1. You never stop learning

I knew very little about women writers in the 19^th century before I started the internship. Of course, I had done some research for the interview, but it focused on the project in general. Once we had selected the women writers we wanted to present in a display accompanying the conference, I realised that I had never heard of the women writers from my homeland nor those from my host country. But after compiling biographies and printing out portraits, I think I now know a little about these women’s lives and works, and I hope this will give me the crucial advantage over other competitors in a pub quiz one day.

2. Limit yourself …

When we started this internship, the first few stages evolved Continue reading →

Embarrassing though it may be to admit, when I started this internship, I had never heard of any of the women writers mentioned in the conference programme. I knew neither their names nor their achievements in the literary world or political arena. My starting point was to search in the university library’s search function to see whether I could find any information about the authors who were the subjects of the conference. There was little information available in the women writers’ native languages and the amount of material in English was also scant. However, one name wielded several results and so I headed for the Scandinavian section of the library where Continue reading →

Only a few weeks have passed since I have started working as an intern for the international conference “Cultural Encounters through Reading and Writing: New Approaches to the History of Literary Culture”, which will mark the conclusion of the Travelling Texts project. However, these few weeks have been filled with many discoveries: I have found out about the lives of various women authors who wrote between 1790 and 1914; I have explored the wonderful and welcoming space that is the Glasgow Women’s Library, where Continue reading →

Upon embarking as an intern for the international conference, “Cultural Encounters through Reading and Writing: New Approaches to the History of Literary Culture”, due to take place at the Glasgow Women’s Library (9^th-11^th June), I was interested to see which writers the conference papers would discuss, and naturally, given that I currently study Spanish at the University of Glasgow, my eye was drawn to the Hispanic writers. Despite being in the middle of exams and stuck in the library for hours on end, I researched the conference and began my internship. A closer look at the programme revealed a familiar name from an honours module and a particular favourite author of mine, Emilia Pardo Bazán.

Emilia Pardo Bazán’s house in A Coruña, Spain

The conference paper was entitled ‘The ones that got away: the unfulfilled promises of Pardo Bazán’s Biblioteca de la mujer’. As previously mentioned, I had studied Emilia Pardo Bazán but Continue reading →

What did the users of the reading societies for women read? Or more precisely, how many and which foreign women did they read? In order to give a reliable answer to the question, there is no Continue reading →

In my concluding blog I want to focus on the norms that women had to adhere to in the nineteenth century, the norms that determined their lives and behaviors – in other words, what a woman needed to be. Arguably, those women who decided to become writers had already diverged from these norms, up to a certain point. However, Alcott went beyond that: she inspired a new Continue reading →

In the last blog, I made use of several methods[i]  from the discipline of literary studies to make sense of Louisa Alcott’s “journey”. In this blog, I want to cross disciplines and take a linguistic approach, working with several digital tools on the translations. Given that Huygens ING is a Digital Humanities (DH) institute and that the Travelling TexTs project is a DH project, with colleagues working in a Virtual Research Environment, it was quite obvious that I, too, would need to try using some DH tools. These tools connect with linguistics, approaching the textual material in different ways. Here I will present the results of my work with two different types of digital tools: stylometrics and ‘Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count’ (‘LIWC’ for short).

As far as stylometrics is concerned, I was motivated Continue reading →

It seems fitting to start my research journey with another journey: the one of Louisa May Alcott’s works to the Netherlands. In the context of the Travelling TexTs project I will look how some of these texts travelled from the USA to the Netherlands, on a transnational level so to say. These are just the beginnings of an exploration, and there is still a lot of ground to cover when it comes to this research. Within the novels texts travel, too: In Little Women (1868) the girls read John Bunyan’s 17th-century religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, a text that found its way to the Western world and Africa and was both shaped by the countries (their norms and tastes) as well as shaping in turn the identity of different countries, as Isabel Hofmeyer recently demonstrated in The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (2003).  Now I want to show, similarly, how Alcott’s novels functioned transnationally, especially with regard to ideas about the role of women and education for girls. I will do so first on a translational level, after which I sketch the contemporaneous context by referring to different review articles on Alcott. I will look at the differences between original and translation of the text, and place these next to what stands out in the reviews. These rather intuitive findings will be taken along for further research on a linguistic and computational level in my next blog, thus creating a dialogue between the findings.

To the Netherlands: Translations

The first thing that stands out when we look at Alcott’s translations is the change of the Continue reading →