Suzan van Dijk, Toward a collaborative research project

NEWW: New approaches to European Women’s Writing

Three starting points:

1.
Women’s literature should be approached on an international scale, allowing for:

• comparing and studying similarities (ex.: international development of women’s journalism)
  
• understanding impact and influence which may have transgressed national borders (ex.: Dutch reactions to works of a little known author as Mme Benoist).
  
  

2.
Women’s writing should be approached from the side of its reception, i.e. the contemporaneous reception.
Dutch literary canon used to include, until recently, about five 18th-century women’s names;
in this project, while starting at the reading end, 200 names of Dutch 18th-century writing women were found.

3.
This large approach corresponds to present possibilities:

• online available:
  
  • information about authors: www.siefar.org
    
  • texts: www.charriere.nl
    
  • and also: information about contemporary reception, which is contained in numbers of documents and inventories accessible on the internet, in particular the periodical press (such as the Dutch Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen: www.e-laborate.nl), or lists of translations (the one by Buisman in www.dbnl.nl; ex.: translation of Mme Beccari).
    
• possibility to create structures where these information and documents can be assembled per author (ex.: Mme Dunoyer), in a collective enterprise where information and preliminary conclusions are shared and commented.
  
  

SvD, March 2008

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