scholarly journals The Mechanization of Motherhood: Images of Maternity in Quebec Women Writers of the Quiet Revolution

AmeriQuests ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan K Kevra
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Rural Women ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
Social Agenda ◽  
Civic Group

In her short story “Le Peuplement de la Terre” (“Be Fruitful and Multiply”) Madeleine Ferron reveals the reality of married life for generations of women in Quebec whose lives were a constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Like other Quebec women writers, such as Marie Claire Blais and Gabrielle Roy, Ferron turns on its head the myth of the tireless, dutiful and fulfilled mother, happy to serve God and country by producing offspring. All three of these writers depict motherhood in the period prior to the Quiet Revolution with disturbing images of childbearing automats, leaving us not with a glorified and tender view of motherhood, but rather a mechanization of mothering. Could the preponderance of such imagery in the works of women writers of this period point to attitudes in the medical establishment and in the social agenda of the first half of the 20th century? Using Ferron’s short story as the primary literary example – with parenthetical references to both Une Saison and Bonheur d’Occasion – I provide historical evidence for the increasingly mechanized nature of mothering in Quebec brought on by the ramping up of social, political, religious and economic pressures placed on women in the first part of the 20th century. The historical evidence will take the form of popular literature of health care professionals in Canada and Quebec during this period, as well as the role of the Cercle de Fermières, a kind of civic group for rural women of Quebec whose ideology of super-productive women is summed up in their motto, “Travaillons sans cesse!”

scholarly journals Sterke vrouwen! De institutionele positie van de eerste Afrikaanse schrijfsters

Literator ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
I. Glorie
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Social History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Literary Systems

Strong women! The institutional position of the first women writers in Afrikaans In the early 1990s several Afrikaans literary scholars suggested that the work of the first Afrikaans women writers had been marginalised, because it supposedly went against the hegemonic Afrikaner-nationalist discourse. Since then research in the field of social history has indicated that during the first half of the 20th century, Afrikaner women were not as powerless as has often been assumed. In this article, the biographical details of women writers from 1902-1930 are provided, with special reference to their involvement in Afrikaans women’s organisations. The short story “Prente” (“Pictures”) by Mabel Jansen is used to illustrate the interrelatedness of literature and social work within the framework of this type of organisations. In the concluding paragraph an attempt is made to explain the marginalisation of these women writers’ work from an international perspective, with special reference to the interference between the Dutch and the Afrikaans literary systems.

A Note on Tree Worship in the Zaza Folk Beliefs

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-407
Author(s):  
Victoria Arakelova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Turkish Government ◽  
Oak Trees ◽  
Individual Trees ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Mountain Villages

The article presents some historical evidence about the veneration of individual trees, primarily the juniper and the oak-trees, traditionally considered to be sacred in the Zaza culture, as well as generally groves and forests. Unfortunately, the once vast and rich forestal covering of the Zazas’ main habitat in Dersim (Tunceli), which was a proverbial phenomenon still in the beginning of the 20th century, has been almost totally exterminated as a result of the mistreatment by the Turkish government. The folk beliefs related to tree worship have also been considerably erased from the people’s memory, lingering on only among the elderly in the remote mountain villages as a dwindling echo of the past.

An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Humpherys
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Critical Interest

From ancient Greece on, fictional narratives have entailed deciphering mystery. Sophocles’ Oedipus must solve the mystery of the plague decimating Thebes; the play is a dramatization of how he ultimately “detects” the culprit responsible for the plague, who turns out to be Oedipus himself. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines a successful plot as one that has a conflict (which can include, and often does include, a “mystery”) that rises to a climax, followed by a resolution of the conflict, a plot line that describes not only Oedipus Rex but also every Sherlock Holmes story. A particular genre of mystery writing is defined by the mystery at the center of the story that is crucially, definitively solved by a particular person known as a detective, either private or police, who by ratiocination (close observation coupled with logical patterns of thought based on material evidence) uncovers and sorts out the relevant facts essential to a determination of who did the crime and how and why. The form of detective fiction throughout most of the 19th century was the short story published in various periodicals of the period. A few longer detective fictions were published as separate books in the 19th century, but book-length detective fiction, such as that by Agatha Christie, was really a product of the 20th century. Most critics of detective fiction see the beginning of the genre in the three stories of Edgar Allan Poe which feature his amateur detective, Auguste Dupin, and were published in the 1840s. Although Poe’s 1840s stories as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which first appeared in the 1880s, are probably the most well known of 19th-century detective fictions, a number of other writers of generically recognizable detective fiction published stories in the almost fifty years between Poe and Conan Doyle, including a number that featured female detectives. Finally, from the 1890s into the early 20th century, a plethora of new detective fictions, still in short-story form for the most part, appeared not only in Britain but also in France and the United States. Detective fiction has always been popular, but serious critical interest in the genre only developed in the 20th century. In the second half of that century, this critical interest expanded into the academic world. The popularity of the genre has only continued to grow. Both detective fictions (now nearly all novel length) and critical interest in the genre from a variety of perspectives are now an international phenomenon, and detective novels dominate many best-seller lists.

Mexican Women Writers, 1960 to the Present

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Mexican Women ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
Mexican Women Writers ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Past

Since the early 1960s, Mexican women writers have relentlessly fought to become recognized within a traditionally male-dominated literary canon. In the 20th century, women’s writing began to flourish, in many cases emerging as a counternarrative to the patriarchal discourse that had dominated the literary scene for decades after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The work of women writers can be examined according to three different phases: from 1960 to the 1970s, 1980 to the 1990s, and 2000 to the present, and by highlighting in particular a group of women writers from the northern border region, who have faced additional obstacles in their path to becoming published writers. All in all, each of the writers discussed here contributes to a snapshot of the literature written by women from the 1960s to today. The chronological trajectory of their literary voices underscores Mexico’s rich cultural and historical past through the eyes and voices of those traditionally silenced and marginalized in the patriarchal and hierarchical spaces of power.

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