The Notion of Space in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007)

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the notion of space in two literary works A Room of One’s Own (1929) by the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) by the postcolonial Algerian writer Assia Djebar. This comparative study of the two authors is done not in terms of characters and plot, but the focus is on the notion of space and how the two writers function in these spaces. The two works unite the ideas of space, both public and private. While both writers gain access to public space, they still feel confinement and exclusion from their own societies. Consequently, the mental space is exteriorized as a literary text, not only because they write their stories as women but also because the space of the written text becomes the site of women’s definition and affirmation