Feminist criticism in Brazilian Graduate Programs and the essays of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This study was based on a survey of state of art with 20 theses and dissertations in which Virginia Woolf’s essays are considered the theoretical possibility to literary analysis of female authorship in Brazil. It has as research source the online catalogue available at Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) website. Those studies were carried out in Literature and Education postgraduate programs, supervised by Capes, in universities all over the country from 2014 to 2019. Most of texts mention Woolf as feminist literary critic in analyses of contemporary women writers’ fiction and poetry. The most quoted essays are A room of one’s own (1929) and Professions for women (1931). Other fairly known feminist critics, such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Hélène Cixous, rarely appear in those studies for very few translations of their essays are published here. This article aims at verifying the relevance of Woolf’s essays in Brazil to study women’s literature while it bridges time and cultural distances between the writer’s mind and those studied literary works.