Autobiographical Narration and Female Authorship in Spanish Exile after 1936

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Matei Chihaia; Dr. Mirjam Leuzinger
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558855229

Among the women who fled Spain during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, there were countless intellectuals and artists. A large part of this group's writings has been (re)published thanks to the work of the GEXEL research group and publishers such as Renacimiento. However, their discussion in research remains centred on a few celebrities such as María Zambrano. Our project will change this by thoroughly analysing a large corpus of autobiographical writings by women in exile. This corpus will allow us not only to reconstruct the lives, creations and worldviews of these authors, as existing research on these works already does, but also to examine female authorship before, during and after exile as the subject of their works and as a pattern of their production, publication and reception practices, with particular attention to intersectional factors of authorship, such as age, class, migration, education, gender, family situation and health. A first goal is to (1) consolidate the corpus and feed its metadata into a database. This should improve the public availability of data on exile, make the authors and artists living in exile visible as such and help to further reduce possible intersectional national and gender-related bias in exile research. The database is freely accessible according to FAIR principles and can be used for further research on exile, female authorship or 20th century art, literature and philosophy. It prepares the second goal of the project: (2) to analyse the production, dissemination and reception of the elements of the corpus. On the basis of references to the elements (including reviews, correspondence, interviews) as well as editions and translations, the aim is to reconstruct how autobiographical writings by women in exile are disseminated – or even forgotten. In addition to these two endeavours, which are oriented towards the ideal of completeness, there are two further goals that are only being pursued for a sample of texts with a strong reference to Mexican exile. This sample of the corpus is to be digitised and made accessible for Named Entity Recognition and thematic modelling so that (3) the intertextual and metapoetic references that contribute to this can be reconstructed, a general idea of authorship as well as the specific authorship of female writers or artists and so that (4) the themes and processes of female autobiographical writing in exile can be modelled as such and, in particular, deepened at nodal points such as the categories of art, exile and medium or the processes of self-representation. The result is a better understanding of female authorship in exile and autobiographical writing in exile, both of which are explored using the Spanish exile as a model.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants