This long title, more suited to a scientific paper, is also, I realise, flawed, because I am using the very category (ie the writing of wom...
This long title, more suited to a scientific paper, is also, I realise, flawed, because I am using the very category (ie the writing of women), which I strongly dispute; but it is the only way I can encapsulate what I am trying to say. The basic problem is that a woman author’s text is still almost invariably read, not merely as a text, but as one written by a woman. Which means that many ideas about and stereotypes of women are inflicted on the writing, and, worse, the pejorative nuances which accompany the word “woman” are foisted upon the writing as well.
However, I will not get tangled in these issues which have been questioned and debated far too often. I would like to focus on one particular aspect of such a misreading of the text of a woman author, something I have become familiar with, because it continues to crop up in a very large number of academic responses to my work, and, I should imagine, to the responses to most women’s work.
This problem lies in subjecting women’s writing to a “tradition and modernity” test, so that the reading is one that perceives a conflict between tradition and modernity...
