While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.
Riassunto: Il dibattito della Querelle des Femmes in Italia si sviluppa soprattutto durante il XV e XVI secolo attraverso vari trattati di autori ed autrici. In realtà l’inizio della Querelle des Femmes si potrebbe far concidere con le poetesse italiane del Duecento e del Trecento. L’articolo analizza come alcuni dei temi presenti nei testi di queste autrici si possono far risalire ad una tradizione di poesia femminile che comprende le poetesse dell’al-Andalus e le trobairitz. Sisters of Querelle. Al-Andalus Women Poets, Trobairitz and Italian Women Poets in the 13th and 14th Centuries Abstract: The debate on the Querelle des Femmes during the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy is based on different male and female authors’ dissertations. This Querelle des Femmes can be traced back to Italian women poets in the 13th and 14th centuries. This paper analyses some topics dealt with by these Italian women poets and studies the features they share with preceding al-Andalusian women poets and trobairitz
Raffaella Simili (Editor). Scienza a due voci. (Biblioteca di Nuncius, 50.) xix + 372 pp., figs., index. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006. €38 (paper).Valeria P. Babini;, Raffaella Simili (Editors). More Than Pupils: Italian Women in Science at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. (Biblioteca di Nuncius, 63.) xviii + 216 pp. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007. €24 (cloth).