6.0540 French Women Writers 1500--> (1/44)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Fri, 19 Feb 1993 12:30:53 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0540. Friday, 19 Feb 1993.
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 93 10:42:47 CST
From: Mark Olsen <mark@TIRA.UCHICAGO.EDU>
Subject: French Women Writers, 1500-1980
I am requesting some assistance from you to identify a list of
significant French women writers who published from 1500 to the
present. I am putting together a grant application to an agency
to enter about 200 or so texts into the ARTFL database. We have
every expectation, judging from some preliminary discussions, that
this project will be funded.
Sometime ago, as part of my study of gender representation in
French, I did a study of the make up of the current ARTFL database.
My results were startling:
The lack of female authors is particularly noticeable.25
Only thirty of the 588 authors in the ARTFL database are women,
representing some 3.8 percent of the total number of titles in
the database (67 of 1760).26 The most frequent female authors
include M. C. d'Aulnoy, Mme de Stael, Mme de Riccoboni, and G.
Colette. The sample of female authors is skewed in important
ways, most particularly in that it is much older than the
database in general, being reflected in the number of titles
published by women in each century. Sixteen of the 280 titles
(5.7 percent) in the ARTFL sample for the 17th century are by
women and 4.3 percent in the 18th century. The number of female
authors declines to 13 of the 573 titles (2.2 percent) in the
19th century and rises to four percent in the 20th century.
This is a glaring omission which I feel needs to be corrected.
As a first step in preparation of this proposal, I would like to
assemble a list of prospective authors/titles that should be included.
ARTFL will assemble a committee of specialists on French women writers
who will select the final sample, but this will be done at the
beginning of the project.
Please respond by e-mail to me (not to the list). I would appreciate
a listing that has
AUTHOR TITLE PUBLICATION DATE
for each work on a seperate line (accents are not necessary).
Let me thank all of you who can assist me in this matter in advance.
Mark Olsen
ARTFL Project