Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by Author "Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth"

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    Womens historical fiction after feminism : discursive reconstructions of the Tudors in contemporary literature
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Historical fiction is a genre in a constant state of flux: since its inception in the nineteenth century, it has been shaped by cultural trends and has persistently responded to the way in which history is popularly conceptualised. As such, historical novels have always revealed as much about the socio-political context of their moment of production as they do about their historical settings. The advent of feminism was among the most significant movements which shaped the evolution of the women’s historical novel in the twentieth century, prompting as it did a radical shift in historiographic methodology. As feminist discourse became embedded in popular culture in the latter decades of the twentieth century, this shift in turn allowed authors of historical fiction the opportunity to reconsider the ways in which women have been traditionally represented in both historical narrative and fiction. The historical novel thus became a site for exploring the female perspective of history, a perspective that had been denied or ignored by more male-centred historical narratives. This dissertation will assess the impact wrought by the popularisation of feminist discourse on the genre of women’s historical fiction during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An examination of a selection of contemporary women’s novels set during the Tudor era will prove particularly useful in executing this assessment, not least because of the Tudors’ unprecedented popularity as the focus of literature and film in the last decade. More significantly, the women of this period have proven to be ideal subjects for their authors to imaginatively reconstruct in the mould of third wave feminist icons in the twenty-first century. By examining how Tudor women have been represented in the contemporary historical fiction of Jean Plaidy, Philippa Gregory, Mavis Cheek, Suzannah Dunn and Emily Purdy, this dissertation will demonstrate the ways in which popular feminist discourse has impacted on the development of women’s historical fiction in the last century, focusing specifically on texts published within the last decade. Three key aspects of the genre will be assessed in detail in this regard: the author’s self-conscious feminist intervention in the characterisation of her historical heroines; the shift in the narrative perspective adopted and the deployment of postmodern literary devices; and the representation of female sexuality. The evolution of the genre as a whole will also be examined in some detail, and the shifting parameters of modern feminisms will be interrogated in order to fully understand their manifestations in popular culture.