WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AMONGST WOMEN. AN INVESTIGATION IN CONTEMPORARY NOVEL WRITING

Aim of the dissertation is to investigate how Shakespearean drama has been appropriated by women writers through the centuries and how it still cross-fertilizes contemporary women’s fiction. The main argument is that the works of contemporary women writers move much beyond the simple concept of appropriation, which thus needs updating and revising. Although feminist and post-colonial perspectives could not be overlooked in the analysis of women’s writing, yet my research goes beyond these two critical approaches, which I believe do not really offer interesting critical and analytical tools to deeply examine the works of contemporary women novelists in relation to the Shakespearean corpus. The dissertation is structured into four chapters: the first one is an excursus in women’s appropriation of Shakespeare from the late sixteenth century to English modernism. From the second chapter onwards the focus is on four specific contemporary novels: Mama Day by Gloria Naylor (1988), Wise Children by Angela Carter (1991), Indigo by Marina Warner (1992), and The Children’s Book by Antonia Susan Byatt (2009). The second chapter maps the tangible presence of Shakespeare in the novels, looking at Shakespearean names and Shakespearean plays that continually crop up in all of them. The third chapter shows how all the narratives are informed by the concepts of matriarchy and utopia, whose relationship with Shakespearean drama has been explored in the lights of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, Bakhtin’s idyllic chronotope and Augé’s anthropological theory of non-places. An analysis of Shakespearean languages and themes has finally been conducted in the last chapter, which argues that Shakespearean drama not only shapes and modifies the very narrative framework of the four novels, challenging their belonging to a single literary genre, but also that specific Shakespearean themes are re-interpreted and re-read through a series of lenses: fantastic literature and its tropes, Freud’s essay on the uncanny, the Victorian culture as well as the African-American one, Greek and Latin literature.