Abstract

My dissertation examines two predominant topics in contemporary cultural and literary studies: those of feminine sexual difference and the sublime. It explores what the current preoccupation with the sublime has to do with modern and postmodern women's writing fiction and feminist thought, and seeks to discover what in the theory of the sublime may be, and have been, gendered as feminine. I discuss some of the classic texts that make up the sublime canon in light of recent male critical treatments and contemporary feminist theory , and read literary texts by primarily twentieth-century women writers as both exemplifying and in some cases revising what the tradition has called "the sublime." Analysis of major works on the sublime in terms of recent feminist and literary theory shows that representations of feminine difference raise in gender-specific terms the very issues that traditionally have been at stake in the sublime. Both focus on the formation and instability of self-identity; are concerned with the construction and destruction of borders ; and involve a confrontation with the question of how such limits may or may not be enforced. The dissertation examines the ways in which a feminist point of view may alter existing theorizations of the sublime, and suggests that re-reading the texts that form the sublime canon has much to teach us about twentieth-century women's fiction and the construction of femininity. Rather than produce a chronological or formalistic study, I attempt to disclose a conjunction between apparently dissimilar domains that historically has been at work, and thereby achieve a more complete understanding of each