Between Life and Literature: The Influence of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue that novels as groundbreaking as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying appropriate key motifs from Don Quixote and Madame Bovary to represent a woman writer’s impossible quest for self-representation in a male literary tradition. Emphasizing the formative effect that Don Quixote and Madame Bovary had on the literary imagination of twentieth-century women writers, my study offers a new perspective on the emergence and development of feminist metafiction, a genre which scholars have located within or as an agonistic response to the traditional British canon.
Author: Victoria Tomasulo
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2561786872