Saturday 16 June 2012

Novas Cartas Portuguesas: The Making of a Reputation

My article on Novas Cartas is now available in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship (open-access). Comments are very welcome!

Ana Margarida Dias Martins turns our attention to the feminist literary and theoretical canon as she focuses on the text Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters), published in 1972 and co-authored by Portuguese writers Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa. Martins reassesses the internationalization of Novas Cartas Portuguesas in order to understand what forces, both theoretical and political, kept the text from becoming an established part of feminist literary canons in Europe or the United States, while also exposing how it contributed to 1970s feminist intellectual conversations and movement. In doing so, Martins also argues for further reanalysis of Novas Cartas Portuguesas in order to understand the often overlooked relationship between French and Anglo-American feminisms and texts from outside the Franco-Anglophone spectrum.