The Function of the fantastic in the works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson

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2005

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Özyurt Kılıç, Mine

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This study sets out from the premise that the fantastic, in the hands of the women writers with feminist awareness,can be used as a tool to subvert patriarchal gender roles that are culturally constructed. The dissertation aims at analysing the fantastic novels by Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus, and by Jeannette Winterson, The Passion and The.PowerBook as examples in which the transgression of gender roles is achieved through the use of fantastic images. The analysis of the fantastic images in these novels is confined to the definitions by Tzetvan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson. The study asserts that through an efficient use of the fantastic mode, both Carter and Winterson negate culturally dominant notions of reality, whereby they resist the cultural constructions of gender. Within the framework of this dissertation, some concepts like the New Woman, historiographic metafiction, the lesbian continuum and compulsory heterosexualism are also studied where they become indispensable to the role that the fantastic images play. Thus, this study identifies each fantastic image in the novels studied with its possible cultural and political implications so that the أun-seenؤ of the culture, a term suggested by Jackson, can be seen. In other words, the study concentrates on the subversive nature of the fantastic images so as to see the ways in which the rigid boundaries of the gender roles in patriarchy can be transgressed

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English literature.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12606170/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/15165

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

M. Özyurt Kılıç, “The Function of the fantastic in the works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2005.