'Mistress of herself'. Aesthetics and discourses of the new woman in the late victorian novel

Abstract

This doctoral thesis explores the elusive nature of the New Woman in literary discourses produced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. Partaking of a feminist revisionist endeavour, it examines this crucial gynocentric space from the perspective of the aesthetic and discursive configuration of late Victorian female subjectivity in the most iconic prose fictions written by Henry James, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton and Sarah Grand. Drawing on a variety of methodological approaches and critical studies of the genre, this dissertation claims that the complex New Woman topos is a contested site projecting kaleidoscopic images of female identities on the border, strategically exploited by oppositional literature in its ultimate aim to change the world.