Reviewed by: Creation, Publishing, and Criticism: The Advance of Women’s Writing Cristina Álvarez de Morales Creation, Publishing, and Criticism: The Advance of Women’s Writing. Peter Lang, 2010. Edited by María Xesús Nogueira, Laura Lojo and Manuela Palacios. The present book is a collection of comparative papers that shows how, departing from comparable circumstances, the Galician and Irish literary systems explore their perspective paths of knowledge from similar points of approach. Over centuries, as Fran Alonso explains in this book, women were forced to keep their words to themselves and now, when they are flourishing, they surprise us with their ideas and the enthusiasm of their poetic voice. And this poetic voice is the echo that sounds throughout the book. As we know, the inclusion of women in literature came late everywhere and Galicia and Ireland were not the exception. In fact, until the 1990s women writers made female identity explicit in their text; “they revised tradition and myth to rewrite them from a feminist perspective,” (5) as if they were the alternative female figures and called attention to eroticism and their bodies. The exception in Galicia was the foundational figure of Rosalía de Castro who represented the culmination of Galician poetry and in general of the Galician literary discourse. And in Ireland, it Irish feminist movements became particularly active at the beginning of the 1960s. The collection is presented in three parts, each of them dealing with a different genre. Part I, Poetry, deals with the publishing of Poetry, which is conceived as a sort of presentation of challenges and future prospects of this genre cultivated by women in Galicia and in Ireland. This part has to do with different features: the concept of woman from different perspectives, —Feminism, Cultural frameworks-—the poetry genre and the relevance of many important figures of the Galician and Irish women poets especially from the 1980s (by Fran Alonso); the phenomenon of the publication of some of the most important poems of the Galician Literature and finally the changes in the society (by Jessie Lendennie) during the last decades that contemplate women as the essence of these transformation. In the first part of the book some authors also study genre Criticism and its influence in the writing by women. María do Cebreiro Rábade analyzes—from a very intelligent point of view—the critical styles and the functions of Galician Feminist Criticism from four possible critical styles associated with the functions accorded to criticism in each particular case: the declarative-apologetic style which is characterized by a defiant enunciative tone and “treats the poets whom it vindicates as emblematic of certain positions, while often claiming to make amends for an earlier critical tradition” (59). The second style is named by the author as the genealogical-foundational, and it situates the value of contemporary poetry and its ability to create bridges by using certain mythical referents (Xohana Torres is a perfect example of this style). The third one is called wishful-projective style, which shares traits with the second style. And the last one is named the metacritical-unveiling style, understood as a mode of critical writing discursively oriented toward the uncovering of the rules and the standards implicit in the act of evaluating the literary output of women. In this part I there are also two interesting essays by Marilar Aleixandre and Irene Gilsenan [End Page 197] Nordin that conform an allegation of the importance of defending the literature apart from the intention, and the sexual tendency or the genre of the person who writes the text. These authors defend the role of education and the literary critic in Academia as a new cultural force closely associated with some important periodicals which gave voice to the cultural, political, and economic concerns of the emerging middle class during the last century. In part II, Fiction, we have to mention the role of women as narrative writers. Mercedes Quixas Zas, Francisco Castro, Paz Castro, Declan Meade and Paula Campbel unify their effort to explain the importance of some of the most singular names who are widely considered to be the undisputed Queens of commercial fiction, names as Marian Keyes, CathyKelly...
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Aug 14, 2024
Yinuo Zhou 
Open Access
