Antigone's Daughters?: Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing - Hardcover

Hilary Owen; Cláudia Pazos Alonso

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611480027 ISBN 13: 9781611480023

Publisher: Bucknell University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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 Luís, (1923- ), Natália Correia (1923-93), Hélia Correia (1949 -) and Lídia 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?

About this title

About the Author:

Hilary Owen is professor of Portuguese and Luso-African studies at the University of Manchester, England.
Cláudia Pazos Alonso is a university lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian studies at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wadham College.

Review:

The chronological sequence of the authors and texts studied in this volume affords a diachronic view of the topic, and their pairing into three groups of two allows us to see how women writers of three different historical periods from 1919 to 1998 relate to the male dominated canon while constructing themselves as authors. . . . the authors, both well-respected academics and widely-published critics, make a decisive contribution to the visibility and critical understanding of a group of nationally-circumscribed women writers. (Bulletin of Spanish Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1611480027
• ISBN 13: 9781611480023
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250