Gender, Genre, and the Novel
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2024
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“Gender, Genre, and The Novel” examines how three novelists confronted the gendered conventions of literary genres. Focusing on the work of Elsa Morante, Monique Wittig, and Elena Ferrante, this dissertation charts how the inscription of gender collides with the marks of genre, and how writers tangentially associated with feminism have understood and negotiated this collision. To so do, I revisit some key tenants of novel theory. The novel, as theorists from Mikhail Bakhtin to Jacques Rancière have argued, is distinguished partly by its sheer inclusivity: it is a form in which anything at all can be represented, using any formal technique whatsoever. Yet, if the novels antigeneric nature operates to expose the limits and artificial restrictions inherent in other literary systems, literary genres reinscribe stylistic and thematic norms back into the novel, thereby allowing gender back in. The writers I examine here work within this dialectical movements between freedom and constraint. While neither Morante, Wittig, nor Ferrante explicitly celebrate the redemptive or liberating capacities of the novel, my analysis reveals that each regard the novel as the ideal medium with which to explore the constraining forces of genre and gender. Both gender and genre, as modes of classification, work to constrict and constrain possibilities.This argument unfolds over three chapters and a conclusion. Chapter One reads Morante’s novel L’isola di Arturo (1957) as an instance of the tradition of novels about “bad readers” whose novelistic ideals clash with reality. I focus on morantel use of parody as mode in which to engage the novel’s relation to the genre of chivalric romance. Chapter Two shows how Wittig takes up and reworks the structure of the epic to dramatize contemporary problems about female writing, subjectivity, and lesbian desire in a heterosexual world. Chapter Three examines Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet as a self-reflexive analysis of the contemporary literary field, drawing special attention to what I call Ferrante’s “middlebrowness.” Finally, the dissertation concludes with speculative reflections on hyper-contemporary debates about feminism, marketing, genre, and autofiction.
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Starace, Lorenza (2024). Gender, Genre, and the Novel. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/31908.
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