| dc.description.abstract | The present dissertation project is an attempt to capture the female textual identity as conveyed by a series of fantastic texts by Hispanic women writers from the last decade of the twentieth century (Isabel Allende, Chile; Carmen Boullosa, Mexico; Almudena Grandes and Cristina Fernández Cubas, both from Spain). The treatment of the archetypal Narrator, the Mirror, the Ghostly Presence and the Body, are the common elements analyzed in selected narratives by the four authors, in the light of gender and genre identity. The main focus is how the parameters of the female text—ambiguity and subversion—are projected within the realm of the fantastic, which is examined as a natural space for the expression of female subjectivity, being itself subversive since it is defined in terms of otherness, desire, and the unconscious.The title of the present project, Sheharazade in the Mirror, plays off an image frequently found in texts by and about women: the reflection in the mirror. This image also serves as the critical metaphor that within the scope of this study emphasizes the contextual/interpretative aspect of the text and introduces the definition of three central notions: the contemporary fantastic text, the feminine text, and the feminine fantastic text. I have drawn my theoretical premises from a variety of approaches—myth, semiotics, structuralist theories of the fantastic, feminist theories of the fantastic, among others—in an effort to conceptualize the feminine and masculine textual identities on the basis of structural differences in perception, conditioned by the cultural center of convention and power, and the criterion distancing-identification in the interaction with the text. | en_US |
