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The Adolescent Grotesque: Transgressing Boundaries Of Female Sexuality In Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory And Jamaica Kincaid’S Annie John, Telia Bennett
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
Adolescence is a transitory time in human development, characterized by internal and external bodily changes. Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid employ the first-person narrative style in their respective debut novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory and Annie John, to amplify the female adolescent voice and provide unmitigated access to the female adolescent experience. During adolescence, the female body is in sexual flux – steadily losing its amorphousness as puberty runs its course. The adolescent female body peregrinates the biological threshold that distinguishes males from females. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as “a body in the …