Loving against the odds: women's writing in English in a European context.

For over eight years the editors of European Connections have published studies in Comparative Literature in response to the increasing demand for cross-cultural approaches to literary texts, which -according to Peter Collier, the series editor -can no longer be studied in isolation from their cultural or formal context.Women's writing has become one of these areas calling for interdisciplinary investigation, as critical, national and generic definitions have proved elusive when dealing with the complex experiences of female authorship and readership.In this light, the volume under review (the third within the series devoted to European intertextuality in women's writing in English) acknowledges the existence of a European network of women's writing, which, echoing Arachne's web as a model for a feminist poetics, has articulated a plural female voice often repressed through history. 1 And that must be the reason why the topos of the 'web' -in its different variations like 'network', 'fabric', 'cobweb', 'tissue', 'embroidery', 'tapestry', 'texture' or 'threads' -is repeatedly invoked by the authors of these articles, in their common attempt at adopting what Nancy Miller calls a "critical positioning which reads against the weave of indifferentiation to discover the embodiment in writing of a gendered subjectivity" (1986: 272).Intertextuality, the collection's declared rubric, is effectively achieved at all levels.Although the focus of the articles is texts written in English, their influence, as Elizabeth Russell admits, has "travelled in all directionsthrough connections and links, solidarities and common problems affecting women" (11).And it is not surprising that, in line with this intertextual spirit, the authors have tried to establish a (more or less) successful dialogue between the English tradition and other national and cultural contexts such as Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Canada.In a similar vein, the diversity of genres, formats and styles explored throughout the volume seems to expand the conventional definition of literary text by including letters, biography, theatre productions or newspaper articles. 1The myth of Arachne has been frequently appropriated by feminist discourse to convey women's re-envisioning of patriarchal cultural patterns.In 'Arachnologies', Nancy Miller's playful account of Ovid's myth, Pallas Athena's illustrations reproduce the patriarchal narratives of authority and power whereas Arachne's illustrations articulate feminocentric protest in showing scenes that contradict the goddess's glorious fables of Olympian history and focus instead on arbitrary crime and abuse of women.In such a context, the weaver's web becomes a powerful metaphor for aesthetic and political subversion which has been endorsed by many female authors.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.