Correspondence and literature: Ana Cristina Cesar, Katherine Mansfield and women epistolary writing.

• Grant number: 24/05639-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: April 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Antonio Siscar
• Grantee: Talissa Rodrigues Ancona Lopez
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The history of the letter is often read alongside the history of women's writing. Since the 17th century, when large correspondences from European women of the nobility were published for the first time, a particularly feminine history of correspondence was established, supported by the main perspective that writing letters would be "natural" for women, given that the letter was seen, at the time, as a "minor genre". Ana Cristina Cesar and Katherine Mansfield are authors who wrote, each in their own way, letters and literature. In each of these authors, the link that connects the correspondence to the literary text seems to occur in a different way, even though the desire for the letter seems to be equally powerful, alive and present. This research proposes, based on a historiographical review of the path of the letter in the history of female writing, to follow how the epistolary writing of these authors relates to their literary works. This research focuses on the notion of "tradition of female epistolography" to investigate how Ana Cristina Cesar and Katherine Mansfield contextually fit into this complex current. From this resumption, the main objective is to investigate how the literature of these authors is constructed in parallel with their epistolary productions. To this end, the concept of addressing is revisited - as opposed to the notion of a "minor genre" of epistolary writing - as a possible key to interpreting the intersections and approximations between letters, literature and women.