This book collects studies from a fifteen-year period on themes related to the exploration of femininity, both in oral and written literature, in texts by both male and female authors, influenced by historical events, cultural memories, social stereotypes, artistic movements, and personal experiences that highlight dynamic female subjects, both in writing and storytelling. The common starting point of these studies is the exploration of the representation of the "other," and especially the gendered "other," as a network of points, ideas, conventions, and symbols that convey through linguistic images, condensed feelings, perceptions, and cultural acquisitions, echoes of experiences and fantasies. For this purpose, the author draws methodological tools from literary theory, as well as anthropology and psychoanalysis.
The book also attempts to highlight female representations through their inscription in oral folk tradition and the ways in which these representations establish relationships between reality, discourse, and the imaginary.
Furthermore, it seeks to detect literary representations of femininity, both in narrative texts by male and female authors of the '30s generation and the contemporary era, as well as in surrealist poetic and prose texts, where the textual play of otherness and identity is explored.
In another section of the book, the representations of female otherness and the "other" - the foreigner - in contemporary Greek novels for adolescents are examined.
Representation is a construction of the text, the author, but also a reconstruction by the reader. The reader is a role in which we can enter to look at ourselves through the textual mirror of identity and otherness, where the otherness of the text constitutes the necessary condition for the reader's identity.