Mother tongues : language and maternity in the fictions of Audrey Thomas

Abstract

Audrey Thomas' novels and short stories employ autobiographical material and repeated storylines to explore the relationship between language and experience. This thesis focuses on stories in which Thomas writes about maternity and motherhood, specifically female experiences which her characters struggle to capture in language. Her use of this subject matter and the techniques of autobiography and repetition leads the reader to question the shifting, non-transparent relationship between language and experience.