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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• Conferences > NEWW participations > ASECS 2008 > Van Dijk