“Mulheres Illustres do Brazil”, de Ignez Sabino, e sua ressonância em dicionários de autoria feminina nos séculos XX e XXI

Abstract

This research is based on the study of literature written by female writers in Brazil in the nineteenth century; it aims to investigate the contributions left by the writer named Maria Ignez Sabino Pinho Maia (BA – 1853-1911) regarding the feminist and academic studies focusing on the female literary production. To do so, the corpus used is the work Mulheres Illustres do Brazil (1899) which lists the biographies of eighteen writers who contributed for the Brazilian faculty of writing in the 800s. Besides that, to observe the influence that the work by Ignez Sabino exerted on the other female dictionaries and check the presence of authors recovered by her in later studies, as well as mention this writer as a pioneer in the studies about literature written by women in Brazil, we used dictionaries and collections published by women amongst the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which are: A mulher rio-grandense: escritoras mortas (1907), by Andradina de Oliveira; Mulheres de ontem? Rio de Janeiro – Século XXI (1989), by Maria Thereza Caiuby C. Bernardes; Dicionário de Mulheres (1999), by Hilda Agnes Hübner Flores; Dicionário de mulheres do Brasil: de 1500 até a atualidade biográfico e ilustrado (2000), by Schuma Schumaher and Érico Vital Brazil; Escritoras brasileiras do século XIX (2000; 2004), by Zahidé Lupinacci Muzart; Dicionário crítico de escritoras brasileiras (2002), by Nelly Novaes Coelho, and Ensaístas Brasileiras (1993), by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda and Lucia Nascimento Araújo. A discussion about the exclusion of names of female writers from the official literary historiography is established with theorists, questioning the erasing that happened round the literature produced by women in the nineteenth century. Some of them are: Ívia Alves (2001, 2005, 2012), Maria da Conceição P. Araújo (2008), Sinéia Silveira (2014), Zilda Freitas (2002), Norma Telles (1990, 1992, 2017). Amongst others, were also used the studies by Roberto Reis (1992) and Maria Fontes (2001) to discuss about the formation of the literary canon. Therefore, we determined how important was the contribution left by Ignez Sabino, especially regarding her work Mulheres Illustres do Brazil which influenced the organization of other works, that is make the names of Brazilian female writers be remembered, studied and disseminated.