Girl, Interrupted: The Distinctive History of Galician Women's Narrative

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses the anomaly that whilst there are increasing numbers of Galician-language women poets and writers of children's literature, women prose writers are still few and far between. Beginning with a discussion of debates in feminist criticism that call attention to the role of influence on authorship, I argue that the fragmented history of women's writing in Galicia, due to the perceived absence of a Galician female public voice in the gap between Rosalia's Follas novas (1880) and Herrera Garrido's Neveda (1920), appears to leave women writers without a literary foremother during the crucialformative years of Galician cultural identity. I then postulate the existence, during the complex, bilingual fin de seculo (c.1885-1916), of a 'lost generation' of women writers whose largely Castilian-language texts show the seeds of a cross-generational dialogue that could potentially bridge this gap. Finally, I ask how the fragmented history of women's writing in Galicia continues to affect wom...