scholarly journals THE PORTRAIT OF A MODERN WOMAN IN THE POETRY OF WANDA MELCER

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sławomir Sobieraj
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
The New Woman

The article tackles the topie of womanhood as a typical motif in Wanda Melcer' s poetry, a topie which in historical-literary studies has so far been insufficiently discussed. Through the analysis of selected poems from her two published volumes as well as from other scattered poems, the portrait of a modern woman as presented in that poetry has been sketched out. This woman is a person who takes part in civilisational, social and manner-related changes. Her relations to culture, art and literature, her vitality and being active in life, all attest to her abandonment of roles imposed by the patriarchal system. It has been shown that the "new woman" breaks taboos and is educated. Above all she is independent and selfreliant, desires success and thirsts for new experiences, as demonstrated by how she frequently changes her surroundings and appropriates new spaces. She moulds her identity in confrontation with the outside world, she is open to otherness and changeability. At the same time she maintains personal consistency. Her creative identity is related to acting upon the principle of choice, and not obligation. Due to the multitude of biographical references present, the portrait of the female heroine contained in Wanda Melcer's poetry can be seen as a self-portrait of the author herself.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Athleticism and the New Woman

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 231-268
Author(s):  
Brigid M. Boyle
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
The New Woman

Queering the New Woman: Ideals of Modern Femininity in The Ladies’ Journal, 1915–1931

NAN Nü ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Chinese Woman ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Social Trends ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Over Time

This case study of Republican China’s most widely read women’s periodical, The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), argues that the New Woman remained a highly contested ideal throughout the journal’s publication from 1915 to 1931. Editors and contributors endorsed competing models of modern femininity that shifted over time, shaped by volatile political conditions and social trends. With a focus on sexual morality, this article subjects normative visions of the modern Chinese woman, as depicted in The Ladies’ Journal, to a queer reading. By exploring the tension between widely circulated heteronormative discourses and their inherent slippages that revealed and fostered subversion, this article demonstrates that, rather than advocating for a clearly defined and radically new icon of sexual liberation, The Ladies’ Journal presented a vision of the New Woman that was capricious, contested, and in some ways conservative.


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