Female subjectivity in the poetries of Eavan Boland, Kathleen Jamie and Gülten Akın

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2019

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Altunsoy, Şafak

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This study evaluates the facets of female subjectivity through selected poems of Eavan Boland, Kathleen Jamie and Gülten Akın from a comparative perspective. Boland from Irish literature, Jamie from Scottish literature and Akın from Turkish literature poeticize certain images of female subjects who have to adapt into their societies and react against the defining roles in a paradoxical way, which forms the main frame of the study, the dynamism of subjectivity in the poetries of Boland, Jamie and Akın. The study argues how the images of woman subjects undergo a consistent change between the dream-like peaceful atmospheres and nightmarish corporeality. The study starts with the discussion of comparable qualities that the three poets share by referring to the literary and social sources shaping their poetries. It continues with the reasons behind preferring the early and later collections in order to suggest the transitivity between their first and last iv poems. The study analyses the female subjectivity in the poems of Boland, Jamie and Akın in two parts. The first chapter argues how the subject survives against the intrusion of the social by referring to the Kristevan argument of subjectivity within the frames of language and history. The second chapter evaluates the influence of the amative powers subverting the repression of the social into a new fluidity in the subjection process. The study concludes by that three poets’ search for a stable paradigm and their failure in each case in their early and later poems offer for them an idiosyncratic sense of unity through their acknowledgement of a continuous disconnectedness.

Subject Keywords

English literature, Turkish literature

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622924/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27906

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

Ş. Altunsoy, “Female subjectivity in the poetries of Eavan Boland, Kathleen Jamie and Gülten Akın,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2019.