Representation of Women and Gender Roles in Georgian and North-American Poetry of the Late 20th Century

Abstract

The role and representation of women has been one of the central issues in the societal, aesthetical, philosophical processes of the 20th and 21st centuries, so much so, that it became a turning point of sorts in the development of Western civilization and in shaping it to its current form. Even today, the topic of women remains a measure of the progress of a country, and is one of the main characteristics of social and cultural development. The voice of women, hardly heard in literature over the centuries, was even more silenced in colonized or foreign-dominated societies. The Soviet cultural policy significantly changed the direction of development of Georgian literature, and hindered modernist-avant-garde tendencies and attempts to express women’s genuine feelings and grievances in literature. The article studies the representation of women and gender roles in Georgian poetry of the Soviet thaw and onwards, as compared to the voice of women in the poetry of a number of prominent North American and Canadian poets.