Perspectives on the Women Literary Travelers

This chapter aims to analyze the novels Mrs, Dalloway (1925) and Quarenta Dias (2014) in the perspective of elucidating the view of the woman writer-character-traveller on the city, showing continuities and ruptures between the modern city and the contemporary city. Therefore, three paths of analysis are proposed: (1) the understanding of urban territories as a way of elaborating subjectivities and experiences; (2) the link between city and memory, place and identity; (3) the link between city and memory, place, identity, and gender. It was possible to verify that both in Mrs. Dalloway and in Forty Days, women have a central role in the construction of narratives about the city and that this is placed in a centrality-character.

J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence. The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer. I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society. Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society. Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history. In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>

J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence. The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer. I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society. Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society. Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history. In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>

Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Vittoria Colonna

Although—unusually, for an early modern woman writer—Vittoria Colonna has long been considered part of the canon, several factors have inhibited a true appreciation of her importance as a literary innovator and model. The current critical moment is conducive to a re-examination of her significance, in the light of recent research on the early modern Italian tradition of women’s writing, on the Catholic Reform movement and its literary expression, and on developments in Italian literature in the last four decades of the sixteenth century. Consideration of these factors reveal Colonna as a figure of wide-reaching influence in her time and a powerful shaping influence on later traditions of Italian literature, in the late Renaissance and beyond.

Reconceptualization of National Spaces: A Close Reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s selected novels with Gloria Anzaldúa´s Nueva Conciencia Mestiza

In 1997, Bharati Mukherjee, a renowned diaspora woman writer, stated in an interview, “I am an American, not an Asian American.” Since then, she has been virulently attacked for defining herself as an American by the writers of her original homeland and her diaspora compatriots. However, with this statement, Mukherjee challenged the diaspora writing and took a solid move to redefine the diaspora through her life and novels. Her novels also considered her autobiographical notes, demonstrate a new diaspora identity that is fluid and transforming. Her latest diaspora writing has challenged the quintessential diaspora identity, gender structure, definition of home, and host land. The paper will do a close reading of her four novels, The Tiger’s Daughters (1971), wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), and Desirable Daughters (2002), to see the transition from being a Bengali Indian expatriate in Canada, Asian American to American Immigrant. In the paper, her four novels are divided into two phases- expatriate and immigrant, which show different writing styles, different psychology behind the narration, and transition in her definition of the nation. This discussion will employ the theory of Nueva Conciencia Mestiza given by Gloria Anzaldúa to comprehend the reconceptualization of national spaces from the perspective of diaspora women.

‘The Fatal Fact of the Woman Writer’: Transnational Encounters in the Avant-Garde Scene of Interwar Spain

‘The fatal fact of the woman writer’ is a phrase coined by the Argentine author Alberto Pineta in the late 1920s, a time marked by women’s growing presence in the cultural sphere. On both sides of the Atlantic, women expressed an acute interest in the avant-garde literary culture and faced similar challenges in their attempt to negotiate their place in the literary field. By considering Spanish-speaking women as mediators across cultural and geographical borders, this study seeks to move beyond the concepts of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in order to rethink the avant-garde as a transnational and multifaceted phenomenon. To explore the intertwined trajectories of Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni and Ernestina de Champourcín, this study examines their literary activities in Madrid and provides a comparative analysis of the avant-garde themes that recur in their poetry. Special focus is set on the transnational processes that shaped their work and allowed them to assert their identity as female writers and poets.

Embracing the Unembraced: Being one with the Translated Thooppukkaari

Thooppukaari is a Tamil novel by Malarvathi the young woman writer who bagged the Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puraskar Award in 2013. Mary Flora, whose pen name is Malarvathi, is a young budding writer, who hails from Vellicode of Kanniyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. It is the simple and plain style of the language used with the mishmash of the colloquial dialect of Vilanvancode taluk of Kanniyakumari district, Tamil Nadu that won her the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar National Award. The tactics that Malarvathi employs through the dialectal words is a sincere revelation of her feelings. The novel helps the reader to comprehend the exploitation, the discrimination, the trauma, the forced labour, the unimpressive appearance and the neglected hunger of the sweeper community in line with the varied layers of the story.