| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,140,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to examine the birth and growth of an English professional woman playwright and the problem of interrelationships between women writers from the late seventeenth century and throughout eighteenth century in England, in the interest of the public sphere which was in the process of initial formation around that time. For that, I firstly considered the socio-cultural aspect of the appearance of the first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, in the theatrical world, and then, analyzed the strategic significance of influential, collaborative, or antagonistic relationships between the second-generation women writers, who were literary conscious of Behn. In addition, how women writers groups could be formed, and how they were accepted or criticized by the contemporary male writers or (women) readers were checked with inquiry into primary sources like the then popular periodicals.
As a result of reconsidering the public sphere from gendered viewpoints, a linage of women writers, that is called Behn's tribe, and a female network could be said to have arisen. While Behn's tribe did build and utilize the linage and network of "women writers," they inconsistently expanded the possibilities of such a network by breaking its unity with their deviant features from it, and contributed to form a literary lineage more stabilized and prolonged than before. They, first appearing as playwrights, could become gradually established as writers who created and published their philosophical contemplations or political opinions, with the help of the prosperity within the publishing culture.
Therefore, analyses of each writer's literary strategies and reasons of the changes in popularity in literary genres lead to the conclusion that the importance of interdependent or antagonistic relationships between women writers can be clearly shown in the gendered public sphere of long-eighteenth-century England.
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