Description

This thesis examines the Kunstlerroman as a site of resistance for post-colonial women writers who include issues of both gender and cultural identity in their revised definitions of the artist. After identifying elements traditionally associated with this genre, the Introduction shows how women artists from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, both the authors of Kunstlerromane and the failed or successful artists they portray, use art in an attempt to reconcile the roles imposed on them with their own experiences as female post-colonial subjects. Issues of gender and national identity inform and transform the Kunstlerroman by interrogating the binary oppositions arising in mainstream examples of the genre. Rejecting an exclusive emphasis on the image of the isolated artist, these authors and their protagonists stress communal development both as women and as members of a specific community in relation to the cultural centre; in these narratives, the artistic process takes a place equal to that of the finished artifact and the distinction between the female domestic sphere and the necessarily public, male-oriented role of the artist is elided. Post-colonial women authors respond politically to an exclusory literary tradition and reject patriarchal linearity in reworking the conventions of the Kunstlerroman. The following chapters offer six case studies of post-colonial women's artist-novels. The first three chapters feature early twentieth-century Kunstlerromane. Chapter One discusses L. M. Montgomery's Emily series; Chapter Two examines Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career; and the third chapter studies three short stories by Katherine Mansfield. The three subsequent chapters examine contemporary artist-novels. Chapter Four discusses Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven; Chapter Five examines Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra by the River; Chapter Six is a study of Keri Hulme's the bone people. The Conclusion argues that the Kunstlerroman articulates the liberation of post-colonial women from imposed categories which silence or exclude them. Despite their striking similarities, these six novels offer differing responses to the double marginalization of their protagonists. The Kunstlerroman, shaped by specific contexts of gender and nation, is no longer an account of an isolated individual struggling against a hostile society, but becomes a more fluid genre in which women artists question and revise fundamental social assumptions and offer tentative inscriptions of their identities., Source type: Print(0)