This dissertation analyzes interruptions of realist narrative in the work of four women writers from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries: Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and Virginia Woolf. I argue that these writers use such interruptions-which take the form of alternate genres such as lyric poetry and the expository essay-to subvert the authority of the third-person novelistic narrator and thus question the dominant structure of the realist novel. By employing these asides, they provide opportunities for first-person and present-tense discourse within a third-person, past-tense narrative, which in turn leads to productive contrasts between subjectivity and objectivity, emotion and thought, public and private spheres, inner and outer lives of characters, and the novel and other genres. These cross-genre interruptions destabilize the overall works in ways that reveal both the contradictions in female characters' lives and the anxieties surrounding being a female author. The practice also exposes limitations of the novel as a form by raising in the reader an awareness of genre conventions. The result is an anti-realist tendency, inspired and fueled by gender concerns, in the midst of the age of greatest dominance of the realist novel.
A review of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Crown, 2005), Songs from the Black Chair by Charles Barber (Nebraska, 2005), and Accidental Species by Kass Fleisher (Chax, 2005). "I was not abused, abandoned, or locked up as a child," Amy Krouse Rosenthal writes early in Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, signaling the reader not to expect that kind of memoir: "My par ents were not alcoholics, nor were they ever divorced or dead. We did not live in poverty, or in misery, or in an exotic country? I have not lived to tell." If the first turn in the history of memoir was the realization that unfamous people, too, could write memoirs, the next logical group to emerge is obscure people to whom not much has happened. The Seinfeldian memoirist, if you will: this show is about nothing. Actually, Rosenthal's catalogue of the ordinary isn't novel, as she
Writing at the University 175 rather roll in the dust than perform again and he does. Mr. Van A. shakes his head, mutters something unsavory, and returns to his Model T. Jim tags along, head and tail down, and when the door opens, drags himself inside. "What's wrong with you, Jim; you lazy or something?" Mr. Van A. admonishes. Jim just lies there and naps all the way back into town. At the hotel door though he perks up. He beats his master out of the car and with one glance back, trots inside. He crosses the lobby and sits down smiling in front of one handsome, antique, breakfront, walnut cabinet. "Bingo," I hope I'll always say, "you are accepted."
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