This paper deals with the enthralling figure of Aphra Behn, the first English women to earn her living by her writing. During her lifetime she gained the attacks of many critics for her chosen ...subject matter, often alluding to female sexual desire. Several centuries later, Women‟s Studies have contributed not only to the current revival of her reputation and works, but also to give her their fair due for her proven worth and intellectual capability. Firstly, she faced male writers under the same conditions, despite the fact that she didn‟t belong to aristocracy; and secondly she broke cultural barriers by writing in a distinctive poetic voice characterized by audacity and directness in a masculine style assumed as her own.
Trabajo que trata sobre la fascinante figura de Aphra Behn, primera mujer escritora que se puede considerar que viviera de su pluma. Mujer y autora muy discutida en su época, varios siglos después los “Estudios de Género” han contribuido no a rescatar o sacar su figura y obra del olvido, sino a hacerle justicia por su valía personal e intelectual. La primera enfrentándose en igualdad de condiciones a los hombres, con el mérito añadido de no provenir de una clase social alta; la segunda por escribir de una manera totalmente libre y desinhibida, expresando no sólo los mismos pensamientos que los escritores del sexo contrario, sino en muchas ocasiones más atrevidos.
Following the restoration of women’s rights and the recognition of theGalician language in the Spanish Constitution of 1978, female Galicianwriters such as Ana Romaní and Chus Pato sought to ...reincorporate literaturewritten by women into the artistic history of the Iberian Peninsulaand particularly of Galicia, at the same time taking on those social andpolitical challenges which are particularly pressing for women.But the last twenty years have witnessed the emergence of a newbranch of Galician poetry that is more concerned with the personal obstacleswomen face in daily life. In much of this poetry, two recurrentthemes have risen to the surface: rebirth and self-destruction. This paperwill identify how both themes weave through the poems of three contemporaryGalician writers: Yolanda Castaño, Olga Novo, and Ana Romaní.In her work, Yolanda Castaño confronts the objectification of thefemale body as it is subjected to the male gaze, exploring the commercialand artistic implications of her own beauty. In many of her poems, shehas dreamed of resisting the path determined for her by this gaze in thehopes of “becoming, once and for all, who I was.” Olga Novo employsanimalization and vulgarity to eclipse the antiquated image of the reservedwoman, in hopes of reclaiming feminine eroticism while addressing the silentsuffering of her female forebears. Romaní, for her part, affects a continualrebirth as she rewrites history in feminine terms.
Tras la restauración de derechos humanos a las mujeres y el reconocimientode la lengua gallega en la Constitución española de 1978, escritorasgallegas tales como Ana Romaní y Chus Pato emprendieron unproyecto para reincorporar la literatura femenina en la historia artísticade la península y de Galicia en particular, y al mismo tiempo abordaralgunos de los temas sociales y políticos que más afectan a la mujer.Pero en los últimos veinte años, se ha presenciado el crecimientode una rama de poesía gallega menos política y más enfocada en losobstáculos personales que experimentan las mujeres en la vida diaria.En mucha de esta poesía, han aparecido dos temas: el renacimiento y laautodestrucción. Este trabajo identificará cómo los dos temas entrelazan los poemas de tres escritoras gallegas contemporáneas: Yolanda Castaño, Olga Novo y Ana Romaní.En su obra, Yolanda Castaño enfrenta la objetivación del cuerpo femenino bajo la mirada masculina, explorando las implicaciones comerciales y artísticas de su propia belleza. En muchos de sus poemas, Castaño ha soñado con resistir el camino que le impone esta mirada imperante para «lograr de una vez por todas convertirme en la que yo era». Olga Novo utiliza la animalización y las groserías para eclipsar la imagen anticuada de la mujer reservada, con la esperanza de reclamar el erotismo femenino además de abarcar el sufrimiento silencioso de sus antepasadas. Romaní, por su parte, incita un renacimiento continuo alreescribir la historia en términos femeninos.
In 1937, the Danish-born writer Karen Blixen published Out of Africa, an autobiographical account, in English, of the seventeen years she spent in Africa (from 1914 until 1931). During those years, ...she forged a permanent bond with Kenya, where she managed a coffee plantation. This bond was immortalised in the book, leading to cult status for both the publication and its author. Out of Africa contains a blend of the essay, the sketch and the historical document. A contemporary reading of the book also reveals some offensive and racist passages; footprints, as it were, of the settler society of its day. However, the lyrical, introspective quality of this book has resulted in its becoming one of the great publishing phenomena of the twentieth century, reaching many readers through various reprints, translations and a film version. This article presents the publishing history of Out of Africa and gives an overview of its many translations across the globe. It also indicates the extent to which, and the reasons why, the book did (or did not) achieve success in Africa. A comparison is also made between Out of Africa and a number of texts by other female writers who wrote about their experiences particularly in African landscapes and/or places.
Between 1836 and 1852, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two British gentlewomen who had emigrated to Canada, published accounts of their lives in the backwoods of Canada for a British ...audience. Descriptions of their encounters with their Native neighbours, more particularly women, are prominent in their texts. A gradual sense of intimacy permeates the writings, battling with the prejudices of the times. I propose to read Traill’s main work, The Backwoods of Canada, her 1848 sketch, “A Visit to the Camp of the Chippewa Indians”, and Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush as emblematic of the “discourses of difference” that Sara Mills identifies in nineteenth century texts by female travel writers. I would like to suggest that Moodie and Traill, in their own way, “went native”. Echoes with later texts such as Canadian Crusoes and Pearls and Pebbles will also be traced to show how the texts admit to an Indian presence that is more than merely exotic, and allow the voice of the First Nations Canadians to be heard, albeit on a small scale. Simultaneously, the texts also inscribe their empowerment.
Kagiso Lesego Molope's The Mending Season (2005 Cape Town: Oxford) explores the lives of three sisters who reject hegemonic ideals of marriage, domesticity and motherhood, and set about constructing ...alternative forms of mothering. This article explores the ways in which Molope grapples with the iconic nationalist figure of the mother through a focus on the experience of mothering. It argues that emerging writers like Molope find that the ways in which women as mothers are represented in canonical fiction tend to be one-dimensional. Instead these writers delink the biological aspect of mothering from the experience of mothering. This article argues that, by capturing and elaborating on the diversity of the mothering experience, Molope begins to fragment hegemonic forms of motherhood, and produces alternative structures of mothering.
The convent was the privileged space for female writing in the Spanish Renaissance. In the intimacy of the nuns’ cells, the sorores wrote their own experiences and personal feelings, as it was the ...case with the capuchinas from Madrid who founded a convent at Sassari (Sardinia) in the 1670’s. Nonetheless, autobiography was not the only literary genre practiced by these nuns, for they also put in writing the exemplary and mystical lives of their female correligionists.
El espacio privilegiado de la escritura femenina durante el Siglo de Oro es el convento. Ahí, en la intimidad de sus celdas, las religiosas redactan sus propias vivencias y creencias y las capuchinas que en los años setenta del XVII inician en Madrid la aventura de fundar uno en Cerdeña también lo hacen. Sin embargo, la autobiografía no es el único género que se practica: las religiosas no circunscriben la escritura de vida únicamente a las experiencias singulares y personales, sino que la amplían, relatando las vivencias ejemplares, santas o místicas de sus hermanas. Y esto es lo que hacen las profesas sardas del convento de Sassari.
It has been commonly asserted that Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow (2006) presents a sordid account of the deprivation of the protagonist's subsistence livelihood by oil despoilment. This assertion is ...made without much regard to the repressed and manifest anxieties and desires profoundly induced in the novel's central character by a male who is present, onto whom the absent male-figure is displaced. This article, therefore, investigates the provocations, corollaries, and correlations of the displaced male-image through its absence and presence and examines how the various offshoots of this image, whether as a father, lover, friend, autocrat or deliverer, are posited by the work's major characters. The manifestation of the varied shades of the male-image is vital for the destiny of the main character and a few others, accounting for their sexual behaviours, consequent torture and the work's tragic form. Also closely examined, through the coalescing and the application of Freudian and Jungian theories, are the anxieties stimulated by the absence or presence of the male-image, how they come about, are made manifest in the Nigerian literary tradition and repressed at the same time. From here, works that display the repressed are analysed and aligned to Yellow-Yellow. Besides the main characters' heeding of some kind of pleasure code, the super-structural image of the male person hangs, like an unseen shadow, over and above Yellow-Yellow's major character, motivating her actions.
This article explores how African creative artists have participated - and continue to participate - in creating African identities that promote the idea of a cultural movement of African literary ...Renaissance. The article divides the phases of the African literary Renaissance into four cultural movements that emerged from the struggle against colonial oppression. The cultural nationalist artistic movement of the 1950s is discussed first, followed by an analysis of the fiction produced during the armed struggles in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The third section focuses on the literature of hope and despair over the betrayal of the goals of liberation struggles in Africa, produced in the 1970s. The final section explores the literature published after the 1980s - a period of renewed resistance against internal and external forces that prevent the full realisation of freedom for Africans. Each of these phases in the African literary Renaissance is a separate yet connected cultural movement of African literary Renaissance rebirth that attacks oppression. The fiction is self-reflexive and questions the ideological terms by which previous creative works of fiction constructed and depicted images of Africans in the discourses of the African Renaissance. The article argues that the main contribution of African fiction is that it refuses to depict the African Renaissance as a static ideology informed by monolithic values. Instead, the range of images in the fiction written by African creative writers emphasises unity among Africans, but also shows that diverse goals and motivations, different values and alternative visions of what Africa can be, inform African literary Renaissance.
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