Oslo Research Seminar
Women Writers in History:
Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture
On Monday, September 19, from 10.15 till 18.00 a guest lecture and a seminar were held within the framework of COST action IS0901 “Women Writers in History. Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture”. The guest lecture was open to everyone; the seminar, including lunch, required registration.
The aim of this COST action is to lay the groundwork for a new history of European women’s participation in the literary field of the centuries before 1900. What was these women’s influence? Which active roles did they play as authors and readers in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. including their roles as transcribers, translators, mediators and educators? What happened to them when they fell into the hands of 19th-century canonizers? How is their disappearance from literary history to be explained?
The action will further develop the database WomenWriters (http://www.databasewomenwriters.nl/) into a broad research infrastructure, allowing researchers to stock and manipulate data concerning the contemporary reception of women’s writing, and to apply different research models to these data.
Particular attention will be paid to women’s participation in transnational cultural dynamics and to the overlooked role of “smaller”, less internationally known literatures within the larger European context. This interdisciplinary research will lead to a new way of looking at Europe’s literary past – male and female –, which also implies a different perspective on Europe’s present.
The guest lecture
10.15 – 1.200, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts hus, Blindern
Suzan van Dijk, Huygens ING, Netherlands, Chair of the COST Action:
- ’Women Writers In History’: the relevance of studying literature.
The seminar
Scandinavia within the European context:
Women's contributions to European literary culture before World War I.
12.15 – 18.00 Rådssalen, Lucy Smiths hus, Blindern
Lunch at 14.00.
Papers:
Torill Steinfeld, University of Oslo:
- Personal voices and unaffected writing: Camilla Collett, Rahel Varnhagen,Therese von Bacheracht
Petra Broomans, University of Groningen:
- Awards and networks. A secret formula for the canonization of a cultural transmitter? On Swedish women´s literature in Dutch translation
Tone Selboe, University of Oslo:
- Male Melancholics and Female Fighters: Camilla Collett on George Sand
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, University College of Volda:
- Genius and housewife: The Norwegian nineteenth-century reception of George Eliot
Janet Garton, Norwich:
Viola Capkova, University of Turku:
- Finnish Women Writers as Translators and Mediators of Writing by European Women at the Turn of the 18th and the 19th Century
Ragnhild J. Zorgati, University of Oslo:
- From Denmark to the hammam: the international female networks of the Danish – Polish painter Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann
Responsible: Tone Brekke, STK, Anne Birgitte Rønning, ILOS, Torill Steinfeld, ILN
SvD, September 2011
- Conferences and activities > COST meetings > Oslo Research Seminar