Antigone's Daughters?

Gender, Geneology, and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-century Portuguese Women's Writing

Hilary Owen and Cláudia Pazos Alonso

2011
255 pages
ISBN 1611480023

Antigone's Daughters? provides the first detailed discussion in English of six well-known Portuguese women writers, working across a wide range of genres: Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), Irene Lisboa (1892-1958), Agustina Bessa Luís, (1923- ), Natália Correla (1923-1993), Hélia Correia (1948- ), and Lídia Jorge (1946- ). Together, they afford a historical insight into the complex gender politics of achieving institutional acceptance and validation in the Portuguese national canon at different points in the twentieth century.

Although a patrilinear evolutional model visibly structures national literary history in Portugal to the present day, women writers and critics have not generally sought to replace this with a matrilinear feminist counter-history. The unifying metaphor that Hilary Owen and Cláudia Pazos Alonso adopt here for the purpose of discussing Portuguese women writers' ambivalent response to genealogy is the classical figure of Antigone, who paradoxically sacrifices her own genealogical continuity in the name of defending family and kinship, while resisting the patriarchal pragmatics of state-building. In the literary historical context this raises the following question: should women writers, faced with the absence of a female tradition, posit a woman-centered place outside the jurisdiction of male genealogy, however strategically essentialist that place may be, or should they primarily eschew fixed sexual identity, undoing the law of patriarchal tradition from within?

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Reviews

"...the authors, both well-respected academics and widely-published critics, make a decisive contribution to the visibility and critical understanding of a group of nationally-circumscribed women writers."
--Ana Paula Ferreira, University of Minnesota, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90.8 (2013): 1389-1390.

About the authors:

Hilary Owen is Professor of Portuguese at the University of Manchester. She holds a doctorate from the University of Nottingham, and is the author of Portuguese Women's Writing, 1972-1986: Reincarnations of a Revolution (2000) , and co-editor (with Philip Rothwell) of Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Luscophone African Literature (2004). Professor Owen has published widely on modern Portuguese, Brazilian, and Mozambican women's writing and is particularly interested in the interface between feminist criticism and postcolonial theory in lusophone contexts. Her articles have bene published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Portuguese Studies, Ellipsis, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Index on Censorship, and Mea libra, among other journals.

Cláudia Pazos Alonso is a University Lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian studies at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Wadham College, author of Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca, and coeditor of A Companion to Portuguese Literature.

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