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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/11375/10965
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dc.contributor.advisorWalmsley, Peteren_US
dc.contributor.authorPollock, Graceen_US
dc.date.accessioned2014-06-18T16:53:05Z-
dc.date.available2014-06-18T16:53:05Z-
dc.date.created2011-08-22en_US
dc.date.issued2000-09en_US
dc.identifier.otheropendissertations/5971en_US
dc.identifier.other7003en_US
dc.identifier.other2182099en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11375/10965-
dc.description.abstract<p>This thesis examines discursive constructions of the subject in Mary Wollstonecraft's <em>Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Demmark</em> (1796) and how the gendering of cultural discourses impacts the narrator's identity. Frequently read as a proto-Romantic text, the Scandinavian Letters actually narrativize the clash between the dominant rationalism of modem capitalist society and the aesthetic and moral philosophies of the eighteenth-century 'cult of sensibility.' The intersection of discourses generates a gender matrix out of which emerges a fragmented writing subject who moves between a masculine observing 'self' and a feminine objectified 'other,' focusing alternately on outward gazing eyes and inwardly contemplative I's. This vacillation coincides with the narrator's ambivalence, produced by ideologies of sexual and cultural difference and, in tum, producing the dialectical movement between desire and disavowal manifest in the Letters' melancholy form and content. Sites of intertextuality reflect the melancholic subject's divided psychology, which, despite being constituted in and by 'naturalized' discourses of difference, reveals the constructedness of gender/sex and the limitations of compulsory heterosexuality.</p>en_US
dc.subjectEnglish Language and Literatureen_US
dc.subjectEnglish Language and Literatureen_US
dc.titleThe Gender Matrix in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)en_US
dc.typethesisen_US
dc.contributor.departmentEnglishen_US
dc.description.degreeMaster of Arts (MA)en_US
Appears in Collections:Open Access Dissertations and Theses

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