Vladislava Gordić Petković
Univerzitet u Novom Sadu
Filozofski fakultet – Odsek za anglistiku, Novi Sad
vladysg@yahoo.com
doi: 10.19090/cit.2017.31.27-32
No. 31 (November 2017), p. 2-10
A Library in the Room of One’s Own: Women Authors, Female Characters and Books from Virginia Woоlf Until Today
Summary
The literary transposition of women’s grim historical experience of a centuries long marginalization has often
been met with antagonistic, or at least ambivalent reactions. If the mediation of women’s experience calls for the
reconstruction of the interpretative norms and practices related to the making of a literary work, it is necessary to
reexamine core metaphors and symbols such as libraries and books.
Revisiting the achievement of Virginia Woolf, the paper delves into the formative elements of women’s experience
which help create a literary tradition of their own, offering at the same time a resolute reconsideration of feminine
plots, as well as their principal motifs and narrative strategies. The male-defined standards are contrasted with
the achievement of gynocriticism and the case of Sarah Waters serves as an example of how the heroines of
Victorian literature grew out of the provincial and parochial into centralised symbols of both new identities and
new fictional genres. In their journey from cultural margins to diversity, women writers have managed to disrupt
the malecentredness of the literary canon and change it irrevocably, despite the ambivalent and contradictory
associations books and libraries invoked in them.
Keywords:
women’s literary tradition, library, Virginia Woolf, female literary characters
Submitted: 10th September 2017
Accepted for publication: 29th September 2017
A Library in the Room of One’s Own: Women Authors, Female Characters and Books from Virginia Woоlf Until Today
by
Vladislava Gordić Petković
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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