Villegas De La Torre, Esther Maria (2012) Women and the Republic Of
WOMEN AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS IN THE LUSO-HISPANIC WORLD, 1447–1700 Esther María Villegas de la Torre Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 Abstract Questions of gender, feminism, and écriture feminine in individual cases continue to be given priority in studies of women’s writing in Baroque Spain, to the exclusion of study of the wealth of original sources that show women participating freely and equally in all aspects of the Republic of Letters, as contemporaries called the literary profession. My doctoral thesis seeks to correct this imbalance by charting the rise and consolidation of the status and image of women as authors in and around the period now recognized as having seen the beginnings of the literary profession, 1600-1650. I take as my field the república literaria in the Spanish Atlantic empire in the period 1450–1700, with parallels from England, France and Italy. Using Genette’s studies of the paratext (2001) and Darnton’s theory of the “communication circuit” (2006), and building on the work of cultural historians (Bouza 1992, 1997, 2001; Bourdieu 1993; Chartier 1994; Cayuela 1996 & 2005), I examine the role of women as authors and readers, chiefly through an analysis of the discourse of their paratexts in a representative corpus of texts patronized, written, or published by women in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish. The key criterion of selection has been the projection of a female voice in public texts, whether via a sobriquet, a real name, grammatical gender, or a pseudonym. However, where appropriate, it has been extended to include also literary correspondence, book inventories, and texts, which despite being published anonymously, have been shown to be by women.
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