Women's Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English

The volume intends to explore how women readers and, especially, women writers had to negotiate their admission to the public sphere of the print market and their place within the patriarchal literary domain. It intends to question how women—poets, novelists, dramatists, critics and even actresses—used writing as a fertile meta-discourse which allowed them to deal with issues of gender inequalities. The essays collected in the volume intend to investigate how, if and to what extent ‘women’, across time and space, experimented with new literary genres or forms of expression in order to transform, question, resist or paradoxically consolidate gender discriminations and dominant ideologies. Patriarchy, colonialism, slavery and racism, imperialism, religion, (hetero)sexuality and male-centred ‘humanism’ are all issues at the very core of the essays collected in this book. It does not, therefore, merely intend to enter the contemporary debates on these specific issues—proposing alternative and constructive reading of women’s texts of the past and of the present—but also aims to analyse the state of the art of contemporary feminist and gender theories, and their possible applications or fruitful re-mediations.