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Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back



Alicia Montoya, Anke Gilleir, Suzan van Dijk, eds.,
Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back. Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era.
Leiden, Brill, forthcoming.


Presentation of the book:
Interest in early women writers is on the rise. However, familiarity with their works varies greatly from one country to another, and resources to assess their historical significance remain insufficient. Yet empirical evidence suggests that women writers who are no longer well-known today were in some cases read throughout Europe. Recent studies show that international exchanges took place, creating networks that extended across the European continent and even to the New World. Within this process, translations as well as other forms of cultural transmission (patronage, journalism, etc.) played an important role. Adopting a transnational perspective, our collaborative, database-supported project entitled "New approaches to European Women’s Writing" (NEWW) seeks to provide empirical data to answer various questions. What roles did women authors play in shaping the literary field? Who read their works? How should we assess, within the context of their reception, the strategies women used to establish a claim to legitimacy? How did their readings of other women writers influence their own development as authors? There will be three parts:

1. New empirical evidence.
What kinds of sources and corpora are of particular relevance in addressing women’s authorship and reception within a transnational perspective? How can different types of sources complement and/or contradict each other?

2. Theoretical reflections.
What was – and is – perceived to be the specificity of women’s writing in different historical contexts, and how did perceptions evolve? How, if at all, was female authorship theorized before the modern era? How does data pertaining to the reception of women writers break open national boundaries and force us to rethink processes of literary canonization?

3. Intertextuality.
Can intertextuality be used as evidence of transnational influence or the existence of female literary networks? How should we evaluate evidence of women reading women? What complicating factors should we bear in mind, such as genre specificity, national contexts, and prevailing ideals of womanhood?



SvD, May 2009



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