In this thesis we explore the similarities and differences between selected literary works by Ivanka Hergold, Clarice Lispector and Virginia Woolf. We do so through the analysis and comparison of texts in the context of the Modernist literary period, which is common to all three authors, and using the methods of feminist literary theory. We first divide feminist literary theory into Anglo-American and French strands, with greater emphasis placed on French feminist theory. French feminist literary theory is rooted in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and we analyse his concept of »différance« in detail. We shall focus on the most significant female authors in feminist literary theory and their philosophical approaches: Hélène Cixous and her écriture féminine or feminine writing, which stems from the so-called »female libidinal economy« and is accesible to both women and men; Luce Irigaray, who identifies the presence of the principles of patriarchal ideology in grammar; and Julia Kristeva, who transforms Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic formulations of the Imaginary and the Symbolic into her own fields of the semiotic and the symbolic, through which she then constructs her Subject-in-process. From the essay A Room of One's Own in which Virginia Woolf incisively describes the circumstances of the opression of women, we extract key observations. From this we also derive an interpretation of the »female sentence« that is consistent with the aforementioned theory.
In the following section of the thesis we outline and analyse the selected works: The Knife and the Apple by Ivanka Hergold, Água Viva and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. In these works we find similarities in the perception and portrayal of love, everyday life, and epiphanies, as well as in-depth reflections on language and the application of deconstructionist principles within it.
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