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Being a Woman Poet in Belgium in the 19th Century: Between Exclusion and Tolerance



Abstract:

If the situation of the 19th-century Belgian author is said to be precarious, this will certainly be the case for the woman writer. At least three reasons can be put forward: not only does she encounter several social obstacles, but she is also banned from the field of poetry, which stands for artistic creativity and is thus considered an exclusively masculine concern. In addition to this, she is confronted with the tension between Belgian (peripheral) and French (canonical) literature, as well as with intra-national multilingualism. This essay examines the presence and image of women poets on the basis of a corpus of critical and poetical texts published in two francophone Belgian literary periodicals, namely La Revue de Belgique (1869-1890, first series) and La Jeune Belgique (1881-1895, first series). It focuses particularly on questions of interculturality and multilingualism, both on an international and on an intra-national level.





SvD, June 2009



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