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Abstract
This article focuses on Bulgarian women writers' activities, their reception, and their problematic existence in the context of the modernizing and emancipatory trends in Bulgarian society after the Liberation (1878-1944). The analysis is based on the concept of the (intellectual) hierarchy of genders and mechanisms of gender tutelage, traced in the specifics of women's literary texts, their critical and public resonance, and the authors' complicated relation with the Bulgarian literary canon. The question is topical, given the noticeable absence of women writers in the corpus of Bulgarian authors/ literary texts, thought and among those considered representative in terms of national identity and culture. The study is based on primary source materials such as works by Bulgarian women writers, the periodical press from the period, various archival materials, and scholarly publications relevant to the topic.
KEYWORDS: authorship, Bulgarian literary canon, Bulgarian women writers, gender tutelage, intellectual hierarchy
This article concentrates on the literary activity of Bulgarian women writers between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the 1940s. The main focus in considering women writers, their critical and public reception, their aspirations to be accepted as nationally representative, and their having a significant role within the native cultural context is on treating women's literature through the relation of the gendered hierarchy of authorship. The article attempts to demonstrate how this relationship appears in various manifestations of gender tutelage in the field of literature, understood as a mechanism for treating women's writing as secondary, amateur, and entangled in Pygmalion plots as a clear articulation of power in the processes of distribution of and access to symbolic capital. The article thus aims to unmask the ideological structure of the Bulgarian literary canon-a solid and conservative structure-and in the process revealing Bulgarian women writers' problematic existence and their limited public visibility.
The reason these problems are topical is the continued absence of women writers in the canon of Bulgarian authors/literary texts considered representative in terms of national identity and culture. This absence is even more noticeable in the background of the present doubts about the hierarchical structure of the canon, combined with the lack of a new system of evaluation standards relevant to the current democratic, modern Bulgarian cultural and sociopolitical situation, placing men and women...