Sexualizing power in naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove

Abstract

<p>Focusing on gender relationships of power, this dissertation examines the representations of power in Dreiser's and Grove's fiction. Deeply informed by poststructuralist feminist and Faucaultian theory, this study targets those textual sites in which power and sexuality intersect: e.g. in the construction of the body, the sexual confession, the representation of women's resistance. By exploring Canadian and American naturalistic fiction during a period of social transition, this dissertation places the discussion of power relationships in a comparative context by pointing to significantly diverging American and Canadian literary perspectives on personal and intersocietal power relations.</p>