Breaking the Bounds focuses on second-wave feminism as a rupture in an unbroken episteme of Western patriarchy analyzed with regard to British dramatic discourse. The theoretical framework is a genealogy of patriarchy deploying and developing Foucault’s ideas on discourse to apply to a deconstruction of Western patriarchy. An analysis of feminist drama texts is used to support the argument that Western patriarchy consists of one unbroken episteme as the patriarchal impulse substrates the epistemological breaks indicated by Foucault. The theoretical text speaks of the twentieth-century feminist rupture from patriarchy, analyzing in detail the texts of five mainstream feminist dramatists who have successfully effected an intervention in the British grand récit of undeniably male dramatic discourse.

The Author: Dimple Godiwala currently teaches drama and post-colonial theory at York St. John College. She received her B.A. in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College and her M.A. in English Literature from Bombay University, both in Mumbai, India. She continued her studies at University of Oxford in England on an Overseas Research Scholarship for her M.St. and D.Phil. She is currently working on a book on Pam Gems and has also published in the field of British-Asian culture and drama.