Women Writers Research Articles

Challenging Voices: Listening to Australian Women Writers across Time to Understand the Dynamics Shaping Creative Expression for Women Writing Today

This article argues for the critical need to value the voices and creative work of contemporary women writers in Australia. Historically, women writing in Australia have endured erasure, dismissal, and suppression. I argue that there is still, in the modern period, a continued lack of awareness, recognition and education on Australian women’s writing despite targeted awards and the achievements of the feminist movement. This piece reflects back across time, drawing on interviews I conducted and PhD thesis research with women writers in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, and maps how the legacies of gendered notions of writers impacted women at this pivotal era to consider what this may mean for women writing today. It also explores how feminist theories such as écriture féminine are helpful for framing and understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference and agency in writing. This article aims to provide insights into the complexities of liberation for women from the past to modern times, and the impact of gender on creative expression in Australia across changing social periods.

(Re)Looking at the Women of Indian Cinema in the Praxis of Conventional Rendering

Films significantly impact social consciousness as they have the power to shape opinions, influence perspectives, and contribute to cultural conversations. In shaping perceptions, films enable people to perceive certain issues, events, or groups of people from dissimilar viewpoints. This paper looks into the nuances of representation of Indian women in films, primarily in Hindi cinema, and how their portrayal differs when their identities are constructed by writers and directors of the opposite gender. It argues for an equitable position for representing women in cinema and highlights the role of intersectional relationships between race, class, sexuality, and ability for the same. With an emphasis on feminist film theory and its praxis, this paper traces the history of Indian cinematic renderings in giving agency to women in films and how the perspectives of women writers and directors seeps into their creations for a positive outcome, whereas the male centric industry hinders the proper portrayal of the lived experience. It finally advocates for an academic understanding of the lacunas that exist in the entire ecosystem and offers an expansive approach for devising actionable and sustainable solutions to the critical problem of representation.

A Perspective Study of Infamous Classic Women in the Novels of Vaishnavi Patel’s ‘Kaikeyi’ and Kavita Kane’s ‘Karna’s Wife: the Outcast’s Queen’

Abstract Indian Mythology has many complex characters that reflect contemporary issues. Vaishnavi Patel and Kavita Kane, renowned women writers, have reinterpreted the epic tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata through a modern perspective. This paper examines human behaviour using a psychological approach in Patel’s “Kaikeyi”and Kavita Kane’s “Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen”. Patel’s“Kaikeyi”explores the protagonist’s optimistic traits, her childhood longings, and her feminist qualities. Traditionally depicted as a villain in the Ramayana, Kaikeyi is recognized as Rama’s stepmother who instigates his exile. However, before assuming this role, she experienced a difficult and challenging childhood in the Kingdom of Kekaya. The novel sheds light on the darker aspects of Kaikeyi’s past, providing a deeper understanding of her character. Kavita Kane’s interest lies in unveiling the complexities of classic women in her literary works. In “Karna’s Wife”, Uruvi, the protagonist, is portrayed as the marginalized wife of Karna, who belongs to the Sutapura lineage. Uruvi, a princess from the Kshatriya family of Pukeya kingdom is depicted as an optimistic character with great skills, knowledge, and mental strength.These two novels focus on the lives of classic women, their behavioural changes, and their insecurities in different situations. Women are inherently multifaceted and encounter various challenges throughout their lives. Different approaches are required to address these challenges. According to Sigmund Freud, the human psyche consists of three aspects that interact and influence each other to create complex human behaviour. Freud’s psychological theory can be used to analyse the characters of Kaikeyi and Uruvi in these novels. The study attempts to highlight the need for women to overcome feelings of insecurity, emotional dependence, to achieve self-realization, and build resilience, which are essential qualities in the contemporary era.

Subjectivity in Women's Writing in the Cyber Age

Women's creativity has undergone a long and difficult development. The emergence of the intangible cultural heritage "Jiangyong Nvshu" gave women an exclusive language to express their life experiences, but in the feudal historical environment, women's self-consciousness was limited, not deep or firm enough,and they could not really fight against the structure, and the subjectivity of women's calligraphy was only a restricted narrative of suffering. With socio-economic development and the rise of Internet platforms, patriarchy and male power can no longer force women to be silent, and the situation of female creators has improved. The Internet is not only a platform for amplifying women's voices, but also a field for women and their creations to be discussed and interpreted again. The era of blogging is not only a time for women to bravely break into the public sphere to write about their subjectivity, but also a time when they may be pressurized and even violated by the words of the other on the Internet. Through the qualitative research methods of purposive sampling and semi-structured in-depth interviews, this paper investigates the personal experiences of four female Internet users to understand their feelings about contemporary female creators, and analyzes their interpretations of the public opinion environment in which female creators find themselves, taking Jia Ling's personal experience and the heated debates her work Yolo as an example on the Internet.The four interviewees are student MengQianye ,editor WangYanshi, operator Pangding and YouTuber HeNan.This paper explores the limitations and possibilities of female creators' writing subjectivity in the cyber era from public figures to the creators around them, and from the experience of the creative subject to the perception of the other, from multiple levels and perspectives.

Mort i posteritat públiques de Maria Aurèlia Capmany i Montserrat Roig

The treatment of the deaths of Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Montserrat Roig both in the media and in the various commemorative events and initiatives organised in the months and years that followed generate rich and nuanced understanding of the public weight of these two women writers as well as providing insights into approaches to literary afterlives and commemoration in the Catalan cultural scene of the 1990s. This article is based on careful scrutiny of the various texts and discourses produced in memory of two emblematic women writers and public figures who themselves recognised the political and ethical importance of such practices of commemoration. It is followed by reproduction of an article written by Roig herself in memory of Capmany shortly before her own passing.

Pervivència i memòria de Maria Josepa Massanés: la creació d’una imatge

This article analyses the various paths that, over the decades between her death and the Second Spanish Republic, led to Josepa Massanés (1811–1887) enjoying a posthumous fame uncommon among nineteenth-century women writers, thanks in no small part to Massanés’s own efforts to construct and preserve her own legacy. Examination of the evolution in interpretations and, most importantly, assessments made by different intellectuals over this period produces a complex and multifaceted vision of her significance as a writer in Spanish and Catalan: from the first of the 19th-century Spanish women poets to a core figure in the Renaixença and even a feminist pioneer. Among these, it is, above all, Dolors Monserdà who will be seen to have worked the hardest to keep Massanés’s memory alive, modifying the picture she painted of the writer to suit changing times.

The Dark Lady’s survival in contemporary Black women’s writing

ABSTRACT This article discusses contemporary literary texts that feature the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets as a Black woman from the past inhabiting the present: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), and Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). The analysis draws on recent approaches to temporality that offer a critique of linear concepts of time and their function for discourses of progress and modernity as well as ‘race’. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, Smith, Evaristo, and Williams address Black history and project anachronic relations between the early modern era and the present moment, as well as between Shakespeare and the contemporary Black woman writer.

«Che ideale sepoltura in quegli abissi»: poetica e autorappresentazione nella poesia di Vittoria Aganoor attraverso la figura di Saffo

This article aims to study the characteristics of Vittoria Aganoor’s poetics and philosophy by focusing on the ways in which the poetic self is represented using the figure and myth of Sappho. The investigation will be carried out through the study of two poems, “Tentazione” and “L’ultimo canto di Saffo”, written in two different periods: the former published in Leggenda eterna, Aganoor’s debut collection, and the latter among the scattered verses published posthumously in Poesie complete. After considering the presence of Sappho in Italian letters between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to multiple associations with women writers, what is deduced from the analysis of the two poems will be placed in relation with some of Aganoor’s correspondence and with the well-known reading at the Collegio Romano to trace leitmotivs and impressions concerning the metapoetic discourse of the Paduan poet, between self-representation and programmatic reasoning.

The ‘wilds of Brompton’: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Women Writers’ Early Careers in the Sociable London Suburbs

ABSTRACT In this paper, we geocode the residences of nineteenth-century Brompton residents to the level of the building in order to argue that literary sociability and propinquity – leading to face-to-face interaction with writers, editors, artists, actors, and publishers – may have played a more important role in the formation of women’s literary careers than scholars have yet recognized. Taking the popular novelist and poet Dinah Craik as our case study, we argue that the walkability as well as the informal and inexpensive literary sociability of the area made Brompton a fertile ground for the early careers of nineteenth-century women writers. Following Alan Liu’s work in Critical Infrastructure studies, we attempt through mapping to reanimate connections that have been lost to time, establishing the importance of Brompton as a literary, artistic, and intellectual neighbourhood in the nineteenth century, and of propinquity in supporting the careers of women writers. Expanding on Sarah Bilston’s recent work on the suburbs as fertile grounds for the careers of Victorian women writers, we add a spatial dimension to Robert Darnton’s well-known print network, placing the private home, a site of literary sociability, as a central node in public print networks.

Marital Discord and Pursuit of Gender Equality in Manju Kapur’s Custody Novel

The landscape of Indian literature has never been found to be equal in contribution from both the genders. It has always been dominated by male writers. It is very fair to say that the aspirations and expectations of Indian women have been largely confined to the ambit of moral and social commitments prevailing in our country. By and large, the Indian women writers in English have come from higher social strata and they do not have felt experience regarding reality of life in India. Despite it, they have started questioning the wisdom of prominent old patriarchal domination and they are no longer willing to play a subservient role to men. They have proved their mettle in literature both qualitative and quantitative wise. In the modern English fiction, the emergence of women centred or feminist approaches have been major developments. For establishing their identity, several Indian women writers have been delving deep into female subjectivity. The image portrayed by these writers regarding women has undergone a complete change. It is due to a paradigm shift in the attitude of the Indian women writers in portraying women as self -sacrificing persons to strong individuals trying to establish their identity. Among the prominent Indian women writers, Manju Kapur has carved a niche for herself by highlighting issues pertaining to patriarchy, family bonding, male –female bonding, inter religious marriage and co -existence of past and present. In 20th century, the works of Indian women writers have been considered as powerful equipment for making modernist and feminist statements. Feminism in India became an accepted doctrine and it was able to gradually set aside the male supremacy prevailing in the society. In fact, the history of feminism in India can be considered in three different phases. The first phase started when the British initiated steps against evil Sati practice. The next co-related with Quit India movement and the third took place after independence when there was a clamour for fair treatment from feminine gender after marriage. This article explains the part played by feminine gender at the domestic front and their willingness to be economically and socially independent and the challenges faced by them in attaining independence in a male dominated society.

Gender Representation in Contemporary Indian Women Writers

This research paper delves into the nuanced exploration of gender representation in the literary works of two distinguished contemporary Indian women writers, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. The investigation encompasses a historical analysis of their narratives, scrutinizing their impact on societal perceptions and the evolving discourse surrounding gender roles. Arundhati Roy's seminal work, "The God of Small Things," serves as a focal point for examining her adept dismantling of traditional gender norms within the socio-cultural fabric of India. Concurrently, Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies," provides a diasporic lens through which gender intersects with cultural identities. The paper progresses through individual analyses of Roy and Lahiri's works, unraveling their unique approaches to gender representation. While Roy challenges societal expectations in India through vivid portrayals of characters breaking free from established norms, Lahiri navigates the diasporic experience, intricately weaving the intersectionality of gender with cultural identity. Common themes and divergent approaches between the two authors are explored, contributing to a broader dialogue on gender representation in contemporary Indian literature. As the narrative unfolds, critical reception and scholarly debates surrounding Roy and Lahiri's works are considered, shedding light on the dynamic nature of gender representation within diverse cultural landscapes. The research also anticipates future trends, emphasizing emerging themes such as intersectionality, global feminist perspectives, and the integration of technology in shaping narratives. Ethical considerations and the advocacy for inclusive publishing practices are discussed, recognizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This research aims to amplify the voices of women in literature, providing a comprehensive understanding of their experiences while paving the way for a more inclusive and equitable literary landscape.

“A Most Important Instrument”: Women, Literature, and the Social Good in 1790s Dublin

ABSTRACT This essay addresses distinctions between Irish and British literary theory and writing on education to sketch an intellectual tradition in which women’s education and public roles were accepted, even promoted. This tradition informs Lady Morgan’s representation of intellectual women, particularly in her later writings, as “instruments” of social change. Eighteenth-century Irish arguments for women’s intellectual equality, at least one so prominent that it was repeatedly republished and excerpted in periodicals, aligned with nationalist arguments at the end of the century which prioritized widespread education as a foundation for progress, peace, and self-government. Irish literary theory around 1800, particularly in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, resonated with such concerns about the collective rather than the individual, stressing community and collaboration on terms consistent with Dublin circles’ practices. The social function of literature was also understood in collective rather than expressive terms and thus those who shape events are characterized by Morgan, Preston, and others as “instruments” rather than leaders. These intellectual trends and cultural practices provide a key context not only for Morgan’s later writings about women as politically active but also for a distinctive feature of Irish Romanticism more broadly: the centrality of women writers.

A Play to Be Read: Authorship as Marriage in Eliza Haywood’s A Wife to Be Lett (1723)

A Wife to Be Lett (1723), Eliza Haywood’s first original comedy, is often viewed as a casual early investment in drama more productively reoriented to novel writing. Taking a contrary view, this article shows how this early play is a sophisticated, self-reflective piece in which the author rehearses what became a recurrent motif in her writing: the unique hardships besetting women’s authorship. By drawing attention to the shared predicaments of wives and women writers, Haywood’s play offers a metaphoric figuration of the woman author as a wife, providing a twist to the common trope of the writer as prostitute. A Wife to Be Lett voiced a powerful criticism against the hypocrisy of a society that relied on women (as wives and writers) for the production and circulation of capital but obstructed their efforts to do so. The play’s radical depiction of women as figures of authority and social respectability in the twin markets of marriage and literature sheds light on the moderate success it had on the stage and its far longer afterlife in print.

Resistance against Gender-Based Violence and Discrimination in the Poetry of Sindiwe Magona

Sindiwe Magona (1943-) is a South African self-made black woman writer who rises out of difficult socio-economic conditions and turns out to be a well-accomplished writer who uses writing as a vehicle to struggle against the oppressive political system of apartheid, ongoing inner conflicts, criminality, and the infliction of gender-based violence. Gender-based violence remains an unresolved problem in South Africa where the apartheid regime and its adherents continue to nurture the patriarchal ideology which victimizes, alienates, and restricts women both in the domestic and public spheres. The focal point of this article, therefore, is to examine Sindiwe Magona’s Please Take Photographs (2009) which is embedded with her subversive strategy of unsettling the masculine authority constructed officially over women and conducted as a natural determinant of men and women’s unbalanced power relationship in South African society. An in-depth scrutiny of her poetry will reveal Magona’s exceptional endeavor to extricate gender-based violence out of the domestic sphere and reconfigure it as the greatest social and political problem of her country.

A PORTRAIT OF SELFSECURE WOMEN AMIDST INSECURITIES IN PREETHI NAIR'S ONE HUNDRED SHADES OF WHITE

Indian women writers of twentieth century mainly spot light on casteism, silent suffering women who become the victims of the atrocities of dominant men, child marriage and constrained widowhood. Indeed the scenerio has been changed in the contemporary century where the focus is on women who start questioning the traditional patriarchal norms and search for their self idendity. It is quite true in the case of Preethi Nair who depicts women rising as phoenix from the ashes of victimisation. The women characters of Nair's One Hundred Shades of White though abandoned by their husbands, rejected, betrayed by their beloveds, put in an alien world where cultural conflicts arise, threatened by the harsh realities of life and no matter what, but rise to the occasion to prove themselves. They are exhibits of empowered women who are selfsecure amidst insecurities and so leading a dignified living.

“The Humble Mahar Women Fall at Your Feet, Master.” Portrayal of the Psyche and Suffering of Mahar Women in Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke

This article delves into the nature of suffering as experienced by Mahar women struggling with the implemented difficulties by the prevailing patriarchal ideology rooted in Brahminism. Baby Kamble dislikes the humanitarian aversion to agony and disparity. She is sensitive to the predicament of Dalit women and conscious of their sufferings. She has managed to dredge into the psyche of Mahar women, prioritizing sisterhood and Dalit femininity over individual suffering. As a woman writer, Kamble concedes that her primary task is to promote women’s emancipation and eradicate untouchability. She propitiously manages to portray Mahar women and their wounded selves. Utilizing Paik’s theory of Incremental Intersecting Technologies about caste, class, gender, sexuality, and agency as the framework, the paper seeks to answer the questions: How much consideration is given to the caste system, and what intersectional aspects have been integrated into discussions about Dalit women in the last twenty years.

Examining identity crisis in Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days

An identity crisis, a term devised by Erik Erikson, is a phase of rigorous study of different means of looking at oneself. Modern Indian English writers have been in the pursuit to restore order and meaning in their lives, especially the women. Women writers have presented their women protagonists as the one who are taking control of their lives, eventually, with or without the support of their family. Samina Ali is one such writer, who explores the identity of her characters in a Muslim community. The novel, Madras on Rainy Days determines the identity of a contemporary Muslim woman protagonist, Layla who is torn between her liberated life in the USA versus her controlling life in India. She faces several difficulties as she cannot be her independent self. She’s forcefully married to Sameer, whose real identity is revealed later by the end of the story. In search of her own home and identity, Layla chooses to stay in India as a brave and enlightened single woman rather than moving out to free America with her gay husband. This paper tends to discover in the text that how a character deals with the fluctuating notion of identity, by breaking free from the shackles of the dominating society. Keywords: Examination, Identity, Women, Self-expression, Modernization, Liberation

Self-Censorship or Irony? The Rhetoric of Silence in Rosalía de Castro’s “Las literatas”

This article studies the textual strategies used by Rosalía de Castro in “Las literatas” to denounce the structural and epistemic violence suffered by women writers and to defend their right to participate in the public sphere through literary activity. The text appears in a peculiar context, a year after street demonstrations by seminarians prevented the publication of another article of hers in the same Almanaque para la Juventud Elegante. This article, addressing the general theme of the silencing imposed on women, exposes their reaction to any kind of pressure: to continue writing and publishing. The splitting of the narratorial voice to show an excinded, dialogic and even incoherent or contradictory authorial self continues a tradition initiated by Romantic women authors to generate fissures in a model of femininity disciplined within the limits of the space assigned to them.

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity.

(UN)EINIG? GENERATIONEN VON SCHRIFTSTELLERINNEN IM DIALOG ÜBER DIE EMANZIPATION VON FRAUEN: HELMINA VON CHÉZY, AMALIA SCHOPPE UND AMALIE STRUVE*

AbstractIn addition to her literary activities, the writer Helmina von Chézy (1783–1856) was committed to the emancipation of women throughout her life. She took a public stand on women's literary activity, participated in anthology and journal projects and wrote portraits of women in various genres. Among her correspondents was Amalie Struve (1824–62), a writer of the 1848/49 revolution who was two generations younger and who came into contact with the women's rights movement in America during her exile. The article explores the extent to which Chézy's Nachlass in the Varnhagen Collection provides new insights into the emancipation of women before and immediately after the revolution. Chézy's previously unpublished portrait of Amalia Schoppe (1783–1858), who also belonged to her network, is examined more closely. To what extent can conclusions be drawn from these texts about the state of the public debate on women writers in Germany? What is innovative about their contribution? The second part deals with Amalie Struve's letters to Chézy from the time of her move to the USA. To what extent do they shed new light on Chézy as a writer of radical change as well as on Struve's emancipatory commitment? To what extent does a generational transition become clear here?