A genre of our time: Women's narratives of violence and collective identities (Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isabel Allende, Chile)

This thesis sees Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits as being representative of a unique sub category of the contemporary novel. This sub category revisits sites of extreme or intense violence in the lives both of its protagonists and of the collective to which they belong in the process of defining the identity of that collective; each of these novels deals with a different historical event of violence.; Beloved returns to Slavery in America in its construction of the African American identity, defining its violence as intimate and personal. The violence of the First World War in Sula is shown as impersonal and mechanical, while Tan presents the violence of the Second World War from the point of view of a single woman fleeing the Japanese invasion of China. Violence arising from the sexism of patriarchal, feudal China is, perhaps, the only kind in this thesis that is not part of a specific political and historical event, but The Woman Warrior includes the Communist revolution. Finally, The House Of Spirits provides a fictional account of the violence of both feudal Chile as well as State torture.; The thesis argues that the constructions of individual and collective identities in these texts are deeply embedded in these narratives of violence. Each text interrogates the nature of the collective formed: from the newly freed and escaped slaves of Bluestone, the African American community of the Bottom, the Chinese American immigrant's sense of a heritage from another country and culture and a future in an adopted country to the Chilean rebel and ex-feudal lord. In form and narrative strategies these texts deploy non-real tropes and elements, using these to index realities in registers other than the empirical, figure forth realities that strain at the limits of human comprehension and endurance and finally, to gesture towards future realities too difficult to imagine.; The thesis also seeks to embed this study in two separate contexts: that of the literary and historical development of the defining characteristics of these novels and that of the theorisation of violence and its narratives.