The "Feminine Fictions" of James Joyce

My thesis explores the representations of women in the fiction of James Joyce through their roles as storytellers. The double meaning of 'telling stories', telling lies as well as creating fictions, lends their roles an ambivalent quality. Such an ambivalence is emblematic of the status of female storytellers, figured in the framework of a male-authored text. Moving from objectified images to speaking subjects is a process which disrupts such a frame, making us question the authenticity of the female voices we believe we are hearing. Concentrating on the more well-known heroines from the early as well as the late fiction of Joyce, from the short story "The Dead" through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, to Finnegans Wake, the female figures concerned are associated in particular with mirrors, with clothing and with the female body, as the politics of representation are explored through a subversive reading of some traditional motifs associated with women. Such a critique is intended to contribute to the growing body of feminist critical approaches to Joyce's works. Its focus on the issues of representation seeks to develop on from recent work in this area, reading the women in Joyce's fiction in a new and radical light as storytellers themselves, rather than merely the stories told