Hilda Hilst por Nelly Novaes Coelho: literatura feminina?

In this article, we analyze the posture of the literary critic and professor Nelly Novaes Coelho in the construction - or negotiation - of a notion of female authorship by the writer Hilda Hilst (HH). To this end, we rely especially on the theoretical perspectives of Fontdevila (2021), Meizoz (2015) and Bourdieu (1996). First, we sought to identify Nelly and Hilda's positions in the literary field at the different times studied, discussing the writer's posture on the issue of female authorship. Next, we examined Nelly's posture on Hilst from three perspectives, from the 1970s to the 2000s: in the first critical texts that the professor produced exclusively on Hilst's work; as editor of two collections of Hilst's literary work; and in the production of books on literature by female authors, including items related to Hilda's work. To support our investigations, we make use of private and public epitexts. From this, we can see how female authorship and "women's literature" are viewed by Nelly mostly detached from normative gender representations (although based on binary thinking), which, we assume, contributed to HH's positive reception of Nelly's posture, despite the writer's complex relationship with such categories.