| This dissertation explores texts by contemporary North American and British women writers that bridge traditional genres, arguing that they confront and reconfigure power structures through fantastic literary forms. It traces how diverse works-including revised fairy tales, historical fiction, dystopian narratives, and science fiction-portray power in various guises ranging from oppressively monolithic forces to omnipresent, multiple, and shifting flows. Beyond merely representing power, however, the texts explored here respond to it. Crucially, the texts' responses to power are tied to literary practices that extend outside the bounds of realism. Revisionist rewriting and speculative fiction perform similar processes of examination, critique, and the creation of possible alternatives. These alternatives, which are specific and direct responses to power, can be understood as an emerging ethics in contemporary women's fiction that is characterized by an investment in indeterminacy, creative potential, and becoming. |
