NWO digitizing project ?The International Reception of Women?s Writing?.
Started in September 2004 at Utrecht University, it aims to facilitate the study of women’s literary history by creating a large-scale empirical basis concerning the response to women’s writing before ca. 1900. In our view this needs to be done on an international scale, in order to include and take account of the role of translation and (female) translators.
The project maintains and furnishes two internet-based instruments:
1. the database “WomenWriters”, a dynamic digital collection of data about contemporary receptio n of women’s writing (before ca. 1900) www.roquade.nl/womenwriters.
2. the publication site “Women Writers’ Networks” www.roquade.nl/wwriters.
Both these function as a collaboratory where participants on the project stock their digital material, and publish partial and preliminary results in preparation for future historiography. They are used in preparation for international projects concerning women’s literary history.
Both the database and the publication site consist of three inter-related levels:
1. Authors: an inventory of writing women’s names. In the database, information has been, or can later be attached to each of these names (relevant biographical information, hyperlinks to on-line bio- and bibliographies).
2. Titles of their writings: works of various literary and non-literary genres, about which reception data are to be provided. In the database, information is or can be attached to the titles (year of appearance, presence in libraries, hyperlinks to electronic versions of the text, relevant details on contents – in part formalised and referring to SatorBase, database for narrative analysis; in certain cases the text of the work itself is provided).
3. Information on the reception of these works: the database contains references to the various types of reactions; in exceptional cases the texts of the commentaries themselves (by typing or OCR). A distinction is made between male and female receptions. Names of female “receivers” are also integrated in the first-level list. Thanks to this unique listing, networks and filiations between women can be rendered visible. Names of male readers do not figure in the same system; they are of course noted down in the records.
Several levels of reception are distinguished, which yield different, mutually complementary, information. One of the novelties of our database’s structure is in the bringing together of these levels:
- The “silent reception”, documented by book history and the history of reading. This material is of the utmost importance for insight in the contemporary impact of texts by women. This information is, however, completely implicit and open to contradictory interpretation. For our purposes, it needs elaboration with the help of other types of reception documents:
- The “creative” reception: rewriting of texts, “intertextualities”;
- The “mediating” reception: literary reviews, translations etc. In these two levels, more easily than for the silent reception, gender can be taken into account.
The database-structure thus generates a series of parallel texts (original texts and their rewritings and evaluations) which need to be studied by comparative textual analysis. Here, a particular instrument is helpful, brought about thanks to narratology: narrative topoi –recurrent elements representing crucial situations. A certain number of those elements will be selected and used as “standard-topoi” in the database, because, provoking reactions with contemporary critics, they must be considered particularly meaningful in women’s texts. Analysis of the “creative” and the “mediating” receptions will focus at these points in comparison to the original text.
The current project (2004-2007) concerns in particular the collecting of reception data from Dutch sources (18th and 19th centuries). At the same time, other projects are being prepared.
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