Suzan van Dijk, Toward a collaborative research project

Preparing a Transnational and Internet-based Research Project
in Women's Writing (before 1900)

Hyperlinks below refer to the database WomenWriters, which – for the moment – contains in particular material concerning

• French and Dutch women writers,
  
• Dutch reception of European women’s writing.
  
  
  

Three Starting Points for Women's Literary Historiography:

1.
Women’s literature must be approached from a comparative and transnational angle.

This corresponds to historical realities too often neglected, such as:

• parallel developments
  

e.g.: birth of women’s journalism

• women's impact and influence transgressing national borders
  

e.g.: foreign reactions to works of now little known authors, such as Mme Benoist

• the roles women played as cultural transmitters
  

e.g.: translating works by other women, as well as by men.

This decision implies the need of international collaboration.

2.
The reception of women’s writing in their own day is considered crucial for any attempt to estimate their historical significance.

Authors and texts should be approached from the side of their (international) reception, independently of the women’s having entered, later on, a literary, historical or feminist canon. This allows to do justice to long neglected authors such as Mme Leprince de Beaumont, provided that searching takes place in large-scale sources, perused completely or for certain periods selected at random:

• quantitative data, such as
  
  • lists of translations
    
  • library catalogues
    
• comments pretending to represent or influence public opinion, such as
  
  • reviews in the periodical press
    
  • early literary history
    
• individual voices, in particular
  
  • authors' correspondences
    
    

A preliminary pilot has made clear that the Dutch literary field included much more than the about five 18th-century women till recently presented in historiography. While starting at the reading end, we found 200 names of 18th-century writing women.

Working on this scale requires adequate technical means.

3.
Technically this large approach and fruitful research collaboration correspond to present possibilities.

• online accessibility is increasing every day, in particular of:
  
  • biographical information about authors: www.siefar.org
    
  • digitized texts: www.charriere.nl
    
  • those documents to be used as sources for information about contemporary reception of women writers, which have been and are being digitized in the context of projects such as (taking only the Netherlands)
    
    • www.e-laborate.nl,
      
    • www.dbnl.nl,
      
    • KB Databank of Digital Daily newspapers,
      
    • Digitalisering Bijzondere Collecties,
      
• interconnecting these three "layers" of data in a database structure is possible, just as the sharing of the information, comments and preliminary conclusions in a virtual collaboratory.
  
  
  

Some examples of source material

Their analyzing will allow to rewrite history and to write the history of historiography.

• France:
  
  • La Porte, Histoire littéraire des femmes françaises (1769), about Madeleine de Scudéry
    
  • Briquet, Dictionnaire historique (1804), about Scudéry
    
  • Jacquinet, Les femmes de France, poètes et prosateurs (1886), about Scudéry.
    
    
• The Netherlands:
  
  • List Heinemeyer (c. 1800)
    
  • Correspondence Belle de Zuylen(1740-1805), about Judith Bouiller (1767)
    
  • Van der Aa (1846), about Maria van Dyk.
    
    

SvD, March 2008

---

• Conferences > NEWW participations > ASECS 2008 > Van Dijk