سئودا عشقی

This research attempts to analyse the depiction of female identity in Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls and Alice Munro’s Dear Life. The thread interconnecting the selected short stories is the fact that they all are the particles of the image of national identity of Canadian women, brought on paper by two female citizens of Canada. The tremendous impact of a female author’s background on the identity of her female characters is studied from the perspective of the triangular interaction of history, identity and narration. The body of the research is mainly made up of two parts. The first part generally explores how the process of narrativization is influenced by the life experiences of an author and how narration mode itself can influence the identity of female protagonists in the selected short stories. This section relies heavily on the theoretical ideas of Hayden White as the main theoretician and Jerome Bruner as the secondary theoretician. The second part specifically gives a brief survey of detailed analysis of selected short fictions. This analysis probes how other-centeredness in heterosexual femininity influences the identity of female protagonists and how the identity fragmentation of female figures is represented via the theoretical framework provided by Michelle M. Lazar and Maureen Whitebrook. The findings of the study show that (۱)the personal history of an author is the raw material which are converted into an independent literary fiction by the power of narrativization, (۲)the narrativization techniques play a vital role in the identity formation of female protagonists, (۳) the selected short fictions give an image of national identity of Canadian women as group identity, and (۴)other-centeredness in heterosexual relationships and identity discontinuity play a vital role in the identity of female protagonists.

This research attempts to analyse the depiction of female identity in Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls and Alice Munro’s Dear Life. The thread interconnecting the selected short stories is the fact that they all are the particles of the image of national identity of Canadian women, brought on paper by two female citizens of Canada. The tremendous impact of a female author’s background on the identity of her female characters is studied from the perspective of the triangular interaction of history, identity and narration. The body of the research is mainly made up of two parts. The first part generally explores how the process of narrativization is influenced by the life experiences of an author and how narration mode itself can influence the identity of female protagonists in the selected short stories. This section relies heavily on the theoretical ideas of Hayden White as the main theoretician and Jerome Bruner as the secondary theoretician. The second part specifically gives a brief survey of detailed analysis of selected short fictions. This analysis probes how other-centeredness in heterosexual femininity influences the identity of female protagonists and how the identity fragmentation of female figures is represented via the theoretical framework provided by Michelle M. Lazar and Maureen Whitebrook. The findings of the study show that (۱)the personal history of an author is the raw material which are converted into an independent literary fiction by the power of narrativization, (۲)the narrativization techniques play a vital role in the identity formation of female protagonists, (۳) the selected short fictions give an image of national identity of Canadian women as group identity, and (۴)other-centeredness in heterosexual relationships and identity discontinuity play a vital role in the identity of female protagonists.