Gender, Image and Materiality in the Literary Culture of Modernity (1880s-1930s)
The project aims to explore the interaction between gender, image and materiality in the literary culture of modernity—between the 1880s and 1930s—in the Francophone and Ibero-American axis with the general objective of analysing the meaning of objects with respect to gender emancipation and sexual dissidence in modernity. The novelty of the project lies in analysing dissident and hegemonic discourses on gender and sexuality in the cultural press, popular collections and other non-canonical formats (albums, etc.) from the perspective of materiality studies (thing theory and new materialisms), with a comparative and transnational perspective, which explicitly considers modernity's emphasis on the circulation of texts and authors, which, together with the idea of novelty, change and speed, reconfigures hegemonic imaginaries at a time of crisis of empires and the emergence of new ideas of nationhood.
The central hypothesis is that modernity is linked to a culture of display characterised by its capacity to transfer objects and bodies from the private domains in which they had previously been located to increasingly open and public spaces where they are constituted as vehicles in which to inscribe and disseminate messages of power in society. Consequently, literature reproduces and produces this complex exhibitionary that links the regulation of modern identity to the social circulation of objects through a series of recurrent figures (the consumer, the dandy, the flapper), objects (the corset, the boots, the bibelot) and practices (consumption and its promotion through advertising, collecting) that are strongly gendered and in which sexual dissidence is often articulated.
The project proposes three thematic lines in order to map this use of objects:
- Objetuality, desire and dissidence, focused on identifying and analysing the representation of objects in the corpus analysed and reflecting on their meaning with respect to modernity, emancipation and sexual dissidence, with an emphasis on phenomena such as consumption, fashion or glamour.
- Authorship, gender and celebrity, focused on exploring the use of objects and images in the configuration of authorial positions that deviate from the canonical and masculine representations of author and gender.
- Aesthetics of the brief, portraiture and visibility, focused on exploring the interaction of non-hegemonic writings and aesthetics, used by dissident authors in terms of gender and sexuality, with hybrid genres and media that often have a markedly objectual character.
Objectives
- To explore the material dimension of consumer literature and how it conditions textuality (short forms, narrative models...) and its circulation in a transnational context.
- To explore the interaction between the visual and textual dimension in the literary culture of the period (advertising, cinema, photography... and how it is incorporated alongside the text and/or imprints new formats, languages... on literary expression).
- To analyse the representation of objects in literary works (the meaning of objects with respect to modernity, emancipation and sexual dissidence), especially of women writers.
- To analyse the role of the visual and the material (photographic image, authorial iconographies, etc.) in the configuration of female authorship in this period.