Writing Women's Literary History

Abstract

The criticism of the first two volumes of Nordisk kvindelitteraturhistorie (Nordic Women's Literary History, 1993) is the point of departure for a general discussion of problems in writing women's literary history. It is argued that literary history can dispense neither with authors’biographies nor with social history and that women's texts must be analysed in context with their own literary tradition before their aesthetic value can be fully established. The problem of gender‐marked texts is discussed and commented on in both the American and the French theoretical tradition, i.e. texts as representing experience versus sex as positions in the texts; it is argued that a possible concept of textual subjectivity could be the connection between the writer's self‐consciousness or identity and the correspondent textual self‐image understood as the subject of the discourse.In the last two sections the traditional feminist approach to history is criticized for being too closely bound up with 19th century evolutionism and the modern oppression/liberation paradigm. An alternative point of view in accordance with the history of mentality is suggested and a genre typology consisting in three varieties of the female ‘Bildungsroman’is put forward as a possible basis for writing women's literary history.