Thanks to the reader of my blog AW, I received the info on this new book by Victoria Rowe "A History of Armenian Women's Writing 1880-1922". Seems very interesting. It's now available to pre-order via Amazon, with the release date (paperback) indicated as 4 March 2009.Below are details via Amazon and Google Book. A preview of 2003 edition of (as far as I understand) the same book (or her PhD thesis) is available on Google Book.
Product Description (Amazon)
This classic, path-breaking volume restores the pioneering generation of 19th and 20th century Armenian women writers to their rightful place in the histories of modern Armenian and Ottoman literatures. The author reconstructs the biographies and bibliographies and analyzes the texts of six Armenian women writers and contextualizes their works in the intellectual and cultural milieus of the late Ottoman and Russian Empires.
(Google Book) The volume focuses on six Armenian women writers-Srpouhi Dussap, Sibyl, Mariam Khatisian, Marie Beylerian, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayian and these authors' novels, short stories, poems and essays. The study contends that Western and Eastern Armenian women writers, while not displaying a uniformity of opinion and vision, nevertheless found inspiration in the activism, writings and arguments of one another and form a literary genealogy of women's writing in Armenian.The study has several objectives. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical account it provides a chronological description of the formative period of modern Armenian women's writing beginning in 1880 with the publication of a series of articles on women's education and employment by Srpouhi Dussap and concludes with the physical dislocations and psychological traumas of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and the fall of the first independent Republic of Armenia in 1921.On another level the book concentrates on disentangling the contemporaneous intellectual debates about Armenian women's proper sphere. The author argues that the role of the Armenian woman was central to debates about national identity, education, the family and society by Armenian writers and women writers sought to participate in and guide this discourse through literary texts.
About the Author (Amazon)
Victoria Rowe specializes in Armenian literary history and gender studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Canada upon completion of her doctoral thesis: The New Armenian Woman : Armenian Women's Writing in the Ottoman Empire, 1880-1915. Her articles on Armenian literary history and gender have appeared in numerous academic journals. She is the editor of translations of the works of Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayian and has translated Inga Nalbandian's Your Brother s Blood Cries Out, (Gomidas Institute, 2007). She has taught Armenian literature at universities in Canada and Japan and is currently co-editor of Journal of Armenian History and Literature.
thanks for posting this mika! this is a brilliant book by a remarkable scholar. it was originally published in 2003 through cambridge scholars press in london. this is a reprint by gomidas press (2009) which in my opinions is one of our best presses that has consistently published quality books, excellent translations and rare titles such as rowe's book. when i met victoria in 2005, as we were working on shushanik kurghinian's translated poems, she told me that her goal was to write a second volume of this (i call it) HERSTORY that will span from 1922 to the present day. i can't wait.
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