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

Download

index.pdf

Date

2005

Author

Özyurt Kılıç, Mine

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

322
views

748
downloads

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

Subject Keywords

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

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Mythmaking in progress: plays by women on female writers and literary characters Uçar Özbirinci, Pürnur; Çileli, Fatma Meral; Department of English Literature (2007) This thesis analyzes the process of women’s mythmaking in the plays written by female playwrights. Through writing the lives of female writers and rewriting the literary characters, which have been created by male writers, the women playwrights assume the role of a mythmaker. A mythmaker possesses the power to use the ‘word,’ thereby possesses the power to control ‘reality.’ However, for centuries, women have been debarred from generating their own myths, naming their own experiences, and controlling their ...
Caryl Churchill and gender roles : Owners, Cloud Nıne, Top Girls Fırat, Serap; Çileli, Fatma Meral; Department of English Literature (2005) This thesis evaluates Caryl Churchill's criticism of culturally defined roles imposed by patriarchy on both sexes in her three plays Owners, Cloud Nine, and Top Girls by referring to Kate Millet's defination of aspects of patriarchal ideology in Sexual Poitics, and the thesis contends that gender roles are arbitrary. Churchill's attempt to draw attention to patriarchal essentialism is discussed within this framework.
Ambivalence in Victorian women’s writing: Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Margaret Oliphant’s Hester Coşar Çelik, Seda; Yıldız Bağçe, Hülya; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2014) The simultaneous rise of Victorian women’s movement and the dominance of female authorship and readership in the nineteenth century prompted scholars of Victorian literature to interpret women’s novels as fictional examples of Victorian feminism or anti-feminism. Yet, this study stresses the ambivalent nature of women’s fiction by paying attention to the contradiction between the feminist and subversive content in women’s texts and their anti-feminist and disciplinary treatment. Exemplary underread novels f...
Kinds of parody from the medieval to the postmodern Korkut, Nil; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2005) This study approaches parody as a multifarious literary form that has assumed diverse forms and functions throughout history. The study handles this diversity by classifying parody according to its objects of imitation. Three major parodic kinds are specified: parody directed at texts and personal styles, parody directed at genre, and parody directed at discourse. In the light of this classification, this study argues that different literary-historical periods in Britain have witnessed the prevalence of dif...
The Construction of female identity in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Break of Day Öztürk, Gülüzar; Çileli, Fatma Meral; Department of Foreign Language Education (2012) This thesis aims to analyse the construction of female identity from the beginning of the feminist activism in Victorian era whose rationale was formed during the eighteenth century, to the contemporary times in terms of patriarchy and motherhood in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Break of Day. This study is conducted with the historical development of the feminist movement that has had different agendas at different periods of history being taken into account. Fighting for women...

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.