The Experimental Self

Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic, Judy Little utilizes the insights of Bakhtin and theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard as strategies for examining the political complexity of the "self" as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christine Brooke-Rose construct it in their fiction. Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose, she argues, manifest a creative, experimental relationship to Western discourses of subjectivity, and their novels construct ideologically mobile selves that thrive on dialogic appropriation and transformation.