictive lines established by the latter has disallowed the rich understanding that an interdisciplinary study which crosses genre, gender, and lines of ethnicity reveals.

This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a reexamination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender.

The Collection tells the story of Barbara, a fifty-something, Christian, teacher, wife, and mother, as she is forced to return home after her estranged father's death. Named executrix of his estate, Barbara navigates family secrets, repressed childhood trauma, and her mentally ill father's legacy. Using Attachment Theory and Intergenerational Theories of Personal Development, this research discusses the development and relationships of the characters in The Collection to demonstrate the connections between their child and adult selves—specifically, the role of Barbara's parents and childhood in her suppressed anger. Framed within the context of Carolyn G. Heilbrun's feminist critique of women writers and women characters, this paper connects socio-psychological theories to investigate how the patriarchal gender norms Barbara's mother instilled in her daughter result in Barbara's suppressed anger, strained interpersonal relationships and adult religiosity. The relationship between adult Barbara and her aging mother is discussed in context of these theories and compared against women characters in Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. Finally, the paper calls for further research into and understanding of the causes and effects of women's anger, as well as an essential shift in how both men and women are permitted to express emotions.

The Second Space is a novel that presents the place of women in a patriarchal society, exploring themes such as sexuality, reclamation of space, and the power of physical objects. It follows the story of a woman who escapes from the prospect of marriage and works to discover her self-identity, forging meaningful relationships with other women. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of women’s writing and the creative process by acknowledging the existence of a distinct space for women in a patriarchal society. This concept is called ‘The Second Space’. This study refutes the assumption that women’s fiction is autobiographical due to the use of themes such as domesticity and motherhood, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for women. The sources that support this research include creative, critical and feminist texts, as follows: Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Carla Kaplan’s The Erotic’s of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Sean Burke’s Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, Micaela Maftei’s The Fiction of Autobiography, Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Communication between politicians and the public is rarely direct and first-hand, but almost always mediated by journalist opinions and values. Consequently, the way in which the media reports on State matters has a profound impact on people’s understanding of political processes and their attitudes towards the governing figures. The aim of this research project is to investigate the role that the Polish Press assumes in mediating women’s involvement in contemporary politics. Stemming from the perspective of feminist critical linguistics, the thesis empirically examines a wide array of media publications derived from leading Polish socio-political magazines (‘Polityka’, ‘Wprost’, ‘Newsweek Polska’) and electronic press. By engaging with the journalist discourse, it focuses on the importance of language in generating epistemological claims about women and femininity. It demonstrates not only how female subjectivities are produced in the Polish public domain, but also how history and culture impinge on these constructions in a dialectical-relational manner. The intention is to draw up an ‘inventory’ of signifying practices through which female MPs emerge as gendered subjects in the hope that this will inspire closer scrutiny of media content, leading to its informed critique and transformation.

This dissertation examines the concept of artistic genius and its workings as a functional ‘charter myth’, helping to inscribe, enhance and perpetuate discriminative practices against women within the field of literature in general and novel writing in particular. As an active agent as well as symbolic representation of some core patriarchal values such as the innate supremacy and thus justified dominance of men, the concept of genius operates in the following manner: Firstly, through its multiple mythical elements such as the untruth of its affirmations surrounding creativity combined with a paradoxical ability to nevertheless produce evidence for its seeming accuracy; its inherent narrative structure featuring a prescribed genius hero and tale and the latter’s powerful mythical allure, all of which help to push the prominence of genius despite its continued academic deconstruction. Secondly, through the subtle yet powerful gendering of the protagonist and plot pattern it provides, containing a clear blue-print for a hero with a male body complemented or opposed by a subordinate, non-genius female. This gendered mythical pattern directly affects women writers in a variety of manners. On the one hand, it assists the lastingly biased reception of women authors, pre-imposing genius-inscribed beliefs of female inferiority onto literary judgments, thus cyclically perpetuating that belief. On the other – and most importantly for this thesis – the myth of genius also has an inward bearing on many female writers, impeding their creative process and development especially through the myth’s complex interaction with self-confidence as one of the core features necessary for a successful completion of literary projects such as novels.

This thesis contributes a sociological perspective on the practice of feminist zine production and distribution in the UK. Feminist zines facilitate the development of ‘feminist zine subculture’, a trans-local subcultural space that centres on a relatively collectivised adherence to DIY feminist subjectivity. The main objective of the work is to show how this subculture is characterised by its own aesthetics, geographical organisation, internal politics and wider subcultural affiliations. Through the utilisation of an Integrated Textual Analysis (ITA) of 74 ‘feminist zines’, interviews with 29 zine creators, and on-site observations of zinefests, this work argues for a revised perspective on the study of subculture. Feminist zine creators’ recognition of the limited ways in which feminist history has been documented, and their investment in DIY lifestyles, motivates their involvement in the subculture. However, participants also embody ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ subjectivities within this space, meaning that many experience a form of ‘peripheral participation’, caused by their geographical location or the extent to which they subscribe to the dominant values of DIY subculture. This thesis situates the spatial negotiations, embodied subjectivities, and cultural production practices of the participants within a broader understanding of subculture as the product of multiple ‘fields of reference’. Utilising an adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’, this work develops ‘subcultural cartography’; a method of data presentation that shows how feminist zine subculture is internally characterised, and how this characterisation is influenced by a variety of different cultural fields. Ultimately, this work argues for a more nuanced perspective on how structural inequalities and hierarchies manifest within subcultures themselves.

The focus of this dissertation entitled 'Difference, Identification & Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Genre Fiction' is the representation of lesbian identity in four contemporary popular lesbian genres: autobiographical fiction, speculative fiction, romance fiction and crime fiction. The aim of the dissertation is three-fold. Firstly, it seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the large variety of representations of lesbianism produced by lesbian writers working with popular forms of the novel during the past twenty five years. Secondly, it explores the ways in which lesbian writers have reworked popular genres in order to highlight lesbian and feminist concerns and to depict aspects of lesbian existence. It analyzes the effects of introducing discourses of lesbianism into the plots of popular genres, showing how the latter have been subverted or adapted by lesbian use. Thirdly, the thesis seeks to specify the ways in which the generic forms themselves, according to their own codes and conventions, shape and mediate the representation of lesbian identity in the text. In addition to this focus, the dissertation traces a number of themes and concerns across and within the four genres under discussion. These include the relationship in the texts between the sign 'lesbian' and the discourse of feminism, and the oscillation between the representation of lesbian sexual identity in terms of woman-identification and difference-between women. The aim throughout the analysis of contemporary lesbian genre fiction is to identify both that which is specific to lesbian representation and that which is characteristic of the particular genre under discussion. The dissertation represents a contribution to three areas of literary study: Genre Studies and Feminist Studies in general, and to Lesbian Studies in particular.

This thesis is a comparative study of popularisation of feminism in Britain and Turkey in the 1990s. It focuses on selected British and Turkish women's magazines and examines the ways in which they engage with feminist concerns. The methodology is derived from feminist critical theory and cultural studies in order to address the dynamic interchange between feminist politics and mainstream or consumer women's interests and to examine the relationship between the concepts of feminism and femininity in contemporary women's magazines. The significance of the research lies in the identification of ways in which these texts incorporate and appropriate feminist discourses to the extent that the notion of femininity has increasingly come to be associated with feminist thought. The argument presented in this study is that the relationship between the producers of cultural texts and feminism, and producers and readers need to be taken into consideration to investigate how gendered subjectivities are reproduced in any given culture or crossculturally, by whom they are reproduced, in whose interests they work, and how they are constructed. This approach to popular culture will provide tools to articulate the political and cultural identities of women. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first, I discuss the evolution of feminist movements in the different historical and cultural contexts of Britain and Turkey by focusing on current feminist debates. The second chapter examines the women's magazine as a diverse form of popular culture with regard to its market and content. Contemporary women's magazine markets in these two countries and the ways in which these markets have been changed and expanded in conjunction with the development of feminist movements over the last two decades are discussed. This chapter also discusses the role of editors in defining a contemporary understanding of femininity for mass consumption and the editorial control of the magazine form as a commodity. The final chapter examines the dominant themes through which these texts have engaged with feminist issues. By comparing and contrasting the Turkish and British women's magazines I have found that specific conditions and politics engender a variety of diverse forms for the popularisation of feminism. Feminist themes and issues embedded in popular and commercial discourses are complex and various. However, I have found that the Turkish women's magazines primarily provide an outlet for women's voices and share a common goal with feminist politics of promoting female empowerment in the context of 1990s' Turkey. On the other hand, feminism is predominantly recognized as a cultural value by the British women's magazines in which feminism is often redefined through commodities and fetishized into a symbol of things. Their approach is defined as postfeminist which means the incorporation, revision and depoliticisation of feminist politics.

This thesis sheds light on Dollie Radford as one of the talented women writers whose work is still insufficiently acknowledged by contemporary studies because of the lack of extant information about her life. LeeAnne Richardson, Ruth Livesey, and Emily Harrington are three of only a handful of scholars who have discussed in any detail Radford's role as a poet, socialist, and activist who was surrounded by key figures in the history of English literature and culture, such as William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Eleanor Marx, and Olive Schreiner. Despite being identified by Victorian reviewers as a “domestic” woman poet, all contemporary scholars who have hitherto considered Radford pinpoint her “radical” thoughts and engagement with the New Woman. Building on arguments by Radford's contemporary scholars, my argument highlights Radford's role as a Victorian feminist who sought, through her poetry, to challenge patriarchal attitudes and defy social conventions which imprisoned women of her generation. While the first two chapters of this thesis provide a contextual background of women's rights and women's poetry in the Victorian era, the four remaining chapters explore how Radford's personal conflict as an ignored married woman and unsupported writer might have influenced her empathetic portrayal of marginalised figures, such as prostitutes, the working classes, women writers, and homosexuals. Simultaneously, the chapters highlight the subversive meanings obscured by Radford's use of evocative and aesthetic language. The majority of the poems, letters, and diary entries included here are unpublished and have not yet been considered by contemporary critics. Thus, this research adds to the existing body of knowledge, offering a new approach to Radford's life and poetry in relation to aspects concerning women in Victorian and Edwardian England. By continuously interrogating Radford's choice of metaphors and images in contrast with those depicted by other Victorian poets, I aim to establish Radford as a significant fin-se-siècle woman poet whose poetry embraces a literary tradition which questions negative gendered attitudes biased against passionate women writers.