Women's Literature

Será possível escrever uma História da Literatura Portuguesa anterior a 1900 que inclua as mulheres? Ou, dito de outro modo: será possível falar de escritoras antes da contemporaneidade?
Estas perguntas têm sido feitas insistentemente por todos aqueles que se vêem confrontados com a escassez de dados sobre as relações estabelecidas pelas mulheres do passado com a escrita e com a leitura. Numa época marcada pela revalorização das contribuições femininas para a sociedade e para a cultura, na qual se questionam os motivos da exclusão das mulheres do discurso historiográfico, o silêncio dos historiadores sobre as escritoras portuguesas parecia impossível de romper.
Esta antologia resulta do esforço de pesquisa em busca da realidade improvável que parecia ser a existência de um número significativo de mulheres com papel activo no campo literário português dos séculos XV a XIX.

Is it possible to write a History of Portuguese Literature prior to 1900 that includes women? Or, to put it another way: is it possible to speak of writers before contemporary times?
These questions have been asked insistently by all those who are confronted with the scarcity of data on the relationships established by women of the past with writing and reading. At a time marked by the revaluation of women's contributions to society and culture, in which the reasons for the exclusion of women from historiographic discourse are questioned, the silence of historians about Portuguese writers seemed impossible to break.
This anthology results from the research effort in search of the improbable reality that seemed to be the existence of a significant number of women with an active role in the Portuguese literary field from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

Recuperando una rica tradición de libros de viajes escritos por mujeres, Mónica Szurmuk nos muestra una dimensión insospechada de la construcción de la identidad nacional argentina. Este brillante estudio de relatos de viajeras argentinas y de mujeres extranjeras en Argentina entre 1837 y 1930 revela cómo ellas, al enfocarse en los aspectos de la experiencia viajera relacionados con su papel femenino, la vida doméstica, la maternidad, la enseñanza, introdujeron importantes matices en la imagen de la argentinidad. Al salir de casa, de lo familiar, para encontrarse con lo ajeno, estas mujeres tuvieron que modificar las ideas recibidas de identidad y otredad, pero lo hicieron sin apartarse de lo que sus lectores esperaban de una escritora de su clase y raza. Especialmente sugestivo en este sentido es el análisis de la descripción del paisaje como el escenario de la construcción del sujeto autorial en su encuentro con lo otro. De igual manera reveladoras son las reflexiones de Szurmuk acerca del ambiguo significado de las fronteras de todo tipo para las mujeres que escribieron acerca de sus viajes. Este libro ofrece además importantes planteamientos acerca de la interacción de las diferencias de raza, género, clase y etnia en la formación de las ideas dominantes de la nación argentina.

“You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women”
- Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
Despite having a fairly long and enlarged provisions including a host of other laws enacted by the government, the empirical reality tells a quite different story that women’s conditions and human rights situation remains gloomy and marginal. The concept of rights and human rights of women as such particularly in the realm of economic and social rights, has been markedly absent from the Indian Government’s activities and approaches to gender equality (Subramanian, 1995). Thus, women are still subdued in our society, they are still not economically emancipated. Not only developing countries even in developed countries the women are facing similar hurdles in achieving equal status to that of men (Engineer, 1992: 32-33), be it politics, administration, civil service, trade, industries, women are extremely inadequately represented.
Thus this study aims to understand the meaning of empowerment and find the relationship between women empowerment and their livelihood engagement. To be more specific does economic empowerment means overall empowerment or is there need to have a holistic view to study empowerment.

The dichotomies of 'self/other', ‘subject/object’, 'mind/body', ‘reason/emotion’ and 'materiality/rationality', having been initiated and systematized by Plato and Aristotle respectively, and accepted as ‘Cartesian Duality’ with the ideas of French philosopher René Descartes, have been gradually turned into strongly established binary opposition of ‘male/female’ by patriarchal societies. This transformation process deriving from female body and sexuality has defined and marginalized woman in accordance with androcentric terms and imprisoned her within patriarchal constraints. Women and women writers, aiming to subvert male hegemony, have been in a struggle for articulating the unspoken female body and sexuality, and giving voice to muted fellows with the required words and awareness. Erendiz Atasü, knowing all the difficulties and limitations as a woman and a woman writer in a patriarchal society, is one of those women writers seeking alternative ways to change women’s constructed submissive and secondary position. In accordance with those considerations, Atasü strives for transcending beyond long-established gender dichotomies emanated from primary ‘male/female’ opposition and emphasizes the significance of unshackling and de(con)structing the phallocentric discourses and unspoken taboos in regard to female body and experiences. In this respect, based on the theories of post-structuralist feminism, this study analyzes Atasü’s poetic work, That Scorching Season of Youth, and aims to prove how women can establish a new, female-oriented tradition that will allow, justify and acknowledge their female existence through the rejecting the constructed phallocentric discourses and hierarchical binary oppositions
Keywords: female body and sexuality, phallocentric discourse, de(con)struction, mind-body, unspoken

x  This article emphasizes the multiplicity of discourses which structure Catalan writer Montserrat Roig’s fiction. Focusing on L´hora violeta, I show how discourses of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and social change interact to create a complex text in which the limitations of the Master narratives of Eurocommunism and Catalan nationalism are presented and feminine spaces are offered as Utopian alternatives from which to Challenger the shortcomings of the political alternatives presented in post-Franco Spain. In L´hora violeta, Roig debates the difficulties of writing about history, the strategies used to encode and textualize the unspoken, and the problematic relationship between literature as a genre of fantasy, and history as a genre of truth. Overtly presented as a sequel to Ramona, Adéu and El temps de les cireres, L´hora violeta defies the premise of Roig’s early novels that there is a “true history” waiting to be told. Instead, L´hora violeta rescues certain moments that the female protagonists savour as ephimerous but promising spaces of freedom.

"‘This book illuminates the fascinating life of Eva Gore-Booth. Often lost in the shadow of her more famous sister, Constance, Eva finally emerges as a key figure. Historian Sonja Tiernan has written an exciting and vibrant life of this extraordinary woman, at once an intrepid feminist, pacifist and advocate for social justice.’
Professor Maria Luddy, University of Warwick

This is the first dedicated biography of the radical Irish writer and political activist, Eva Gore-Booth. A vast body of material from private collections and state archives has been used to uncover this remarkable life history.

Born into West of Ireland Anglo-Irish landed gentry, Gore-Booth dramatically rejected her aristocratic heritage, choosing to live and work amongst the poorest classes in industrial Manchester. Her pioneering work on behalf of barmaids, circus performers, flower sellers and pit-brow lasses is traced here with clarity and enthusiasm. The story of Gore-Booth's life is captivating and provides new insights into key political issues of early twentieth century Ireland and Britain. A prolific author who enjoyed a place within W.B. Yeats' literary circle, Gore-Booth also fostered a well-deserved reputation as a determined and successful political activist, at one stage defeating no less an adversary than Winston Churchill. This ground-breaking book reveals Gore-Booth’s experiences of militant pacifism during the Great War, her campaign to reprieve Roger Casement's death sentence, her instrumental role in the fight for sexual equality in the English workplace and her unwavering struggle for Irish independence. Her close bond with her sister, Countess Markievicz, an iconic and sometimes divisive Irish nationalist, offers the reader a new dimension into Markievicz's personal life.

Comprehensive and engaging, this book establishes Eva Gore-Booth as a significant player in Irish and British politics and as a major figure in literary, women’s and trade union history."

“Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance: African American Women
Writers, 1900–1922,” aims to digitize and annotate a limited array of
primary texts, mainly poetry, and present these materials as a digital
archive in the Scalar platform. The project aligns with what Kim
Gallon has referred to as a “technology of recovery,” which is one
of the core principles bridging African American literary studies
and the digital humanities. The project uses Scalar’s visualization
and tagging structures to explore stylistic, thematic, and social
relationships among a small group of writers, as well as to explore
the conversations these writers were having with established
writers and editors. Several key themes have begun to emerge as
the project has developed. The first of these is the confrontation
with American racism, which impacted African American
communities intensely in the 1910s; and these poets document
the emergence of racial violence and the response to that violence.
Second, these poets show how the role of African American
motherhood was evolving in the early years of the twentieth century, in part because of the stresses of raising children in a
racist society. Third, the black Church became strongly connected
to the movement for social justice at this time; and several, if not
most, of the writers in this archive explored Christian themes in
their anti-racist writing.

In Weihui’s banned novel, _Shanghai Babe_ (1999), the social effects of globalization can be seen in changing ethical discourses concerning what it is to be a responsible citizen, friend or lover. Beginning with a discussion of cosmopolitanism and cultural citizenship, this paper explores how class inequalities and gender hierarchies undercut these ideals. For while the novel celebrates cosmopolitan choice and cultural empowerment, its plot also foregrounds the fragility of interpersonal commitments in the face of market capitalism’s promotion of both a culture of immediate pleasure and an elite culture based on deferred gratification. Similarly, the novel celebrates sexual freedom, but its graphic accounts of the protagonist’s sado-masochistic affair with a married German businessman may leave readers wary of the dangers of transgressing conventional norms.

Cet article propose une interprétation sociologique, esthétique et féministe des Chiennes savantes, deuxième roman de Virginie Despentes qui demeure peu étudié. Despentes révèle les processus de socialisation menant à la construction de l'identité féminine qui, selon Pierre Bourdieu, repose sur la domination masculine. Cette socialisation conduit à la construction binaire et à la naturalisation des identités de genre. À travers la caractérisation des personnages, les dynamiques de pouvoir et l'ironie dramatique, Despentes dénonce la mise en scène de l'opposition entre le masculin et le féminin. Cette ironie fonctionne comme une resignification et subversion qui engendrent l'« agency, » selon Judith Butler, de la protagoniste.

In den ersten Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts veröffentlichte Johanna Carolina Amalia Ludecus, geb. Kotzebue (1755-1827), unter dem Pseudonym Amalie Berg zahlreiche Erzählungen und mehrere Romane. Weibliche Figuren standen im Mittelpunkt der Erzählprosa dieser Weimarer Autorin, die sich mit dem Zeitgeschehen und den Lebenswelten ihrer Gegenwart befasste.
Die Residenzstadt an der Ilm bildete den Lebensmittelpunkt der in Wolfenbüttel aufgewachsenen Schriftstellerin. Hier diente sie als Kammerfrau am Hof der Herzogin Luise von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. In ihrem Haus an der Esplanade fanden die geselligen Zusammenkünfte an einem der berühmtesten Weimarer Teetische statt, zu dem Johanna Schopenhauer ihre Gäste einlud. Als eine der Mitbegründerinnen des „Patriotischen Instituts der Frauenvereine“ gehörte sie zu dem Kreis der sozial engagierten Frauen der Stadt, für deren Initiative die Großfürstin von Russland und Erbherzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach Maria Pawlowna die Schirmherrschaft übernahm.
Die vorliegende Auswahl ihrer Erzählungen wird durch eine kommentierte Erstveröffentlichung ihrer Briefe ergänzt. Neben Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker, dessen vielgelesenes Taschenbuch »Erholungen« regelmäßig Erzählungen von Amalie Berg enthielt, gehörten Carl August Böttiger und Friedrich Justin Bertuch zu den Briefpartnern der Cousine des Erfolgsautors August von Kotzebue.

These voices of utopia, inseparable from the experience of dislocation, are a unique contribution to the literature of testimony. With her cycle Svetlana Alexievich has established herself as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainian and Belarusian who uses the Russian language – the only language in which she is completely fluent – to collect and present, from her own subaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of the traumas inflicted by empire.

Literarische Texte über traumatische Erfahrungen legen sich stets
eine eigenartige Sprache zu: die Sprache nämlich, in der das Trauma – dessen wichtigster Grundzug es doch ist, verschwiegen zu werden – schließlich doch noch erzählt und so auch verwunden werden kann. Traumatexte werden oft als Geständnisse, narrative Heilungsprozesse verstanden. Es entsteht um die Wende vom 20. zum 21. Jahrhundert in der Tat eine Vielzahl literarischer Texte, zu deren Verständnis die Ansatzpunkte der Traumatheorien einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten können. Die literarischen Traumatexte scheinen nämlich auf den ersten Blick entweder nüchtern und emotionslos, ja sogar kalt zu sein (bekannte Bespiele sind Roman eines Schicksallosen von Imre Kertész, Asszony a fronton [Frau an der Front] von Alaine Polcz und die Erzählungen von Ida Fink), oder aber sie erwecken im Gegenteil den Anschein, zu gefühlsam, geschwätzig, offenherzig, ja bedrückend ehrlich zu sein. Zu dieser letzten Gruppe gehören zumeist Schriften, die eben in Folge dieser Eigenschaften nicht zur hohen Literatur gezählt werden: Holocaust‐Memoiren, Briefe, Autobiographien. Den Lesern fällt es schwer, in diesen Werken die Spuren eines Traumas – die Unfähigkeit es auszusprechen, den Drang daran vorbeizureden –, kurzum die Elemente zu entdecken, die ihnen diese ungewohnten emotionellen und ästhetischen Erfahrungen zuteil werden lassen, weshalb sie viel zu oft ablehnend reagieren. Das Lesen traumatischer Texte erfordert von dem Rezipienten
ja mehr Offenheit und eine größere Bereitschaft, an seelischen
Lasten zu tragen, als die Rezeption eines durchschnittlichen
literarischen Werks, um von der Lektüre der Unterhaltungsliteratur ganz zu schweigen. Das Trauma lässt sich ja zum Teil auch während der Lektüre miterleben – vor allem dank der Wirksamkeit spezifischer
Texteffekte. Ich erörtere in der vorliegenden Abhandlung die
Wirkungsmechanismen der traumatheoretischen Interpretationsstrategien anhand der Auslegung von Gabriella Nagys Schrift Fall.

Écrivaine, conteuse, auteure de plusieurs poèmes, romans, nouvelles et ouvrages destinés aux jeunes, mais aussi ancienne interprète, traductrice et enseignante de français, Marie-Célie Agnant nous a fait l’honneur d’accepter notre invitation à intervenir sur le thème « Femmes et mémoire » dans le cadre du 7e colloque international Women in French. Pour le présent volume, l'auteure a bien voulu répondre, par correspondance, à nos questions sur la mémoire, le souvenir et, en particulier, le travail de la transmission entre les générations, notions qui s’inscrivent au cœur de ses œuvres.

Introduzione, traduzione italiana con testo latino a fronte a cura di Paola Casali. La donna non è solo “tanto gentile e tanto onesta”. Anche il nostro medioevo, come ogni età e troppe culture, non è immune alla misoginia. La raccolta delle nove favole del maestro Adolfo di Vienna, tramandata con il titolo «Doligamus» (gli inganni delle donne), e pubblicata ora in ebook in traduzione italiana e in latino da Paola Casali, è un testo in versi che si inserisce nel pieno della tradizione misogina, da quella occidentale della commedia latina e degli «exempla» medievali a quella delle raccolte novellistiche orientali, come «Le mille e una notte», fino a giungere a Boccaccio e oltre. Con l’intento dichiarato di mettere in guardia contro la malizia e la scaltrezza femminile, tutte le storielle narrate dipingono la donna, moglie e madre (in particolare delle donne!) secondo il repertorio misogino più classico, indugiando sui particolari anche licenziosi della donna traditrice come Dalila, feroce come Medea, mutevole come Proteo, fonte di tutti i mali e di tutte le disgrazie dell’uomo. L’edizione critica, a cura di Paola Casali, con un puntuale commento e traduzione per ciascuna favola, è stata pubblicata a stampa nel 1997 dalle stesse Edizioni del Galluzzo.

El propósito de este trabajo es analizar la recepción de las escritoras de posguerra españolas en un doble ámbito: el de la crítica tradicional y el de la crítica feminista. En este careo se pone en evidencia la misoginia que impregna la crítica literaria masculina y las dificultades que afrontan las escritoras para afirmarse en los ambientes literarios. Si en la crítica tradicional priman consideraciones infundadas e insustanciales sobre el matiz autobiográfico en los textos de las escritoras de posguerra, para la crítica feminista es un claro deber recuperar voces disidentes y testimonios ocultos. Las escritoras fueron conscientes desde el primer momento de que su testimonio, aún sin proponérselo, suponía una diferencia, primero respecto a todo lo que habían escrito las mujeres de preguerra y, en segundo lugar, en relación a lo que escribían sus compañeros masculinos.

The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso,
héroe

Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen etimológico del término “compromiso” y su relación con la figura del héroe. ¿Son ámbitos diferenciados, irreconciliables o, en momentos determinados, él héroe puede lidiar con cierta locura que implicaría la realización del acto heroico, de un compromiso con su sociedad?.

KEYWORDS: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, madness, engagement, hero

Through the analysis of selected scenes from the last chapter of Homeland's sixth season and the film Sully, I reflect on the etymological origin of the term “commitment” and its relation to the hero‟s character. Do they belong to different or irreconcilable areas, or at certain moments, can the hero deal with a certain madness that would imply the accomplishment of the heroic act, of a commitment to his/her society?.

Focusing on Edith Wharton’s New York trilogy, the author interprets the function of fashionable dress as a means of constructing social identity. The paper looks at how the concept of “passing” develops through the language of dress and the poetics of behavior. The semiotics of dress reflects the wearer’s strategies of performative “passing”: efforts to become accepted in a certain social group, in this case, New York High Society of the Gilded Age. The paper analyses two key conceptual discourses used in the works of Edith Wharton: Veblenian theory of the leisure class and Darwinian idea of natural selection.

This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.

The Grace of Mary Traverse, a play written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, presents a multi-dimensional portrayal of the role of women by focusing on social, political, psychological, and also physical aspects. The imposed inferiority upon women compared to the supposed superiority of men in a patriarchal society is challenged by the female characters in the play. However, the main character, Mary is taken in her own quest. While trying to break her chains and learn the life and search for knowledge, she has fallen to the trap of mimicking the patriarchal attitude rather than subverting them and creating her own way. Thus, this article will analyse to what extent the main character of the play succeeded in the discovery of the world, knowledge, her identity, and herself while struggling to see beyond the glass only through which she was allowed to see the world for years. Moreover, the pursuit of finding her identity as a subject will be questioned as an act of turning the other people into objects.

Brown have been read by millions of children and adults. Most of her forty novels and other short stories, published from 1923 until 1960, are less well-known. Crompton's writing often focuses on the lives of women, who are stifled by society's expectations. They feel trapped within houses, walls and gardens, although a few find solace in a room of their own. Their experience resonates with Virginia Woolf's concern for the plight of women writers who struggle to find a room of their own in which to write. Some of her characters tussle with the nature of good and evil in carefully structured tales that break the norms of traditional realist fiction. Crompton also writes about the experience of disabled people, who are patronised and marginalised within family and community life. Richmal Crompton's novels reflect social and cultural changes at work in the mid-twentieth century and deserve much greater attention. They are not funny like her famous stories, although there are a couple of exceptions, but they do take a satirical and wry look at life. Crompton writes about ordinary people who are often more unconventional and interesting than some might assume. For Crompton, every life has value. Most of her novels are not based on dramatic and exciting plots, although a few are. They explore how people cope with their expectations early in life and their circumstances later. They are interested in the early promise of the young and what happens to ordinary middle-class people when their dreams are not fully realised. At times, she is optimistic and her characters find some accommodation with themselves and in their relationships with those close to them, whilst others do not and become angry and resentful. The novels use powerful imagery and metaphors

Writing for emancipation While reading through the texts of the Contemporary Period present in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, I had a particular attention on the ones written by women. These authors narrate their experiences making us know what was like being a woman, a black woman or an immigrate woman in the 20 th century ; also we can have a really clear idea of the ideology that the dominant class, and precisely men, had about women. From an historical point of view, what was labelled as the " weaker sex " has always been persecuted since the very beginning of human history, because discrimination is an issue of power. Starting from this, between the end of the 18 th century and the beginning of the 19 th century, women, in the United States as well as in Europe, started to create associations and corporations in order to achieve all the rights that had always been denied to them. My goal is to demonstrate that the gaining of Women rights in America was glorious if compared to Europe, not only for the date when women can vote, but for example, because of the number of women that made writing their professions. That wasn't even thinkable in Europe. So, reading the texts I have decided to focus on, I'll try to prove also how women literature had helped them to emancipate and gain their rights. To achieve this goal, I have decided to divide my paper into four main sections. The first one is going to be on the historical context; I'm going to focus precisely on the main events that represent the beginning of the Women movement in the United States. In the second part, I'll analyse the texts I chose, concentrating on the different experiences they had lived and how their writings helped them to achieve several aims. The third part is going to be a crucial comparison

F emale curiosity is here discussed in the context of traditional and modern Korean folktales and proverbs, and the ways in which these conceptualize the issue.These traditional ways of perceiving female curiosity are then juxtaposed with the way it is re-imaged in a contemporary feminist fairy tale. The aim of such comparison is to show how patriarchal ideology is being sub-verted in contemporary feminist rewritings of traditional Korean fairy tales.  First published in BAKS 10, 2005: 107–118

This book review of Emma Young's important monograph calls for more inclusivity in short story theory.
Article also accessible here: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/14/1/144/5316465

Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpy028

Scrittrice, giornalista, critica d’arte. Camille Mallarmé (1886-1960) è stata questo e altro, in un susseguirsi di identità multiple, sovrapposte, e alla fine consegnate all’oblio.
Nipote del poeta Stéphane, moglie di Paolo Orano, amica intima di Eleonora Duse e Gabriele D’Annunzio, nonché traduttrice di Pirandello in Francia, Camille Mallarmé si colloca in uno dei momenti più delicati e intensi della Storia primonovecentesca per poi uscirne sconfitta, al pari di una personalità apolide e a tratti ‘scomoda’.
Quel che resta è una scrittura senza volto, di cui Diego Salvadori segue l’evoluzione discontinua e incerta, ripercorrendo in maniera inversa le tappe di un volontario sfiguramento, attraverso l’analisi di documenti inediti e d’archivio, ma soprattutto guardando alla produzione letteraria della scrittrice: dal romanzo sentimentale alla narrativa per l’infanzia, per poi approdare all’autobiografismo latente.

2020, seria "Perspektywy Ponowoczesności", tom 10: "Topografie podróży" pod red. Anity Całek

The paper titled 'Outlander. The journey through time, the journey through space' by Barbara Szymczak-Maciejczyk is centered on the leitmotiv of time-traveling. A popular tv series about the love of a twentieth-century nurse Claire Randall and Scottish warrior Jamie Fraser from the eighteen century is considered as a pop-cultural phenomenon that influenced film tourism and in-depth research on Scottish old and contemporary culture.

This paper is focused on showing the progress of changes in ways of reading and, what is more important, interpreting women’s autobiographies and diaries. Main attention was given to the increasing influence of theoretical considerations combine with feminist literary criticism. Both history and theory of women’s autobiographical writing, was (and still are) seen as more complex, more related with many contexts - political, historical and social, and, moreover, literary.

RESUMEN: Emilia Serrano, baronesa de Wilson, escritora granadina del XIX, pasó la mitad de su vida en América Latina, convirtiéndose en una buena conocedora del continente. Sus libros Maravillas americanas y América y sus mujeres trataron de dar cuenta de su experiencia, en un momento de notables cambios en las relaciones entre España y América Latina. Este artículo busca analizar la posición que ocupa Serrano en la literatura de viajes de su época, en un tiempo donde la mujer escritora se incorpora masivamente a este género, pero también el modo en que utiliza dos fórmulas narrativas distintas: el costumbrismo y la autobiografía para elaborar imaginariamente la mirada hacia su tierra de acogida.

This article examines menstruation as an exclusively feminine experience and outlines its expressions in current-day Israeli women's literature. Presenting menstruation from a feminine point of view, one attentive to the experience of women in a patriarchal world, it delineates a distinct move – from exclusion to commendation, from a source of shame to a core of empowerment. At the same time the feminine story provides testimony to a primordial female presence which shatters hegemonic frameworks, defying the rules of patriarchy – a female motherly presence described by Julia Kristeva as one of the "Powers of Horror" which rise on the cultural father, rocking the foundations of his world. Reading Israeli women's literature from the 1950s, 60s and 70s reveals an uttermost avoidance of the female cycle, in keeping with the dictates of the hegemonic discourse, which sentenced the discussion of the discharges of the female body (and the body in general) to silence. The 1980s mark the beginning of a (rather arbitrary) discussion of the subject, which is finally awarded poetic legitimacy in the 1990s. The 2000s disarm the references to the fundamental experience of the female existence from its attendant overtones in patriarchal culture, and the debate becomes completely casual. In discussing the charged issue the article also reflects on the mother-daughter relationship in a patriarchal world, as it is expressed in recent local Israeli women's writing.