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Item She's a lush : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Collette, MarianaIn this thesis I examine the form of memoir and look at how and why female memoirists use fictional techniques to establish their narrative of problem drinking. Over the last decade, there has been a rise in the number of memoirs being written about the problematic relationship between women and their drinking, yet there is still very little about this topic from a New Zealand perspective. I argue that memoir is an important tool to examine larger social issues through a personal viewpoint and that the use of memoir gives power to women’s voices on particular issues. This thesis is comprised of two parts. Section one is a critical essay entitled ‘Women who Drink and Memoir.’ Section Two is a creative component consisting of a memoir piece entitled ‘She’s a Lush.’ The critical essay examines Drink: The Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol by Ann Dowsett- Johnston (2013) ; Lit by Marry Karr (2010); Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp (1996); Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola (2015); A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (1977) and Mrs D. is Going Without by Lotta Dann (2014), exploring how and why they use social and medical data, metaphor, chronology, characterisation and intimate detail to tell their story of problem drinking. The creative component is my own memoir.Item The dream called overseas : mobility and creative self-exile in fiction by Charlotte Grimshaw, Paula Morris, and Anne Kennedy : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Mitchell, EkaterinaThis thesis investigates how the cultural imaginary of New Zealand is re-examined and redefined through a mobilities paradigm in three contemporary novels by local writers: Charlotte Grimshaw’s Foreign City (2005), Paula Morris’s Queen of Beauty (2002), and Anne Kennedy’s The Last Days of the National Costume (2013). This textual archive evokes and revises mid-century settler cultural nationalist concerns, specifically New Zealand’s perceived cultural and geographical remoteness from the metropolitan centre. Within cultural nationalist discourse, “here and there” were critical geographical and cultural co-ordinates, where “here” referred to a local, derivative reality, while "there” was the centre where history took place. In each of the three novels, the female protagonist moves overseas through a form of creative self-exile, pursuing truthfulness to her artistic nature. However, the characters’ desire for movement takes its origins in patterns of mobility and displacement as experienced by earlier generations. A comparative reading of these novels, alongside a theoretical body of work on mobility, can reveal a unique way in which each writer deals with these concerns, reinterpreting a modernist worldview in the context of the globalised world of the new millennium. Grimshaw approaches literary geography from a semi-ironic angle: although Foreign City deals with a New Zealand artist’s attempt to revisit the inspirational site of Bloomsbury, it is not the real Bloomsbury experience, and thus, it has a distant significance attached to it. For Morris, the remapping project involves inserting Māori cultural aspects into the mobilities paradigm, aligning mobility of stories with mobility of people. In Kennedy’s novel, mobility exposes a settler culture that has failed to live up to its own ideals. Partly set in metropolitan centres, these works of fiction reflect on this country’s settler and immigrant past, proposing an alternative to the modernist European longing that had forged New Zealand’s literary character for several generations. Taken together, this body of contemporary New Zealand fiction indicates the continuing relevance and preoccupation with cultural remarking of distance, isolation, and periphery.Item Attitudes to love and marriage in poetry by women of the Romantic Period : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Master of Arts in English at Massey University(Massey University, 1994) Jones, Rachel AnneThis thesis examines the little-known poetry of the women poets writing during the Romantic Period in Britain. In particular, it focuses on attitudes to love and marriage expressed in their poetry, with a view to showing how women poets were confined by their society's ideology and how this affected the content of their poetry. The thesis focuses on poems that deviate from the ideologically "appropriate" representations of love and marriage and attempts to identify the strategies by which the women managed to express conventionally unacceptable thoughts. Particular attention is paid to the work of the two leading women poets of the period, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon.Item Breaking the silence : protest in the feminist fiction of two New Zealand women writers : a thesis ... for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology at Massey University(Massey University, 1984) Cvitanovich, LynleyThe thesis is concerned with the work of two feminist writers. The conceptual tools of a socialist feminist critique are applied to the selected fiction of Edith Grossmann and Jean Devanny. Grossmann's novels were written in the late 1890's and early 1900's. Devanny's New Zealand novels were written in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The major aim of the thesis is to illustrate that the protest fiction of Grossmann and Devanny is inextricably linked to the realities of life for women, in the period within which they were writing. In contrast to traditional literary criticism, and to Marxist aesthetics applied in isolation, it sees the need to develop an understanding of the specific problems of women within capitalist patriarchy. The attempted synthesis of radical feminist and aspects of Marxist analysis points toward such a progressive development.Item The different shapes of love : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Communication in Expressive Arts at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2016) Wheelock, TiffanyThe work is an extract or part of a creative non-fiction book in the autobiographical genre. The book is based on the author’s romantic relationships throughout her life to this point. The book follows a developmental journey as the author discovers who she is, what qualities are most important to her and what type of person she wants to end up with. The book describes different stages of relationships and the emotions one experiences, such as being very in love or very heartbroken, and touches on the author’s experience in dealing with these emotions. There are three sections to the critical component of my predominantly creative thesis. The first part involves looking at conventions of female autobiographical writing, how it often, (through different time periods), includes elements from the romance genre, and how my writing fits into this paradigm. The second part explores an array of different academic sources on how writing about one’s own experiences can be therapeutic for the author. Lastly, the third and final part of the critical component highlights writing styles, techniques and approaches used in some recent successful non-fiction books that include examples of autobiographical writing on the topic of romantic relationships, as well as aspects of life journeys, bildungsroman or self-development. The section explains how I adopted aspects of these approaches alongside my own writing style to write my book.Item "I shall not want another home on this planet", a study of the tradition of elegiac poetry in the work of three New Zealand female poets, Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University(Massey University, 1994) Hankin, Emma TuiThis thesis is a discussion of the elegiac poetry tradition as it exists in English literature and how it impacts on the New Zealand literary tradition. The discussion centres around three New Zealand female poets; Mary Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield and their participation in the elegiac tradition. The time period which encompasses these three poets reaches from 1915-1945, a period of intense growth and discovery in the literature of New Zealand, as it dissociated itself from the English model and redirected itself in a Pacific direction. Each of the three poets was influenced by the literary beliefs which were cultivated in New Zealand and exhibited this knowledge through their work. Mary Ursula Bethell and Katherine Mansfield composed personal elegies on the loss of companion and brother respectively, yet Robin Hyde composed a more formal elegy on Mansfield's death, though she had not personally known her. One theme runs through the work of Bethell, Hyde and Mansfield, the theme of exile. Bethell was the typical Englishwoman exiled in New Zealand by geography, but also by her education and her upbringing. Mansfield chose the life of an expatriate, yet this was no more than a self-delusion, when after the death of her brother she realised that the New Zealand of her childhood was no more. Hyde also fled to England, like Mansfield, yet her impetus was no more than a schoolgirl memory. She too, as in the case of Mansfield, produced her finest compositions when the idea of exile became reality. In some way, all three poets experienced the intensity of exile, from the known landscape whether of New Zealand or England, and transferred that yearning into their elegiac verse, as they became exiled from all that their loved one represented. For Mansfield, her brother's death ensured she could never go 'home' and yet provided the impetus for her New Zealand stories within which she challenged short story convention and wrote lasting memorials to both her country and her self. For Hyde, her elegy on Mansfield was an elegy to New Zealand and her reality without it. Bethell, after the death of her companion Effie Pollen, became exiled from her physical home in the Cashmere Hills, and, more poignantly, her garden. All three of the poets were faced with a universe which had been altered irreversibly by exile and in elegy attempted to describe and mourn that loss. These three women, though participating in a genre and a tradition which was undeniably male-oriented, expressed themselves as women within a tradition which through its very versatility accommodated both them and their grief.Item A 'novel' approach to leadership development : using women's literary fiction to explore contemporary women's leadership issues : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Business Studies in Management at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2016) Martin, Lydia AnneThe central aim of this thesis is to investigate how women’s literary fiction can be harnessed for the purpose of exploring contemporary women’s leadership issues. This thesis argues that literary fiction is a valuable source of interdisciplinary and ‘artful’ consciousness-raising material for proactively addressing at the interpersonal level a wide range of critical concerns related to women’s leadership experiences. Having identified a significant ‘gap’ in the extant literature – the underutilisation of women’s novels, short-stories and plays in leadership studies – this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate how literary works can be used to examine women’s contemporary leadership issues. For this research project I adopted an interpretive qualitative research paradigm informed by critical leadership studies and a multiplicity of feminist perspectives. I developed a systematic method for long listing and short listing appropriate texts and analysed selected works in response to a five-point conceptual framework of critical concerns arising from a review of the women and leadership literature. I also kept a reflective blog to track the iterative nature of the research process and to record my learning during this study. The findings demonstrate that women’s literary fiction offers a rich repository of thought-provoking illustrations of women’s leadership concerns, including gender binaries, power-play, socially constructed perceptions and gendered expectations, and women’s diverse range experiences as both leaders and followers. The extended analysis provides a number of in-depth examples and reflective questions, revealing myriad opportunities for critical theorising, illustrative analysis and critical reflection. Subsequently, this thesis argues that fictional stories are a viable and potentially transformative ‘artful’ intervention for addressing complex leadership issues concerned with gender within the context of women’s leadership development programmes. My recommendations for future studies include a focus on ethical leadership, the evaluation of participant ‘book club’ interventions and an extension of the reading lists to include more culturally relevant New Zealand authors. To my knowledge, there are no studies that utilise women’s literary fiction for the purpose of exploring contemporary women’s leadership concerns and questions. Consequently, my thesis makes an original contribution to the leadership and humanities field, as well as providing an innovative and creative product that can be used for critical and interdisciplinary approaches to women’s leadership development.Item Transcending tradition : the struggle of the Indian female protagonist in selected Indian novels : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University(Massey University, 2001) Suppiah, Mohana RaniThis thesis is an exploration of selected novels by Indian female writers and their portrayal of Indian women and the conflicts of identity that they face as a result of tension between the traditional and modern aspects of their lives. The novels have been chosen partly because of their focus on this identity crisis faced by the female protagonists. The novels that have been selected for this study are Anita Desai's Voices in the City and Clear Light of Day, Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terror, That Long Silence and The Binding Vine, Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem, Indira Ganesan's Inheritance, Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The female protagonists in all the novels that are to be explored are educated and come from the middle class. The problems of these protagonists that interest the authors are not so much concerned with bread-and-butter issues but their protagonists' search for an identity in the face of changes that are taking place all around them in society. Part of the social change that takes place is a change in the status of women as education opportunities increase and more women enter the workforce. While trying to incorporate these changes into their lives, the women are depicted as facing tension balancing these changes with society's traditional expectations of the roles they are to play. Some aspects of tradition that are explored in this study and which are portrayed as being repressive of the women include traditional sexual stereotyping of women, sexual politics in the traditional marital relationship and traditional institutions like the extended family and the purdah system as well as forms of repression arising from religious orthodoxy. These facets of tradition are continued to be practiced and maintained by groups of people to whose advantage it is to do so and these are usually the men, especially those belonging to the higher strata of the caste system. Another aspect of this study is the strategies that the female characters are portrayed as resorting to in coping with the identity crisis that they face. The strategies that are depicted in the novels range from withdrawal to accommodation to rejection and rebellion. The novels that are first explored in this study and which were written earlier portray milder reactions by the protagonists to the crisis they face, as compared to the bolder moves of rebellion portrayed in the novels that are looked at later in this study. This points perhaps to a trend by Indian women to be bolder in rejecting aspects of tradition in their attempt to forge an identity for themselves and to convert a barren inheritance to a more promising future.Item A novel approach to education and development : insights from African women writers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University(Massey University, 1997) Nash, HannahThis thesis explores the contribution of creative writing to the interdisciplinary academic field of Development Studies. The theoretical framework of the thesis is guided by contemporary development perspectives, notably the concept of empowerment within Gender and Development literature, which emphasise the importance of seeking women's voices and listening to their views on issues of concern for themselves and their communities. Reading women's creative writing is one way of hearing women's voices. Three novels by African women are examined for their insightful treatment of education, a key development issue. These novels are The Joys of Motherhood by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana. Educational themes that feature in the discussion and analysis of the novels are the constraints that African women face in making decisions about their daughters' futures; the sexism and alienation that girls encounter in their pursuit of Western schooling; and a critique, in the context of neocolonialism, of the educated African elite who emigrate to developed countries, constituting a "brain-drain". The three novels make a valuable contribution to understanding educational issues in developing countries, particularly those facing girls, and suggests broad principles upon which future efforts to address people's needs in this area could be based. Above all the thesis concludes that fiction is a powerful vehicle of communication and, as such, challenges Development Studies to broaden its interdisciplinary approach still further to include the study of fiction by people from developing countries.Item 'I'm not a woman writer, but--' : gender matters in New Zealand women's short fiction 1975-1995 : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand(Massey University, 2006) Le Marquand, Jane NicoleFrom the late 1970s, New Zealand women short story writers increasingly worked their way into the literary mainstream. In the wake of the early, feminist-motivated years of the decade their gender, which had previously been the root of their marginalized position, began to work for them. However, rather than embracing womanhood, this growth in gender recognition led to many writers rejecting overt identification of their sex. To be a labeled a woman writer was considered patronising, a mark of inferiority. These women wanted to be known as writers only, some even expressing a hope for literature to reach a point of androgyny. Their work, however, did not convey an androgynous perspective. Just as the fact of their gender could not be avoided, so the influence their sex had on their creativity cannot be denied. Gender does matter and New Zealand women's short fiction published in the 1975-1995 period illustrates its significance. From the early trend for adopting fiction as a site for social commentary and political treatise against patriarchy's one-dimensional image of woman, these stories show a gradually increasing awareness of fictional possibilities, allowing for celebration of the multiplicity of female experience and capturing a process of redefinition rather than rejection of 'women's work'. Though in the later 1990s it may no longer have been politically 'necessary' to promote women's work on the grounds of gender, on a personal level the 'difference of view' of the woman writer remained both visible and vital. An increasing sense of woman-to-woman communication based on shared experience emerges: women are writing as women, about women, for women.