Dalal, Anita Kamala; (1998) In search of home: The writings of Katherine Anne Porter, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Bishop and Joan Didion. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The thesis brings together four women writers linked by their American nationality, their gender and their subject matter, Latin America in its broadest definition; Katherine Anne Porter, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Bishop and Joan Didion. The thesis uses recently published primary sources and rare additional material from American collections to site the women's writings on Latin America in a tradition of literary travellers. The introduction notes that no similar study exists for twentieth entury American women writers.Each chapter is aself-contained, chronological examination of the writer using close textual analysis. The current understanding of Porter's gradual disillusionment with Mexico, where she lived intermittently through the 1920s, requires re-examination in the light of recently published early works. Her dichotomous attitude is shown to have varied according to her chosen genre and her emotional state.The chapter on Gellhorn discusses the range of her prolific Latin American writings, from novels to war reporting. It links this range to Gellhorn's fundamental division of the world into war zones and elsewhere, a division paralleled by her obsession with swimming, which divides the world into above and below water realms.Bishop's twenty year relationship with Brazil is studied in the light of her poems, recently published letters and little known prose and translations. The chapter considers how Bishop's attitude toward Brazil depends on the form in which she writes, a far deeper consideration being apparent in her poems. Bishop's bond with North America is also examined.Didion sees Latin America in relation to her homeland. The chapter traces the evolution of her view of Latin America, from an object lesson to the United States of a continent gone astray to its position as the victim of the North's political posturing, which she increasingly identifies as the true source of the Americas' moral decline.

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