The War That Challenged Gender Roles: English Women War Narratives of the First World War

Authors

  • Denise Borille de Abreu UFMG

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5902/1679849X25175

Keywords:

Women and War Studies, English Literature, The First World War

Abstract

Women’s participation in wars, either directly or indirectly, has been the study object of war narratives since the Classical Age. This article aims to analyze women’s significant role to the construction of cultural memory and how women’s representations have evolved, from myth, since Homer until the early twentieth century, when the First War was declared, to the assumption of “silent victims” in wartime, and finally to the condition of proactive members of a much-dreamed society with equal opportunities for everyone. This paper addresses, more specifically, how women war narratives of the First World War reflect upon the war trauma, which brought equally disastrous consequences for women, men and children and how the War contributed to the reconfiguration of women’s social roles.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Denise Borille de Abreu, UFMG

Graduação em Letras pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (1996), mestrado em literaturas de língua inglesa pela mesma instituição (2008) e doutorado em literaturas de língua portuguesa na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (2016)

References

BARKER, Pat. Regeneration. New York: Plume, 1991.

BLUNDELL, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

BRITTAIN, Vera. Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

DAS, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

HIGONNET, Margaret R. Lines of Fire: Women War Writers of World War I. New York: Plume, 1999.

HOMER. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

LEFKOWITZ, Mary R. Women in Greek Myth. London: Duckworth, 2007.

LEVENBACK, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

MARTIN, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

ROBBINS, Keith. The First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

SCOTT, Bonnie Kime. Introduction. In: WOOLF, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005, p. xxxv-lxviii.

THUCYDIDES. História da Guerra do Peloponeso. Trad. Mário da Gama Kury. Brasília: Editora da UnB, 1982.

USUI, Masami. The Female Victims of the War in Mrs. Dalloway. In: HUSSEY, Mark (Ed.). Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. p. 151-163.

WEST, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier. New York: Random House, 2004.

WOOLF, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Downloads

Published

2016-12-11

How to Cite

Abreu, D. B. de. (2016). The War That Challenged Gender Roles: English Women War Narratives of the First World War. Literatura E Autoritarismo, (17). https://doi.org/10.5902/1679849X25175

Most read articles by the same author(s)