Genoveva Edroza Matute: A literary biography and a critical edition of her short stories

• Main Author: Montealegre, Ma Antoinette Cusi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2004
• Subjects: Genoveva Edroza Matute; Criticism; Biography as a literary form; Short stories > Women authors; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/58; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1057/viewcontent/CDTG003787_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The present study dealt with the preparation of Genoveva Edroza Matute's literary biography and a critical edition of her short stories. To prepare the literary biography, oral interview was conducted with the author herself. This was supplemented by biographical accounts from her own collections of short stories and from anthologies that included her stories compiled by other authors and critics. GEM's autobiographical essays in Tinig ng Damdamin: Mga Piling Sanaysay (1992) were also used to supplement the oral interview. The literary biography sought to present in chronological order the life and time of GEM and, whenever possible, the biographical data were used to explain some aspects of certain stories that were found to be based on real life. The critical edition of GEM's short stories is composed of ninety-six (96) stories in all. vii To prepare the critical edition, the following steps were undertaken: 1. retrieving all of GEM's extant short stories and their different editions from different anthologies, magazines, reference textbooks, and from GEM's own collections of short stories 2. arranging all the short stories and their respective editions in chronological order based on the date of first publication, if this was not available the date of the second publication was used as basis 3. examining all the editions of each short story to establish the copytext, choosing the edition which was published the earliest as the copy-text 4. collating all the editions of each short story and the copy-text and 5. annotating each short story to note the changes, differences or alterations between the copy-text and its editions. After accomplishing the two main purposes of this study, the following conclusions were drawn: 1. GEM features many times children as the subject or narrator in her stories. 2. She used most of the time real life people as basis for creating her characters (e.g. 'Mabuti' was her fellow teacher in V. Mapa High viii School, Leoncio Santos in Walong Taong Gulang was her Grade I pupil)