| This work analyses the ideological implications of two narratological parameters, time and space, in the construction of character identity in Jeanette Winterson's novels. Although the importance of time and space in the construction of identity is a recurrent structural and thematic trait in the fictional world of Jeanette Winterson, I have chosen only two of her novels, The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989), as the core of my analysis because of their explicit relation to history and the postmodern literary trend known as "historiographic metafiction", on the one hand, and because of their shared feminist revision of fantasy, the fairy tale and grotesque realism, on the other. My working hypothesis is that Winterson's revision of historical texts and literary genres is a political act carried out chronotopically, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's term, that is to say, through the specific depiction of gendered images of time and space which allow for alternative forms of identity construction and representation through storytelling.;The first part of this work is dedicated to Winterson's most frequently reworked story, her own life. Like the characters in her novels, Winterson uses all kinds of fictional disguises in order to conceal her true self and insists on the fact that there is nothing of herself outside language.;The analysis of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry has been divided into three parts. The first one examines the way in which the historical element is reworked in each of the novels. The second part centres on the metafictional techniques which emphasise the constructed nature of both texts. Finally, the third part focuses on the chronotopic portrayal and redefinition of the identities of the character-narrators in the two novels. This three-fold analysis shows that Winterson's imaginative attempts at experimentation with narrative conventions and generic forms are not only aesthetic but primarily ethic. Her strong political commitment aims at the subversion of sociocultural power structures and, ultimately, at the re-appropriation of traditionally male-defined concepts for the development of a new sexual politics. |
