Aspects of female authorship in Emily Dickinson's poetry

• Grant number: 09/13163-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2011
• End date: January 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos
• Grantee: Natalia Helena Wiechmann
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims at studying Emily Dickinson's poetry from gender theory perspective to reveal the poet's consciousness on gender relations in her historical and cultural context as well as its consequences and/or manifestations in her poetic work. In other words, assuming the patriarchal background of XIX century North-American society and Emily Dickinson's intense poetic production, more than 1000 poems discovered only after her death, this study will confront Dickinson's poems with the concepts of this society (more specifically on what concerns the literary work) so that, this way, we can define and explore the marks of the female presence in her poetry.Some of the issues to be discussed in this research are, on the one hand, the notably male-oriented southern north-American literary tradition, the female ideal from the male perspective and the stereotypes women have been confined into in literature and society. On the other hand, we will examine the shape these questions took in Emily Dickinson's poetry, as for instance the subtext that shows the degree of consciousness of the female authorship, the poetic images that consolidate the poet's experience with the poetic and social male authority and her particular poetic diction, which indicates an attitude of poetic resistance against linguistic and poetic conventions of her time. In order to do that, a corpus of poems will be defined throughout the development of this research to give support to the discussions proposed in this project. The theoretical perspective for this research is mainly based on the north-American feminist criticism as it is proposed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) as well as on other authors and texts related to the feminist criticism, which will be cited in the bibliography of this project.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

WIECHMANN, Natalia Helena. A questão da autoria feminina na poesia de Emily Dickinson. 2012. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências e Letras. Araraquara Araraquara.