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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until November 13, 2025

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Unruly Subjects: Willful Women in Modernist Narratives

Hall, Lynn
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1605813388828221

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
This dissertation explores the political possibilities of being unruly. Following Sara Ahmed's definition of willfulness, this project traces the figure of the "willful woman'" through modernist narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and ending with Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), the project uncovers the political possibilities of representing willful women with three aims in mind: to articulate the representations of women in these modernist texts as being willful; to explore how these representations of willfulness are working on and against the dominant discourses of subjecthood and intelligibility in the modernist period; and to demonstrate, by reading these texts together, the ways in which modernist authors created new realities, thereby exposing how cultural paradigms are constructed and malleable. In putting these texts in conversation with one another, I create a willfulness archive of unruly subjects who collectively offer alternatives to narratives that render certain types of subjects unintelligible. This archive, I argue, articulates how the modernist aesthetic used willfulness as a trope to create and hold open space for new and different stories and realities to be made intelligible.
Madelyn Detloff, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Katie Johnson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Stefanie Dunning, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
107 p.
British and Irish Literature; Literature
modernism; feminism; willfulness; gender and sexuality studies; women; willfulness archive; subjectivity; English literature; literary modernism; drama

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hall, L. (2020). Unruly Subjects: Willful Women in Modernist Narratives [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1605813388828221

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hall, Lynn. Unruly Subjects: Willful Women in Modernist Narratives. 2020. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1605813388828221.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hall, Lynn. "Unruly Subjects: Willful Women in Modernist Narratives." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1605813388828221

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.