Women Writing Folklore: Politics of Folk and Fairy-tale Collections from Italian and Irish Islands (1870-1920)

This research aims to explore how the cultural phenomenon of collecting and compiling folklore and fairy tales was influenced by nineteenth-century ideologies, national identities and linguistic thought by focusing on the works of women writers and folktale collectors in Italy and Ireland. Sharing a mutual interest in reviving the culture and traditions of their native islands, women such as Laura Gonzenbach (1842-1878) in Sicily, Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) in Sardinia, Lady Jane Wilde (1821-1896) and Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) in Ireland, were interested in folklore and ethnographic research and produced works that, beyond their geo-cultural contingencies, are concerned with gender issues. The objective of this study is therefore to examine the influence of these women writers and collectors on the perpetuation of folkloric insular narratives in Italy and Ireland by relocating them within a broader transcultural and transnational framework. By focusing on Italian and Irish insular contexts, this research investigates the conceptions of ‘the folk’ underpinning these women’s folkloric writings, the use they make of the folk material at their disposal and their attitudes towards vernacular languages. This thesis ultimately seeks to unveil the peculiarities as well as the commonalities between folk imaginations from dissimilar islands and to retrace the trajectories through which women’s folkloric narratives emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such a comparative approach aims to create an intertextual dialogue between diverse patrimonies of European traditions that have been mostly studied in isolation and helps to shed light on the collection of folklore through a gender perspective, in a crucial historical phase when the process of nation-building was taking shape.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Sottilotta, Elena Emma

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Sanson, Helena
• Russell, Paul

• Women’s Studies
• Comparative Literature
• Folklore Studies
• Fairy-Tale Studies
• Italian Studies
• Irish Studies
• Island Studies
• Nineteenth-Century Studies
• Early Twentieth-Century Studies

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.90883

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/343458