Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Roopika Risam

Second Advisor

Aden Evens

Abstract

How do feminists today make interventions into the millennia-long tradition of androcentric writing dominating the literary canon, and why must they continue to reckon with ancient texts? Situated at the intersection of feminist poetics and the epic, this essay argues that writers may engage with the epic as source material for feminist arguments through strategic uses of intertextuality, literary form, and rhetorical devices. Drawing on the work of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, this essay articulates a theory of “revolutionary feminist poetics” and examines how its strategies may be used to disrupt phallogocentrism. It explores the functioning of these strategies through close readings of the works of author Ursula K. Le Guin and poet Lisa Robertson, Lavinia (2008) and Debbie: An Epic (1997), both of which are adaptations of Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC). The essay shows how the epic functions as a paradoxically productive site for the performance of revolutionary feminist poetics and how the intersection of French feminist and post-structuralist theory operates in literary practice. As formal interventions into the genre of the epic, Lavinia and Debbie articulate avenues for reconceptualizing women's places in the literary canon and prioritize an understanding of textual relations through intertextuality rather than filiation.

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