Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women\’s Writing, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
This online symposium examines historical fiction by women writers across languages, time periods and cultural settings. The aim is to facilitate a dialogue between scholars working on and/or from the Global South and North on intersectional feminist approaches to women’s histories and literary texts. Papers explore how the genre unearths women’s historical experiences, retrieves them from the archive and fills gaps in historical narratives through fiction in order to counter and challenge patriarchal and cisnormative official histories. How can fiction become a way for women writers, especially ethnic, LGBTQIA+ and other minorities, to reclaim their ancestral pasts and write forgotten subjectivities back into history? The symposium will reflect upon trends in historical fiction and gender-based approaches to the genre, with the aim for this to be a significant step towards developing more inclusive, transnational, comparative and comprehensive theoretical notions on women’s historical fiction.
