This dissertation provides a feminist reading of the works of Latin American women writers since the decade of the sixties to the present who focus on the particular historical moment of their times from a political perspective. A systematic study of the narrative figure in novels by Dora Alonso, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, and Isabel Allende, reveals an awareness of the undercurrents of oppression existent in their societies based on racial and class stereotypes with a growing understanding of oppression based on sex. From the perspective of the female narrator in Tierra Inerme by the Cuban writer Dora Alonso, the Cuban social structure before 1959 is condemned for its inequality on the basis of class, race, and sex. However, the perspective of the narrator reveals that she has not entirely escaped the prejudices that permeate her society concerning women. Hasta no verte Jesus mio, by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska concentrates on the testimony of Jesusa Palancares who condemns the structural inequality existent in Mexican society. Although Palancares' perspective reveals an awareness of the unequal treatment of women, because of her underprivileged status she concentrates on oppression based on class. In Cenizas de Izalco by Darwin Flakoll from the United States and the Salvadoran Claribel Alegria, the 1931 massacre of the peasants in El Salvador is condemned. However, through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators, oppression on the basis of sex is most emphasized. La casa de los espiritus by the Chilean Isabel Allende depicts brutal class, racial and sexual oppression in Chile from the 1920's to 1973. It is in this novel that sexual oppression is portrayed most vividly, again through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators. Although a growing awareness of sexual oppression emerges in the novels studied becoming most emphatic in this decade through an awakening feminist consciousness, the perspective of the narrators emphasize to varying degrees the importance of solidarity among women to combat injustice of every form to achieve a more equitable existence for all oppressed people.

The thesis investigates a diverse range of feminist postmodern philosophy, distinguished by its varying rearticulation of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism and feminism’s own position vis-à-vis that debate. Drawing on postmodernism’s primary tenet that substantive, binary identity categories comprise discursive, performative constructs, feminist postmodernism theorises a range of strategies for their subversive re-performance. This is realised in the mobilisation of parodic, “failed” repetitions and identities embodied, for instance, by transsexual, transgender, and transvestite personae. Hence the reformulation of postmodern versions of agency, resistance, and choice. In the second instance, the thesis examines the combination of feminist postmodern philosophy with the narrative techniques of postmodernism and its sister genre, the fantastic mode. As a heterogeneous, open-ended, self-reflexive form, the “postmodern fantastic” challenges conventional realism and its correlative sovereign subject. The postmodern fantastic is redeployed by feminist practitioners, whose inscription of both textual and topographical re-performance, such as is manifest in the cyborg and the grotesque, represent the literary counterparts of feminist postmodern agency. The above provide critical contexts for a reading of four late-twentieth-century women writers, focusing in particular on their intervention in the modernism/postmodemism debate and their deployment of the feminist postmodern fantastic as a means of destabilising sexed, gendered, and sexual identity. The selected authors Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter represent distinct and diverse, culturally specific, literary and feminist traditions, reformulating the relationship between modernism and postmodernism in different ways and with varying degrees of success. They coalesce, however, in their contribution to the feminist postmodern fantastic. It is the general purpose of the thesis to demonstrate how this particular mode embodies one of feminist postmodernism’s most powerful means of literary and ideological critique

This thesis discusses female silence, voice and representation as portrayed in four postcolonial novels written by Asian female writers or those from the Asian diaspora. The novels included in the corpus are The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne. This thesis aims to explore the different strategies adopted by the authors to represent different forms of silence of the type highlighted in theoretical work by Spivak, Olsen and Showalter. The novels analysed open up new contexts in which issues of silence, migration, displacement and multiculturalism, which are central in postcolonial literature, are explored. In its examination of these issues in detail, the thesis has been influenced by postcolonial and diasporic studies, with a focus on women’s issues and feminist thought. Instead of focusing on the role of silence solely in relation to specific characters, the thesis attempts to engage with the complex ways in which these narratives represent various forms, moments and scenes of silence. From the analysis, we can exemplify that the novels can also be used to suggest the ambivalences of speaking/not-speaking via the narrative representations of silence. Authorial silence involves the author’s deliberate refusal to speak directly in the text ; instead, the author utilises several literary devices to convey something indirectly to the reader. Silence is also linked to concepts such as shame, secrets and gossip. One is likely to refrain from speaking if he or she is ashamed, secretive or is the topic of gossip in one’s community. There are also some female characters who are portrayed as not-speaking, or choosing to remain silent so as not to cause problems for the family. A few other characters have been portrayed as refusing to speak out as they have been traumatised into silence. Lastly, women can also be complicit in holding on to patriarchal structures and in the process, attempt to speak out in order to to silence or to cause problems to other women.

This project follows a thread of citations of the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector found in the philosophical feminist texts of four European thinkers: Hélène Cixous, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, and Rosi Braidotti. I explore the intersection of material feminisms, Latin American decolonial feminism, and sexual difference theory differentially and multiply across contexts. I revisit histories of women and texts - French, Italian and Brazilian - that are multiply and differentially marginalized in the current Western feminist narrative framework - in order to create sources of alternative knowledge and create an opportunity for something new to emerge symbio-creatively from these points of contact. Chapter One covers the genesis of European feminist approaches to Lispector’s oeuvre in France, the impassioned reading by Hélène Cixous of Lispector’s work, and also provides vital counter-memory, decolonial feminist stories on Brazilian and Latin American feminisms which have been left out of the dominant Anglo-American/Western feminist historical narrative. Chapter Two will focus on the arrival in Italy of Lispector’s texts, Luisa Muraro and the Diotima women’s feminist philosophy group’s readings. Chapter Three then covers Adriana Cavarero, as well as her split from said Diotima group. Finally, Chapter Four brings us to Rosi Braidotti, from her early texts on Lispector to present theoretical horizons. My concluding discussion stems from the idea of connections as posited by Sonia Alvarez: “a translocal feminist politics of translation is crucial to the decolonial turn and a key strategy in building ‘connectant epistemologies’ in order to confront the equivocations or mistranslations that hinder feminist alliances, even among women who share the same language and culture.” I expand on my theory of points of contact and explore possibilities of symbiosis and non-deterministic evolution as a theoretical tool.

This dissertation explores the work of specific female autobiographers or memoirists who have written about their endured emotional or physical wounds inflicted by trauma. Throughout history, women’s writings and experiences have been commonly devalued or excluded from those autobiographical texts within the traditional canon. Further, traumatized women have traditionally been regarded as pathologically divided victims who suffer holes in their psyches. Their stories about traumatized childhood and adolescence are thus treated as insignificant or dangerous and are easily silenced. As a result, life stories of traumatized women have been commonly considered as unfit texts for students to read in class (especially because of concerns about possibilities of (re)traumatizing readers), and thus are commonly omitted from the English curriculum. Considering that the literary world still is dominated by white male writers, this study examines not only traumatized women writers but also women writers who represent “difference” as well as have suffered trauma. This dissertation’s analyzed authors and texts include: Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These women writers variously demonstrate, through their embodied trauma writings, how easily a seemingly integrated/unitary self can be shattered, how unexpectedly the status quo can be destabilized by certain events in their life-writings, and how subversively the history of the female body can be rewritten. The life-writings by these women, who are non-heterosexual, non-white, and from the lower class, and/or who have lived with disabilities/illnesses, are far from that typical autobiographical writing that emphasizes tests of manhood, or beautifies the linear development of the masculine subject. In other words, they never emphasize their triumph over trauma, do not celebrate selfsufficiency or self-reliance, and are not interested in claiming any authority of their own personal experiences. Rather, they highlight the understanding of their own incompleteness, fragmentation, and self-contradiction, which serves to uncover the fictiveness or myths of self-control or self-mastery typically found in narratives by male and often white-only writers. In their life writings, the traumatized adolescent selves are continuously reshaped and discursively constructed, not as helpless victims of terrifying events, as is frequently assumed, but as those with rebellious, transgressive, and uncanny power, who can disturb patriarchal social norms or regulations in their life writing and come to terms with trauma in their own ways: Duras’s eroticizing trauma in The Lover, Menchú politicizing trauma in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Kaysen’s depathologizing trauma in Girl, Interrupted, Satrapi’s and Bechdel’s visualizing unrepresentable trauma in The Complete Persepolis and Fun Home. This study employs poststructural theories that “challenge the unity and coherence of the intact and fully conscious ‘self’ of Western autobiographical practices and the limits of its representations” (J. Miller, 49) to examine traumatized girlhood. In particular, based on feminist poststructural critiques of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about autobiographical perspectives and voices, the following questions are examined in this dissertation: What words or images do this study’s examined authors utilize as a way to (re- )construct a self out of trauma? What understandings or insights do these authors achieve — or not achieve — while working to come terms with their traumas? In what ways might — or might not — these authors’ memoirs or life writings serve or disrupt a palliative/therapeutic role in what often is termed the healing process? What places, if any, might such autobiographical works focused on women’s experiences of trauma have in the English curriculum within the secondary classroom? And lastly, what and who constitutes the English literature canon, and what debates continue to characterize efforts to expand this canon to include voices of the marginalized?

This thesis considers the idea of the 'metaphysical' in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury women's poetry, notably by exploring the female-voiced lyrics affiliated with Marie Maitland (d. 1596) in the Scottish manuscript verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto (c. 1586). The study aims to reintegrate important strands of Renaissance culture which have been lost by too exclusive a focus on English, male writing and contexts. For many literary historians the 'metaphysical' refers overwhelmingly to Dryden's pejorative categorization of Donne and his followers. However, Sarah Hutton has recently shown how the 'metaphysical' can be traced to an Aristotelian Neoplatonism, whereby influential fifteenth-century thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino were conflating the spiritual and material for political purposes. For the queer Renaissance critic, Michael Morgan Holmes, the 'political' pertains to individual spiritual-material desires which can undermine hegemonic definitions of the natural and unnatural. Building on this, my thesis illuminates 'metaphysics' in the work of Maitland, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Constance Aston Fowler (1621?-1664) and Katherine Philips (1632- 1664). These poets use the physical and spiritual bonds between women to explore the nature of female space, time and identity. Hutton's and Holmes's definition of the 'metaphysical' has special applicability for these poets, as they tacitly deconstruct the patriarchal construction of the virgin/whore and offer their own configuration of the spiritual-sensual woman. While critics have foregrounded a male metaphysical tradition in the early modern period, this study proposes that there is a 'dissident' female metaphysical strand that challenges the 'dominant' male discourses of the time. Over the last few decades, feminist scholars, notably, Lorna Hutson, Barbara Lewalski, Kate Chedgzoy, Carol Barash and Valerie Traub have reinstated the work of Lanyer and Philips in the English canon of Renaissance writing. More recently Sarah Dunnigan has drawn attention to the importance of the Scots poet and compiler, Maitland. Moreover, Helen Hackett has indicated that the writings of Fowler force us to rethink the roles of women in early modern literary culture. I take this further in two ways. First, I examine these poets' relationship to the 'metaphysical', the importance of which has been underestimated by critics, despite Dryden's original gendered use of the term. Secondly, I propose that these writers are responding to a 'polyglottal' female metaphysical tradition that develops in Renaissance Europe through a female republic of letters. I also assess the difficulties in belonging to a 'female tradition' in an era where female authorship was necessarily affected by misogynistic attitudes to women as writers. The research re-contextualizes the work of these women by examining the philosophical ideologies of Aristotle, Ficino, Marguerite of Navarre, Donne, Sir Richard Maitland, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville, Olympia Morata, Herbert Aston, Katherine Thimelby, St Teresa of Ávila and Andrew Marvell. By juxtaposing these four poets and reading them from within this philosophical-political context, the thesis sheds new light on the nature of early modern female intertextuality, whilst challenging male Anglocentric definitions of the 'Renaissance'.

This thesis explores the meanings of home in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction. I argue that there are five components to Gaskell's fictional iteration of homes, each of which is explored in the chapters of this thesis. I analyse the ways in which Gaskell challenges the nineteenth-century cultural construct of the home as a domestic sanctuary offering protection from the strains and stresses of the external world. Gaskell's fictional homes frequently fail to provide a place of safety. Even the architecture militates against a sense of peace and privacy. Doors and windows are ambiguous openings through which death can enter, and are potent signifiers of entrapment as well as protective barriers. The underlying fragility of Gaskell's concept of home is illustrated by her narratives of homelessness, which for her, is better defined as a psychological, social and emotional separation rather than the literal lack of shelter. Education takes place within the home and is grounded in Gaskell's Unitarian beliefs and associationist psychology. Gaskell creates challenging paradigms for domestic relationships in her fictional portrayals of feminized men and servants. Her detailed descriptions of domestic interiors provide nuanced and unconventional interpretations of character and behaviour. I draw on Gaskell's letters, her non-fiction writing and a range of other contemporary documents for insights into her fictional presentations of home. This methodology provides a creative, holistic interpretative framework within which Gaskell's achievement can be more adequately measured. I argue that Gaskell's own experience of home was that of an outsider lingering on the borderland, and her concept of home was therefore unstable, fluid and unconventional. The tensions she experienced in her personal life found their way into her fiction, where her portrayal of home is multifaceted and complex.

Introduction: The Historical Tradition of Baillie, Scott, Hodson and Southey -- William Wallace : "A Terrible Beauty" -- Exploration and conquest : Columbus, Balboa, and Pizarro -- National and Domestic Heroines : Margaret of Anjou and Lady Griseld Baillie -- Gothic Interactions : The Miscellaneous Legends of Baillie and Hodson. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1035/thumbnail.jpg

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This thesis comprises two works: a novel ‘Libertine’ and a monograph ‘A writer’s reflection’. ‘Libertine’contemplates the eroticising and brutalising of being, and sex as currency, as need and as sacrament. It is set in a city where war is the norm, nightmare the standard, and ancient deities are called upon to witness the new order of killing technologies. The story is narrated by a woman chosen to be the consort of the General, a despostic war leader who believes that he has been chosen by the goddess Kali. She journeys deep into a horror which exists not only around her, but also within her. ‘Libertine’, by melding the erotic and the Gothic, tells the story of a woman enacting the role cast for her in the complex theatres of war. ‘A writer’s reflection’ discusses the themes of the novel, introducing the notion of existential erotica. The existential experience particular to the expression of the erotic being is discussed, and the dilemma which arises from a self yearning to merge ecstatically with an/other in order to obtain a heightened or differently valued self. This theme is elaborated in ‘Libertine’ with regard to subjectivity and the broader issues of nausea, horror and choice, drawing on the conventions of Gothic literature and apocalyptic visioning. This visioning, as eroticised death worship, is found in a Sadian credo of cruelty, the tantric rituals of Kali devotion, and the annihilating erotic excess propounded by Bataille. The monograph illustrated that ‘Libertine’ is not a re-representation of these elements, but an original contribution to the literature of erotica. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)