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“A Highly Ambiguous Condition”: The Transgender Subject, Experimental Narrative And Trans-Reading Identity In The Fiction Of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, And Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer A. Smith

Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the constantly evolving gender identity o f a text’s transgender subject relates to the text’s narrative structure and shapes the orientation o f the reader to the text. Accordingly, this project examines how these transgender narratives deploy experimental stylistic techniques that enhance the reader’s experience of ceaseless transitioning by revealing gender as a constant process that never solidifies onto a body and by highlighting the text’s own status as process rather than finalized product. Further, this project examines how a transgender subject and his/her relationship to the body, culture, and narrative is involved in the re-vision …