British Women Writers 1945-1960: Documentation, Interpretation, Cultural Impact Research

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ingo Berensmeyer
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 264357303

The principal objective of this project is to document and interpret the work of British women writers between 1945 and 1960 and to assess their cultural impact. The project combines insights and methods from gender studies, literary sociology, postclassical narratology, new authorship studies, and the digital humanities in order to study the role of literature in processes of cultural change. As many women writers from this period are currently being rediscovered, there is a need for more systematic research in this field. In order to support such research, this project has three goals. Its first goal is documentation. The project aims to develop an electronic database in a wiki format to collect information and to make this information available to the public as a tool for research and teaching. The database will include entries for c. 200 British women writers of the period. The second goal is textual interpretation. The project pursues an intersectional study of constructions of gender in texts by women writers in connection with issues of domesticity, class boundaries and issues considered socially taboo or unwholesome at the time, such as female criminality, adultery, madness or homosexuality. This research will result in case studies of selected writers and texts from various genres, taking the form of close readings/textual analysis. They will also address the question of how certain genres (such as the confessional lyric or the kitchen-sink drama) influenced or pre-formatted what could be expressed in a given context, and to what extent and on what levels state censorship still played a role in this period. The third goal is to gain a wider cultural-historical perspective on the development, production and reception of British women writers: to study how sex (the ascription of being male or female) functioned as a category of difference and value in the British literary system of the 1940s and 1950s. This part of the project addresses the question how women writers staged themselves or were staged as (women) authors by other cultural agents (publishers, reviewers, censors, etc.), and also the question of their cultural impact or afterlife until today. This objective combines insights from the documentation of authors and the textual interpretation of sources with recent advances in authorship studies that focus less on individual writers than on cultural networks.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants