| This thesis addresses the social construction of gender and the role that fiction as cultural production plays in this. More specifically, it looks at contemporary feminist fiction as counter-hegemonic cultural production, i.e., as an instrument in expanding and changing the social meaning of gender. A theory is developed which posits that counter-hegemonic feminist fiction accomplishes three political objectives: unmasking women's subordination, creating models of resistance to it, and prefiguring systems towards which change can move. A qualitative analysis of three contemporary feminist novels is then carried out to see how these processes are articulated in this work. These novels are: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
