Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English

Lilla Maria Crisafulli · Gilberta Golinelli

May 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

The volume investigates the ‘voice’ of women writers in the development of literary studies, and interrogates how scholars read and teach women’s literary texts. These issues are still crucial for women’s and gender studies today and deserve to be properly investigated and constantly updated. The various essays collected here examine how, and to what extent, ‘women’, across time and space, experimented with new 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, and (hetero)sexuality.

Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English is addressed to MA and PhD students in women’s and gender studies, and to all those students or young scholars who are interested in gender methodologies as a mode of practice in literary criticism and analysis. The authors of the volume share a long-standing experience in women’s and gender studies and in teaching English women’s literature, literary criticism and feminist methodologies and theories to students from different national origins.

About the author

Lilla Maria Crisafulli is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna, Italy, and is the Italian coordinator of the Marie Curie Program Gender and Culture of Equality in Europe (GRACE). She founded and directs the Interuniversity Center for the Study of Romanticism and the literary journal La Questione Romantica, and has published volumes and essays on English Romanticism and on gender issues emerging in pre-Romantic and Romantic women poets and playwrights. She has also published on Anglo-Italian literary relations, Mary and Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her most recent full-length text on Romanticism is entitled The Romantic Stage: A Many-Sided Mirror (2014), and was edited with Fabio Liberto.

Gilberta Golinelli received her PhD from the University of Bologna, Italy, where she currently teaches English Literature, Feminist Methodologies and Critical Utopias. Her research fields include Shakespeare and early modern travel literature; the reception of Shakespeare in eighteenth century England and Germany; women’s literature, female utopian literature and utopianism; and feminist methodologies and gender studies. Together with essays and articles in international journals and edited collections, her publications are in the area of early modern English literature and Shakespearean studies. Her most recent book is Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women’s Utopianism. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell (2018).