Women Writers and Modernism: reading Eleanor Farjeon, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf

• Grant number: 18/11314-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: February 01, 2019
• End date: May 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Cleide Antonia Rapucci
• Grantee: Guilherme Magri da Rocha
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 19/15456-6 - Children's literature and literary modernism: dialogues in the Anglo-American tradition, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This research project aims to present reflections on the established relation between Children's Literature and Modernism. In order to achieve this objective, Reception Theory (JAUSS, 1994, ISER, 1999 and 1996) and Feminist Criticism (SHOWALTER 1985 and 1994) were the theoretical contributions selected to enable reading possibilities of The World is Round (1939), by Gertrude Stein; "Nurse Lugton's Curtain" (1991) and "The Widow and the Parrot" (1985), by Virginia Woolf; "The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit" (1996), "The Bed Book" (1976), and "Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen "(2001), by Sylvia Plath; and Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1921), by Eleanor Flarjeon. These are texts written by women who are notable for their participation in what is conventionally called Literary Modernism, and whose books are important expressions of female authorship narratives. These specific volumes were selected because we understand that there is a symbiotic relation between Modernism and Children's Literature, which has been little explored worldwide. In this way, it is intended, through the mentioned texts: to problematize the question of the literary canon; to analyze how female characters are represented, as well as power relations are constructed; to examine modernist influences in children's literature; and to reflect on the relationship between the reader and the reading process. Finally, we aim to analyze these books in order to detect if the horizons of expectation of the young reader can be expanded by them, favoring his/her formation as a critical reader.

Academic Publications

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

ROCHA, Guilherme Magri da. Children's literature and literary modernism: palimpsests and representations of fictional consciousness in literature by women. 2022. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências e Letras. Assis Assis.