The extended nation: Collective identity in antifascist women's literature.

Confronted with the threatened liberal nation-state and the alarming rise of fascist movements seeking to dismantle it in the mid to late 1930s, women writers like Djuna Barnes, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, and Virginia Woolf reevaluate their relationship to the nation, expressing sentiments of nostalgia or militaristic sympathies that they had previously denied. Drastically transforming their previous political assumptions and alliances, the fascist threat looming over Europe unleashes a new moment within these women's literary career in which they rally around and defend a nation-state which they themselves seek to transform. As if refiguring their own shifting relationship to the nation-state in fictional form, these writers focus upon predominantly dislocated or ethnically marginalized characters who, either through their coupling with a partner of a privileged racial identity or their own divided cultural allegiances, challenge the boundaries by which the nation has been traditionally defined. Seeking to construct a more capacious model of national identity than offered by the liberal nation-state, these writers employ their culturally complex figures to recast the nation as an intrinsically aggregate and heterogeneous entity.PhDEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131963/2/9938501.pd