The criterion of authorship
Numerous preliminary studies have been carried out in order to identify precisely the corpus of women French-speaking Luxembourgish authors. These investigations were carried out using 1) the Dictionnaire des auteurs luxembourgeois (online); 2) the CNL (in collaboration with its archivists and its management); and 3) the BNL.
The FEATHER research project focuses on the period from 1900 to 2020. The choice of this period rests on the complexity of the 20th century, which was strongly marked by political (access to vote, war effort), social (right to vote, divorce, abortion etc.) and historical upheavals which influence in particular the choice of the writing language in Luxembourg. In fact, we see a very strong increase in the publishing of literary works, thus modifying the access of literature to visibility and publicity, the links between authors and the public, but also an awareness of the written text (even unpublished) as a literary work which increases the number of manuscript deposits in the Luxembourg national archives (a fortiori for women).This period will also be defined by a questioning of the links between author and reader, anchored in a quest for what literature can be in a period marked by a boom in para-literatures and means of communication (notably women of letters, journalistic writings).For the period studied, we obtain a total of 185 women appearing in the Dictionnaire des auteurs luxembourgeois. Among them, 180 women fall under the “auteur” criterion. The same research carried out on a male corpus leads to a result of 534 men, of whom 519 appear under the criterion “auteur”.
Literary prizes and canonizations
In this respect, literary prizes can obviously constitute an important avenue for identifying a recognized literary corpus, the canonization of an author and his work being clearly linked to access to literary prizes and anthology. As S. Ducas (2014) points out, the literary awards system represents an essential space for literary recognition of the writer by his peers or by juries of professionals or amateurs, of increased media visibility aimed at the “sacre de l’écrivain” (Bénichou, 1973). At a time when books must compete with other cultural goods, Prizes remain pledges of literary quality and the institutional recognition of an auctorial singularity: as “étalons d’excellence” (Ricoeur, 1990). There are seven main Grand Ducal Prizes (Source: CNL), which come to concretize the status of Luxembourgish writers without distinction by language. Here is a summary of the national Prizes obtained between 1900 and 2020 for French-language (women and men), German-speaking and Luxembourgish-speaking authors.
Thus, it appears that French-language female authors enjoy statistically significant national recognition. A finding that needs to be clarified is the recurrence of certain names, which will be the subject of a detailed analysis.
If the same criteria are applied at an international level (Luxembourg literature, 1900 to 2020, French Language Works Award), we obtain the following results:
It is striking to note 1) the low recognition enjoyed by Luxembourgish French-language literature, but above all 2) that only women have been awarded these international literary prizes. Here the idea of their national invisibility, to which one would easily correlate lesser literary qualities, is clearly caught in the dark, which constitutes an axis of work for the FEATHER team: in order to study how sociological issues are articulated genre and literary recognition.
Literary networks and consecration
Next, literary networks, particularly European ones, constitute another avenue for understanding and cataloguing the Luxembourgish literary scene for French-speaking women. We will start from a question concerning the articulation between network and literary field raised by D. de Marneffe and B. Denis (ed.) in Les Réseaux littéraires (2006). In line with G. Sapiro, FEATHER postulates that the notion of the network can be a tool for exploring literary fields, not only in terms of interactions, but also from the positions taken by the authors themselves. Thus, the notions of ethos (Maingueneau, 2004) and posture (Meizoz, 2007) will clarify the reciprocal relationships between female authors and the literary scene. Of course, in this respect, correspondence between writers will be invaluable in identifying and mapping literary relationships. It is the notion of exchange that can be enlightening from this perspective: the very idea of a network involves a back-and-forth, continuous and long-term exchange of news and ideas, in which the (male and female) authors mutually enrich themselves. Note that, like the famous A. Mayrisch, correspondence is also an opportunity to build an internal vision of the literary scene and to identify the criteria of literarity retained by the authors themselves. The study of networks thus makes it possible not only to identify the processes at work in literary creation, but also to quantify the presence of female authors in Luxembourgish French-language literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the correspondence exchanges attest to entry into literary circles. This is all the more important to identify that these literary networks participate in establishing contact with other people, often themselves authors and/or actors in literary life. In this regard, preliminary research carried out within the framework of FEATHER makes it possible to identify several correspondences demonstrating literary networks of interest for this study.
This question of networks is supplemented by three other lines of work will be part of this reflection to analyse the female French language literary scene in the Grand-Duchy: the membership in the Luxembourgish and European learned societies; the critical studies devoted to the Luxembourgish French language writers, which will take into account the dissemination of their works locally and globally; and finally, the publishing houses present on the national territory, to correlate with the places of edition (and here also of canonization) of the authors of our corpora. Three of them present editorial lines anchoring literary works in the Luxembourg landscape: “Phi” editions, “ultimomondo” editions and “Saint-Paul” editions.