Practices of Liberation in Women’s Writing circa 1900 (Central and Eastern Europe)

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Affiliate Organization: Association for Women in Slavic Studies

Brief Description

In many areas of Eastern and Central Europe, including Ukraine, women emerge as a literary force towards the end of the 19th century. Was such increased visibility simply the result of greater numbers of women engaging in cultural production or did other factors affect the emergence and recognition of female writing? This panel examines how women writers emerged in specific national contexts and what pressures might have helped to shape how they were recognized in their own eras and later. What factors conditioned – perhaps enchaining or facilitating -- women’s literary liberation in Ukraine? And how does the Ukrainian case compare with the experience of other national traditions in Central and Eastern Europe? Other questions to be considered include: Were women encouraged or required to write differently than men in order to enter the literary field? How did factors such as class, ethnicity, and heteronormativity affect the reception of women writers? Were certain social or political views required of them or considered taboo? How did currents such as modernism, radicalism, nationalism (or supranationalism) intersect with the female gender to define or influence the literary status of women writers? How did understandings of gender spill over into other discourses or modes of knowledge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inflecting them as female and influencing their reception? And finally, do case studies from different cultural contexts illustrate shared supranational principles about the role that women writers have had to play in literary history?

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Sara Dickinson, U of Genoa (Italy)

Roundtable Members

• Anna Lordan, Oberlin College

• Anastasiia Omelianiuk, Vrije U Amsterdam (Netherlands)

• Olha Poliukhovych, National U of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Ukraine)

• Oleksandra G. Shtepenko, Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (Ukraine)