Uma história na História : Representacões da autoria feminina na História da Literatura Portuguesa do século XX

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to examine discursive aspects and practices concerning recognition of literature written by women in 20th century Portuguese literary history. It endeavours to reveal and identify organizational elements along with author representations that, in a historical perspective, lead to marginalization of women writers. The research material consists of narrative literary histories and Encyclopaedias of authors and literature, which have assumed the task of summarizing and retelling the literary development of 20th century Portuguese literature.In order to deconstruct the dominant historiographical discourse and to reinterpret the marginalization of women writers, the theoretical and methodological frameworks of this dissertation are taken from the fields of Discourse Analysis and Gender Studies. The combination of these theoretical perspectives provides tools for analysing the questions of power and ideology inherent in the construction of a traditional literary history discourse. Furthermore, this theoretical framework allows us to understand the contingency and historicity of knowledge established in a historiographical discourse.The main part of this study consists of a qualitative analysis of representations of women writers along with a discursive analysis of the construction of literary history. The conclusion emphasises five observed discursive strategies, which lead to a reduced narrative history for literature written by women. They could be summarized as follows. Female authorships are conceptualized in a separate strand as “women writers”. Female authorships before 1950 are in literary, socio-political, terms not contextualized. They are not conceptualized within the main lines of historical narratives (literary movements, schools etc.), the female tradition as such is not contextualized, and moreover, the political expression of female authors is reduced.Apart from this result this study gives an increased understanding of the different ways in which hegemony in historical discourses opposes representations of “the other”.