• Login
    • Submit
    View Item 
    •   Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    • Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland

    Icon
    View/Open
    BACON-DISSERTATION.pdf (1.327Mb)
    Date
    2011-05
    Author
    Bacon, Catherine M.
    Share
     Facebook
     Twitter
     LinkedIn
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.
    Department
    English
    Description
    text
    Subject
    Molly Keane
    Winifred Holtby
    Sylvia Townsend Warner
    Kate O'Brien
    Inter-war
    Women's novels
    Celibacy
    Spinsters
    Sexology and literature
    Sex in literature
    Single women in literature
    English literature
    British literature
    20th century
    Women writers
    Women authors
    Lolly Willowes
    Land of green ginger
    Rising tide
    Mary Lavelle
    Female sexuality
    Lesbians in literature
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2011-05-2674
    Collections
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    Related items

    Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

    • Chicana feminist voices : in search of Chicana lesbian voices from Aztlán to cyberspace 

      Hernandez, Lisa Justine (2001-12)
    • Ideologies of motherhood : literary imaginaries and public discourses 

      Walter-Gensler, Christina Cindy; 0000-0003-3558-7633 (2016-08)
      Compared to other industrialized Western nations, the number of female professionals in Germany remains low, and fewer women combine a career with raising children. Public debates repeatedly argue that only stay-at-home ...
    • Imaginative appropriation : confronting otherness through the female body in the works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino 

      Abell, Lynn Valerie (2011-05)
      This report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order ...
    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin

    Browse

    Entire RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentThis CollectionDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartment

    My Account

    Login

    Information

    AboutContactPoliciesGetting StartedGlossaryHelpFAQs

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics
    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin