Gender and Creation : Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority, and Authorship

Conceived as a cross-over between gender studies, science and literature studies, the history of medicine and biology and cultural studies, this collection sets out on a diachronic survey of gendered constructions of creativity, authority, and authorship, with a focus on British literatures and cultures but also including glimpses at German and French texts and works of art. The volume explores in how far creation and creativity were and are gender-specific concepts, in how far discussions about authorship utilized gender-specific role attributions, connected to the traditional dichotomies of culture-nature/male-female - and in how far literary texts and cultural artefacts subverted or supported this process of attribution. Congruences and divergences between biological and spiritual concepts of creativity, creation and procreation are at the centre of interest throughout. Individual chapters are concerned with medieval and early modern women writers, Enlightenment struggles over the concepts of spleen and creativity, the gender-theoretical implications of eighteenth-century poetry's metafictional contemplations of creation and/or nature, gendered concepts of authorship during Romanticism, nineteenth-century authors and constructions of masculinity, postmodern concepts of gender and creativity, and the link between double colonization and conceptions of female authorship in postcolonial literatures.