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The academic discipline of women's writing as a discrete area of literary studies is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men."〔Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. ''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English''. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990. viii-ix.〕 It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender: her position as a woman within the literary world. Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. The study of women's writing developed in the 1970s and since. The majority of English literature programmes offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right. ==Discussion on Women's writing being a distinct category == The broader discussing women's cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history, but the specific study of women's writing as a separate category of scholarly interest is relatively recent. There are examples in the 18th century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's ''Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences'' (1752), John Duncombe's ''Feminiad'', a catalogue of women writers, and the ''Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments''.〔Todd, Janet, ed. ''British Women Writers: a critical reference guide''. London: Routledge, 1989. xiii.〕 Similarly, women have been treated as a distinct category by misogynist writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele's ''The Unsex'd Females'', a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. Earlier discussion of women's broader cultural contribution can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled ''Catalogue of Women'' (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his ''Moralia''. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in ''De mulieribus claris'' (On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write ''The Book of the City of Ladies'' (1405). Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's ''The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead'' (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume ''Female Biography''. Virginia Woolf's ''A Room of One's Own'' (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers.〔Buck, Claire, ed.''The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature''. Prentice Hall, 1992. vix; Salzman, Paul. Introduction, ''Early Modern Women's Writing''. Oxford UP, 2000. ix.〕 And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.〔Blain et al. vii; Todd xv; Spender, Dale, and Janet Todd. ''Anthology of British Women Writers''. Harper Collins, 1989. xiii; Buck ix-x.〕 Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals such as ''Fireweed'' and ''Room of One's Own'' which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses. The question of whether or not there is a "women's tradition" remains vexed; some scholars and editors refer to a "women's canon" and women's "literary lineage," and seek to "identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns" in women's writing,〔Spender & Todd xiii.〕 but the range of women's writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of "women's writing" in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls "women's writing" an "unstable category."〔Buck xi.〕 Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one "women's tradition." Some scholars, such as Roger Lonsdale, maintain that something of a commonality exists and that "it is not unreasonable to consider" women writers "in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behaviour they faced.".〔Lonsdale, Roger ed. ''Eighteenth-Century Women Poets''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. xliii.〕 Using the term "women's writing" implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Women's writing (literary category)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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