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This thesis maps and re-maps literary London through an engagement with selected novels by Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo and Andrea Levy. The thesis builds on the work of very strong strands of black British women's writing, an area of writing that remains committed to the necessity of having to defend it. I argue that the literature of this group of contemporary women writers re-orientates trajectories of black British writing to focus on emerging distinctive London identities in the twenty-first century. The thesis charts a shift in black British women's writing which rewrites familiar postcolonial tensions around nationhood, displacement and unbelonging to articulate a rootedness in London. Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's sense of belonging stems from the city in which they were all born and raised, their 'London-ness' rendering a new form of selfhood which informs who they are and what they write. The study is motivated by an agenda to critique black British women's writing outside of the historical paradigmatic racial and gendered identities through which it has traditionally been read. I wish to attend to women's writing in a way which disturbs the canon of contemporary British fiction, reconfiguring predominately male narratives of London life to present an alternative view of the city. The study assesses Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's contributions to and reappraisal of long traditions of women writing novels of family and home. The novels I engage with are localised within a particular London postcode, foregrounding the importance of microcosmic conceptions of home and domestic spaces to constructions of belonging in a multifaceted, complex urban environment such as London. The role of family is central to the authors' narratives and the thesis explores familial women's relationships which are both nuanced and complicated. The trope of sisterhood is deployed across the texts and raises profound questions concerning ideological constructions of belonging and home. The thesis grounds itself intellectually at the nexus of debates in the fields of feminist discourse, postcolonial theory and contemporary urban theory, implementing them within a more fluid critical framework capable of reading the literature by this group of writers outside rigid categorising partitions. To not attend to questions of race and gender within their works would be to distort the thematic framework underpinning the novels. Nevertheless, I wish to re-inflect the ways in which we critique London writing to encourage the emergence of a new language which allows us think about it as organically diverse, rather than consciously or systematically 'multicultural'.

This thesis examines womens' poetry of the radical Left and organised labour movement of the Depression-Era United States and investigates the relationship between poetry and politics during this period. In so doing, it shows that women poets were concerned with precisely that problem: of poetry's political function. The work of individual poets and the acts of collective cultural production explored in this thesis articulate a radical, politically transformative poetics at a time when the continued existence of poetry was perceived to be under threat from scientific advance and wider cultural changes. Juxtaposing analysis of Left modernist poets with poets of the labour movement, the chapters focus on three individual poets including Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) and Miriam Tane (1916-2007). To provide an understanding of the role of poetry within a specific political movement and to establish the context in which Tane's poetry was produced, two chapters are included which analyse the educational culture and the collective cultural production of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. One chapter focuses on the history of the ILGWU's educational and cultural activities and the other analyses collections of poetry which the union produced. This thesis challenges the existing paradigm in which the study of American radical Left and labour poetry has been isolated from any broader enquiry about its relationship to class, American political history and also to literary modernism. This thesis advances two main arguments: that the poets considered in this thesis conceived of poetry as a politically transformative force; that these politically transformative understandings of poetry were rooted in in an engagement with the ideological and material contexts of the social movements to which these writers belonged. Furthermore, this thesis considers poetry in terms of the material context of its publication, and the political uses to which it was put.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on Feb. 22, 2007). PDF text: v, 219 p. : ill. UMI publication number: AAT 3216433. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in paper, microfilm and microfiche format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2000. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-200).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Divinity School, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX218785.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Erndl, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of International Affairs. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 2, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.