Texts of passage: Post-war constructions of female adolescence and national identity (A. S. Byatt, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Jackson, South Africa, New Zealand)

Texts of Passage is a study of the narratives cultures create about female adolescence, the narratives they create about nation, and the intersections between these two. The dissertation centers on contemporary female coming of age in Great Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, and is both literary and historical, analyzing a broad range of texts: novels, films, speeches, advertisements, legislation, government reports, newspaper articles and photographs. Reading fictional narratives by A. S. Byatt, Nadine Gordimer, and Peter Jackson in the context of historical material, Texts of Passage makes two interrelated arguments: that the fictional protagonists' sexual maturation is interwoven with and complicated by their national identities, and that each nation's collective sense of self in the modern age depends heavily on its ideological construction of female adolescence.; After an introductory discussion of the history of the female bildungsroman and related theory, Texts of Passage examines the relationship between A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden and the 1953 Coronation of Elizabeth II. The iconography of the young queen exerted a powerful influence on a generation of young women, and forged a connection between domestic femininity and the nation's future. The Coronation, a cultural rite of passage, seals this union of individual and national destiny--both within Byatt's novel, and on the larger historical stage.; In Chapter Three, the dissertation explores the interweavings of politics and sexuality, and of public and private space, in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter. By juxtaposing the novel with the cultural text of the prison, this chapter exposes the ways spatial metaphors overlay questions of sexual, as well as racial, identity in Apartheid-era South Africa.; Chapter Four focuses on media coverage and literary reworkings of a renowned 1954 matricide in Christchurch, New Zealand. An analysis of public reactions to the 15-year-old female murderesses highlights the complicated links between pop culture, teenage sexuality, lesbianism, and nationalism in New Zealand in the 1950s. Superficially unrelated to questions of nation, the case in fact taps deeply into cultural anxieties about New Zealand's changing relationship to Great Britain, and its changing sense of identity as a nation.