Hampton-hungry Homemakers: Female Voices in Bulgarian Literature after 1989 (Exigent exegesis)

Abstract

The paper tries to write both of the history of prose and poetry in the post-communist Bulgaria. It is worth emphasising since in the Bulgarian culture poetry enjoys a higher credit not only among literary genres but also among the arts in general. As a consequence female prose often reminds the structure and texture of contemporary music or visual art rather than of a discursive practice. It rarely relies on what it says or states, nevertheless it tries to articulate unknown female realities and feminine experiences, which, being insusceptible to fabulation, demand from female fiction a highly poetic potential. On the other hand, the most challenging female poetic voices are those who cast aside the dictate of the metaphor in favor of a poetic narrative, which is a strategy almost deprived of tradition in Bulgarian literature. Along the 1990s female literature - taken as literature written mainly by, on and for women - has been fighting on two fronts: first, against patriarchy and its symbolic order, providing the foundations of the Bulgarian literary canon; and second, against the alleged simple and shallow feminist discourse, against the supposed false addressing of female issues, against the enticing exits and vain exiles. This exigent exegesis wants to throw a bridge between approaches that either read female literature as exceptionally female, or indiscriminately as literature per se.