CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Beganovic, Velid |
|---|---|
| Title | Women with Women, without Men: The Emergence of Lesbian Themed Novels in 1920s and 1930s in London and Paris |
| Summary | Abstract This thesis is a product of my interest in the pioneering, explicitly lesbian themed novels which started appearing in the late 1920s and early 1930s in London and Paris. By ‘lesbian themed novels’ I mean only those novels which were written by women, who themselves at some points in their lives were attracted to other women. Most of the analysis focuses on the period around the year of 1928, when three lesbian themed novels were published in English: Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes. The first such explicitly lesbian novel in the French language, which was partially published in 1932, was The Pure and the Impure by Colette. The four novels, all came out of two quite famous smaller communities of London and Paris – the Bloomsbury group and the Left Bank community, respectively. In the thesis I am using the discourse analysis, as defined by Fran Tonkiss* to try and pinpoint the various factors that influenced the writing, censuring, and printing of these novels. I conduct a closer reading of the novels themselves, the available biographical materials on the lives of the authors, as well as the criticism and studies that appeared after the books have been published. The greatest part of my thesis tries to establish the idea of a women’s modernism, a project mostly separate from the canonical modernist writings. It proves that women who wrote against the current modernist norm, established mostly by men, to erase the presence of the author, risked more than not being considered proper artists at their time. They risked being marginalised in, if not completely excluded from, the canon. Yet by staying true to their own beliefs of what literature should be about, they created a foundation for the next generation of women writers. ___ _______________ _______________ ____ *Tonkis s, F. (1998). Analysing discourse. In Seal, C. (ed.), Researching society and culture. London: Sage Publications (pp.245-260) |
| Supervisor | Barát, Erzsébet; Lukić, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/beganovic_velid.pdf |
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