This doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive work on Martinican women’s literature. I demonstrate that Martinican women authors have been just as prolific as their male counterparts and have increasingly contributed significant social criticism from a specifically female perspective. The aim is to rectify the imbalance in the attention given to women writers from Guadeloupe and those from Martinique, and to remedy the disproportion of critical studies dedicated to male Martinican writers compared to those by their female counterparts. The thesis provides a general overview of Martinican women authors and focuses on Nicole Cage-Florentiny, Suzanne Dracius, Fabienne Kanor, Marie Flore-Pelage and Audrey Pulvar in particular. These five authors belong to a generation of writers who are less concerned with revolutionary and ideological manifestos, but with the specific problems with which women are confronted on a daily basis. What is thereby generated is a canon of Martinican women’s literature, or French Antillean literature more generally, that can be situated in its own context, rather than assimilated into African-American, Third-World or Francophone African literary canons. They break silences on taboo subjects, putting into the forefront rape, incest, madness, miscegenation, silencing, exile, dysfunctional relationships and lesbianism, and present distinctively female experiences of racism, sexism, and class elitism. My analysis shows these authors establish new forms of resistance against patriarch oppression, not only in their approaches to representing women’s subjugation, but also in how they appropriate, subvert, and reject available Western literary techniques. They situate the root of their society’s problems in the time of slavery and colonialism, and insist that changes need to be made today, thereby incorporating an awareness of their past yet maintaining a new and all-inclusive femi-humanism. Their female aesthetic and shift away from male-centred beliefs, portrayals and stereotypes and towards a new understanding of the position of women as mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, and as authors of their own subjectivities, is a much-needed component in a complete and critical literary representation of Martinican society.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:605017 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Jahn, J. |
| Publisher | University of Cambridge |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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