‘The smallest agents of transformation’: animal creatures in Grace Wells’ and Antía Otero’s poetry

Abstract

The aim of this project is to examine animal creatures in Grace Wells' poetry. Her work will be compared with that of the Galician writer Antía Otero, as both deal with similar subjects and are framed in two historically and culturally related contexts: lreland and Galicia. Although this study will use the whole poetry production by both authors, particular attention will be paid to Grace Wells' book Fur and Antía Otero's O cuarto das abellas.

My aim is to analyse the conception of the environment and the exploration of human relationships with nature. Such relations lead to a dicothomy between the wild and the domestic that is present in these poets' writing. Moreover, as they are both women writers, I aim to emphasize the role of women facing that dualism. I will analyse how the use of animal creatures may in part symbo lize the 'othered' and 'oppresed' situation of both women and nature as a result of an anthropocentric and androcentric ideology dominating Western culture. Thus, special consideration will be paid to the transformation that those conceptions entail for current literary imaginaries