Following Showalter's division of the three phases in women's literary history, namely the"Feminine, Feminist and Female", this essay launches a biographic study on Sarah Orne Jewett, discussing how she transcends domesticity by embracing female friendship in life and writing a female culture in literature.
Queer theory,as a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and Women' s studies,is now receiving more and more academic attentions.This paper gives an introduction to its definition,theorists,basic premises as well as its literary applications,aiming to shed some light on this seemingly "queer" theory.
As a celebrated American feminist writer,Kate Chopin and her novel The Awakening are always the signal texts for feminist crit icism.Going beyond feminist perspective,this paper tries to interpret the heroine Edna through queer lens,studying the setting of the Cre ole society and Edna' s relationship with Adele Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun,and therefore reveals the tragic woman as an unspoken queer.
