Thesiss

When the life writer has experienced violence, injustice, and political unrest within her region, memoir and testimonial writing requires a process involving the writer as victim and as witness and the reader, who also becomes a witness. This multi-layered process is further com…

This dissertation examines four eighteenth-century published travelogues by women and the ways in which the authors gain agency for their narratives. Chapter I considers the genre of the travelogue and the role of women writers within eighteenth-century culture. Examining women'…

This thesis examines the reading lives of eighteenth-century English men and women. Diaries of the middling sort and the gentry show that reading entwined daily routines and long-term aspirations. This life-writing also demonstrates that readers performed and contextualised read…

In 1808, a French maid-servant, Marie (or Maria) Paradis, became the first woman to ascend Mont Blanc, thereby establishing her place in women’s mountaineering history. Paradis’ success was followed by that of a wealthy French countess, Henriette D’Angeville, who successfully su…

At a time when scholars have rekindled the old debate about what is world literature and how can one study it (Casanova, 2004; Moretti, 2000, 2003; Damrosch, 2003, 2009), this thesis analyses the canonisation of Central American Revolutionary women's writing as it moves toward t…