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Heroines of Hunger Relief: Challenging Feminization of Famine in Twenty-First Century Cultural Archive(s)

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Resumo:Female heroes of the Great Irish Hunger and its aftermath (1845–1852) have received little attention in popular culture and historiography. Extant portrayal of women of this period is to this day dominated by stereotypical tropes of passive victimization and suffering. This article links this phenomenon to the notion ‘feminization of famine’ (Kelleher 1997) and examines how contemporary literature challenges archival absences of alternative female roles through different manifestations of nineteenth-century female heroism. Proposing to interpret literary fiction as both an agent of alternative cultural archive and a source of cultural conceptions of the heroic, the article zooms in on Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder (2016). A close reading of its female characters reveals that contemporary literature subverts female imagery based on victimization and suffering. Instead, it promotes heroic figures that foster hunger relief and defy expected gender roles in hunger crisis scenarios. Supplementing the analysis with recent representations of female heroes in new digital Famine archives, the article concludes that future cultural production will be increasingly interested in potential parallels between nineteenth-century female heroism and recent crises such as the global pandemic.
Autores principais:Steiner, Daria
Assunto:Great Irish Hunger Feminization Famine Literature Heroism Famine novel Cultural archive Digital archive
Ano:2021
País:Portugal
Tipo de documento:artigo
Tipo de acesso:unknown
Instituição associada:Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Idioma:inglês
Origem:Diffractions

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