Louise Vasvári

Women Writing Holocaust Lives and Beyond is a book-length project that involves a retrieval of a heterogeneity of women’s voices and their gender-related experiences as historical subjects before, during, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, from which valuable insights can emerge both for Holocaust studies and Gender Studies. Through a theoretical framework centered in cultural studies, (feminist) cultural history, literary theory and critical discourse analysis I examine the writing of some 500 women, primarily Jewish survivors but also a number of gentiles, written in a half dozen languages. I believe that my study can guide readers to be attentive to the manner in which the narrative truths of the Holocaust, and of war more generally, are built on collective and personal experiences of both genders and that women’s text can challenge and modify our [pre]conceptions, at a moment when we are nearing an ‘after’ when personal accounts will no longer be forthcoming.