Displacement, migration and forms of encounter in European Women's Poetry between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

The dissertation investigates the role of women’s poetry in Britain and in other European countries, such as Spain and Italy, between the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Century with particular reference to texts that deal with experiences of displacement and migration. The project explores women’s poetical works in relation to the historical period they were produced, and as an important element for considering literature as a cultural product promoting policy of gender equality. The research will demonstrate to what extent the literary corpus under scrutiny enabled European women poets (as travellers, migrants or as observers of various forms of migration) to resist oppression coming from dominant power relationships. Though figuring as excluded subjectivities, women writers gave voice to new ways of expressing social needs in a patriarchal and conservative society. These texts generated new forms of representing migration as means of dislocation but also encounter with new realities. Drawing from feminist theories that move from, Friedman, Scott, Kristeva, and many other literary and feminist scholars, the project will refer to a wide range of poetical texts written by women writers which deal with migration as a multidimensional and multiperspective phenomenon. The aim of this investigation is to shed a new light on the experience of women migrants and how this experience is mediated by and filtered through their eyes and elaborated in their poetics. Finally, the dissertation intends to explore the ways in which the creation and expression of poetry by women also convey a representation of a subject in transit who crosses geographic and symbolic boundaries while questioning gendered roles and rules