Genre and Gender in Butterfly Burning: Yvonne Vera’s Elliptical Writing
Set in the late 1940s in Southern Rhodesia, Yvonne Vera’s novel Butterfly Burning tells the tragic story of Phephelaphi, a young woman who tries to find her own voice and ends up burning herself. In order to express the feeling of incompleteness of the young woman, the author resorts to a form of wr...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2024
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | Set in the late 1940s in Southern Rhodesia, Yvonne Vera’s novel Butterfly Burning tells the tragic story of Phephelaphi, a young woman who tries to find her own voice and ends up burning herself. In order to express the feeling of incompleteness of the young woman, the author resorts to a form of writing based on silences, fragments and allusions. Yet what could threaten the coherence of the novel is counterbalanced by a construction that can also be called elliptical in the sense that several motifs and images draw ellipses throughout the text. Meaning is conveyed through a system of repetitions, echoes and variations that prevent it from falling apart. Through the analysis of this elliptical writing, the present paper questions the relationship between gender and postcolonial context. |
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