Antigone's Daughters?
Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing- Authors:
- |
- Publisher:
- 2011
Summary
Antigone's Daughters? provides the first detailed discussion in English of six well-known Portuguese women writers, working across a wide range of genres: Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), Irene Lisboa (1892-1958), Agustina Bessa Lu's, (1923- ), Nat_lia Correia (1923-93), HZlia Correia (1949 -) and L'dia Jorge (1946 - ). Together they cover the span of the 20th century and afford historical insights into the complex gender politics of achieving institutional acceptance and validation in the Portuguese national canon at different points in the 20th century. Although a patrilinear evolutionary model visibly structures national literary history in Portugal to the present day, women writers and critics have not generally sought to replace this with a matrilinear feminist counter-history. The unifying metaphor that the authors adopt here for the purpose of discussing Portuguese women's ambivalent response to female genealogy is the classical figure of Antigone, who paradoxically sacrifices her own genealogical continuity in the name of defending family and kinship, while resisting the patriarchal pragmatics of state-building. Should women writers, faced with the absence of a female tradition, posit a woman-centred place outside the jurisdiction of male genealogy, however strategically essentialist that place may be, or should they primarily eschew fixed sexual identity to act as unnameable saboteurs, undoing the law of patriarchal tradition from within?
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Bibliographic data
- Copyright year
- 2011
- ISBN-Print
- 978-1-61148-002-3
- ISBN-Online
- 978-1-61148-003-0
- Publisher
- Lexington, Lanham
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 256
- Product type
- Book Titles
Table of contents
- Contents No access
- Acknowledgments No access
- Introduction No access Pages 13 - 35
- 1. Florbela Espanca and Female Genius: Alone of All Her Sex? No access Pages 36 - 69
- 2. Irene Lisboa: Minding the Gender Gap No access Pages 70 - 96
- 3. The Case of the Missing Body: Allegories of Authorship in Agustina Bessa Luís No access Pages 97 - 127
- 4. Matriarchal Precedents: Thus Spoke NatáliaCorreia No access Pages 128 - 157
- 5. Giving Up Whose Ghost in the Works of HéliaCorreia? No access Pages 158 - 177
- 6. Sexual/Textual Re-Visions in LídiaJorge No access Pages 178 - 204
- Conclusion No access Pages 205 - 209
- Notes No access Pages 210 - 238
- Bibliography No access Pages 239 - 250
- Index No access Pages 251 - 256





