"The Poetics of Friendship between Women" (Women's Writing Online)
Deadline: 30/03/2010
Female friends,usually associated with the college-age relationship that contributes to forming late adolescent identity-are a significant, yet often neglected part of the cultural imaginary related to adult female life. In this second issue of Women's Writing Online we would like to encourage authors to investigate the literary appearances of female friendship and to analyse their role from the cultural, psychological and aesthetic perspectives.
Female friendship is a commonplace in our culture. It is often associated in the nineteenth-century with girls' promises to be "sisters forever" in letters or in adolescent novels (famously associated with Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery). Nevertheless, female friendship can also be the a focus of much more thorough literary investigations and it is the aim of this issue to take the investigation of female friendship further into analyses of literary representations of women's friendship in their adult lives in Slavic and East European literatures: Polish, Russian, Slovak, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and others.
Friendship between women-between mothers, co-workers, widows-in the lives of many women can become a crucial relationship, which escapes the conventional patterns of relationships based on heterosexual desire (e.g. marriage) or on kinship (sisterhood, motherhood). The relationship of two or more women who are connected by space and time and who have managed to develop affinity despite their different upbringing, experience, language, culture, age or religion will constitute the main focus of the issue. We encourage authors to examine the role of female friendship in coping with such traumas as war, death, abandonment, illness as well as life changes such as having children or ageing. This special issue aims to provide a forum for an encompassing reconsideration of many aspects of female adult friendship.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
* Friendship between women in literature (this need not be limited to texts by women);
* Autobiographical reading of women's writing through the lens of friendship;
* Female friendship in lesbian studies;
* Psychological analyses of female friendship in Slavic cultures (again this need not be limited to women's texts);
* Friendship and its connection with religion in Slavic women's writing;
* Lack of friendship as a key issue in a female writer's creativity;
* Concerns related to ageing, the menopause, illness and death, and the role of female friendship;
* Any of the above themes as reflected in film, theatre and art.
As Women's Writing Online specializes in Slavic and other East European cultures we especially encourage scholars to write about literature from these cultural contexts. Nevertheless, since the WWoL stresses its comparative character, we would be happy to consider theoretical elaborations and examples from other literatures.
Priority will be given to the articles that address these themes, but others will be considered for publication in the next or later issues.
Please submit articles for consideration of between 6000-10 000 words to Urszula Chowaniec Ursula.Chowaniec (at) uta.fi by 30 March 2010.
Contributors should follow the journal's house style rules which are to be found on the Women's Writing Online webpage http://womenswriting.fi/online-journal/
