Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Scott MacKenzie
Second Advisor
Jason Solinger
Third Advisor
Caroline Wigginton
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
“’A Transient Veil’ : Appropriation of Exclusionary Form in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing” is an exploration of how women writers of the eighteenth century strategically and subversively appropriated patriarchal, often misogynistic, literary idioms to expand literary discourse and craft flexible, alternative, and feminine literary forms. It emerges from the desire to underscore what rhetorical features of women’s writing can tell us about the creative agency of women writers. By exclusionary form, I mean to reference both rhetorical conventions and aesthetic traditions that excluded women writers by assuming a male subject position or by the explicit objectification of feminine figures. This dissertation argues that women writers’ contributions to certain kinds of literary, and especially poetic, form emerged in part from an effort to adapt existing masculine standards. More explicitly, women’s appropriation of certain types of masculine literary forms made those forms available for new kinds of writers to authorize their own subjectivity while simultaneously critiquing the rhetorical exclusions that they were responding to and adapting. With a specific focus on poetry, and in the final chapter, novels, the writers in this dissertation emphasize the way that feminine identities provided opportunities for crafting new aesthetic standards.
Through its exploration of feminine forms, “A Transient Veil” revisits ideals of femininity in literary texts of the eighteenth century and examines how femininity interacts with, and is shaped via, literary idioms. This research suggests that expressions of femininity in the eighteenth century did not always coincide with a specific race, class, or gender. This project demonstrates how women authors of the period inscribed a subjectivity that countered restrictive, hegemonic models of femininity. I argue that they did so not by overtly opposing governing ideologies relating to femininity, but by unveiling the ways that femininity allowed for new aesthetic ideals. The first three chapters target poetic kinds and idioms—friendship poems, the muse, and the sublime—to capture the ways that women authors were simultaneously engaging with feminine subject positions and appropriating exclusionary language, figures, and forms, respectively. The final chapter examines how novelists were explicitly participating in contemporary discussions about feminine identities.
Recommended Citation
Ferniany, Andrea, ""A Transient Veil": Appropriation of Exclusionary Form in Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2808.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2808