Female Novelists Research Articles

Rethinking the critical reception by male critics in Saudi Arabia of Saudi women’s pre-1980 novels

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the pre-1980 works of Saudi female novelists were received by male critics in Saudi Arabia in their critical studies. It seeks to explain why many Saudi and Arab male literary critics either ignored or decried these pioneering novels, by highlighting the essential criteria they adopted in their evaluation and criticism of such texts. The paper determines that these novels were poorly received—and unjustly so—in comparison with those written by men in the same period, male critics having subconsciously dismissed or disregarded them on the grounds that they were of limited literary quality, did not belong to what was accepted as the Saudi social and cultural environment, or did not represent the reality of Saudi women’s lives. Had these core evaluative criteria been adopted in criticism of the early novels of Saudi men, many of these would also have been excluded as having no artistic value or as failing to represent Saudi social reality.

Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

COLORISM IN TONI MORRISONS GOD HELP THE CHILD

The present paper has been specifically designed to scrutinize the aspect of colorism in Toni Morrisons well acclaimed novel God Help the Child. African American literature is an academic body of writing produced by African descendants residing in America. The literary canon of African- American literature emerged in late part of 18th century in oral forms like sermon, gospel, music, jazz, blues and spirituals. African American writers have deliberately expressed their painful agony, racial segregation, social injustice and ill treatment which they tolerated in white American society. Toni Morrison was a prolific female novelist of African-American literary writing. Morrisons eleventh novel God Help the Child prominently deals with colorism, racism and child abuse. Conceptually, the term Colorism was coined by Alice Walker to address the superiority of lighter or white skin over the dark. Colorism has its genetic roots in racism because without racism the standardization of color conflict would not be exist. The novel unfolds the story of Bride, also known as Lula Ann who is born with dark black color. She receives ill treatment by her own parents and gets negative rejection because of having black skin. Brides dark color ruins her golden childhood period. Louis Bridewell rejects Bride from accepting as his baby. Similarly, Sweetness breeds Bride with harsh treatment and cruelty. The research study will primarily focus on to address the color conflict faced by child protagonist Lula Ann.

“You make everything into a joke”: the forward-looking feminism of Elaine Dundy and Barbara Pym

ABSTRACT This article considers two popular novels of the 1950s, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (1952) and Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (1958), whose sophisticated comic and satiric techniques exemplify overlooked forms of feminist creative and intellectual labor within the post-war years, while also anticipating contemporary modes of feminist comedy. Though the novels seem at first to reflect common stereotypes around single women, their narrators’ strategic use of self-deprecation and satire undercuts those initial impressions and challenges assumptions regarding not only single women but romance and sexuality more broadly. In addition, Pym and Dundy counter a typical understanding of self-deprecation as uniformly reinforcing a patriarchal view of women, instead offering a new conception of the mode's feminist potential. Finally, by situating these texts within a satiric tradition, my reading expands an understanding of satire to one that better incorporates the historically more subtle and sympathy-driven work of female novelists.

Four Letters: Deconstructing the Brontë-Héger Myth

Out of many, only four Brontë-Héger letters have survived the test of time, all of them one-sided. Since these unfortunate gaps cannot possibly fill themselves, speculation has largely taken over the scholarship surrounding this complex relationship. Claire Harman, Sally Shuttleworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Smith are only a few exceptional scholars who have explored the contemporary obsession with this relationship. The intertextual discourse largely focuses on Charlotte Brontë as a hopeless romantic, an infatuated mentee struck down by first love—the judgment sometimes extending so far as to deem her a Victorian madwoman. In this essay, however, I will be arguing that the intellectual relationship between Héger and Brontë is far more important to analyze than the romantic, as it gives us a justifiable reason to delve into the intimate contents of the letters. For a purpose other than gratifying curiosity regarding Brontë’s private life, perusing the letters offers a fresh perspective to assess her fictional works. In a sense, her novels are given new life through the act of reimagining how and why she made certain literary decisions. What catalyzed Jane Eyre? In this case, who? Constantin Héger directly influenced Brontë’s empowerment as a female novelist, her urgency to improve, and dedication to the art of storytelling. “Her essays bid for his professional attention, a point too frequently missed by critics who treat her attachment to Héger as a romance rather than a writer’s connection,” mirrors Sue Lonoff in her study of Brontë’s Belgian devoir essays (Lonoff 391). As a firm believer that personal writings often hold invaluable resources to enable the reader to distinguish the artist from their art, I intend to explore this further. In this paper, I examine the letters chronologically, approaching them with much more than merely romance in mind, but the sentiments of a woman who was once taken seriously by an intellectual counterpart, embittered by the sudden deprivation of it.

A World of Difference: A Single-Sexed Paradise in Selected Novels by Mary E. Bradley Lane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Joan Lyn Slonczewski

Abstract This research aims to investigate the utopian visions in three feminist science fiction novels: Mary E. Bradley Lane` Mizora, Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s Herland, and Joan Slonczewski`s A Door into Ocean. The purpose of this research is to highlight the utopian aspects in the three communities of the three novels. It, moreover, shows how the three writers dethrone men from their inherited positions and is directed to portray how women obtain a lot of skills and potentialities to build up their own castles alone without the assistance of men. The research, moreover, shows that the inhabitants of the three communities never dispense with the instinct of motherhood and highlights the importance of maternity by providing some progressive motherly guidelines which definitely help produce efficient and helpful generations. Thereafter, the thesis sheds light on the importance of women`s education as the basic step to liberate them. Then, it ends with directing readers to the strong co-relation between the ecological system and women which is called ecofeminism. Accordingly, the three female novelists present three communities created by women and for women.

Black Bodies White Culture: A Black Feminist [Re]Construction of Race and Gender in Morrison's Paradise

'This article intends to explore and expose through the analysis of Morrison's Paradise how the Afro American female writers [re]construct the potential of Afro American ecriture feminine to seek the true freedom and empowerment of black women by appealing them to 'write-through bodies'. To achieve this purpose, this article articulates its theoretical agenda, through the exploration of the work of the outstanding, widely acknowledged award-winning, English speaking Afro American female writer: Toni Morrison. Though it aims to highlight the significance and contribution of the Afro American female novelists towards broadening the frontiers of 'ecriture feminine', it does not aim to offer the generalized history of women writing in Afro American literature. It seeks to propose alternative ways of informed analysis, grounded in discourse and Feminist theories, to evaluate Toni Morrison's contribution to 'ecriture feminine'.

Negotiating Religion

This article analyses the production of gendered subjectivities in contemporary cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Europe. We take the recent work of the Finnish and Dutch female novelists Pauliina Rauhala and Franca Treur as our case study. We explore how their novels represent the negotiations of women and girls from conservative protestant faiths and traditions. Approaching the novels as narratives of sense-making, we focus on notions of creativity and imagination, and gendered embodied experiences. Our analysis thus sheds light on contemporary understandings of women in conservative religions in contemporary Northern and Western Europe.

The Sociocultural Function of Translation: A Study of Simin Daneshvar’s Stories Sociocultural Aspects

The term “gender” is a load concept in translation studies. The present study focuses on stories written by Simin Daneshvar (1921-2012), a contemporary Iranian female translator and novelist, in order to explore how the visibility of women in the Iranian culture and community after a long patriarchal era has changed the community’s thoughts about women. The method used for this study was qualitative with the interpretive approach. The corpus consisted of five Persian stories, Wandering Island, Wandering Cameleer, The Quenched Fire, Ask from Birds of Passenger and Suvashun by Daneshvar, who has contributed to the promotion of Iranian women’s sociocultural status during the contemporary era. The results proved that women translators and novelists had endured the hardships of sociocultural changes and made it possible for the modern Iranian women to make themselves visible in their social context.

Who is the author of Neria (1992) – and is it a Zimbabwean masterpiece or a neo-colonial enterprise?

This article focuses on the Zimbabwean film Neria (1992), arguably one of the most important films in the history of sub-Saharan Africa. Directed by the Black Zimbabwean Godwin Mawuru, it was the first feminist film in Zimbabwe and in the region, highlighting the plight of women who become the property of their brothers-in-law after their husbands die. The article addresses the issues of the origins of the story and the authorship of the screenplay. On the final reel of the film, the story credit names the accomplished Zimbabwean female novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga; while the screenplay credit names Louise Riber. Riber served as the film’s White American editor and co-producer who, with her husband John Riber, managed the Media for Development Fund in Zimbabwe. The key question of this article is simple: who wrote the screenplay for Neria? Through the physical and metaphorical journey of this research, we discover that the story is based on the personal experiences of Anna Mawuru, the director’s mother. This is the first time that this fact has surfaced. As such, this article also offers some reflections on issues of adaption/translation, particularly in the context of postcolonial collaborations.

Rebekah Hyneman’s Leaves of the Upas Tree: A Tale of (In)temperance and (Im)morality

Abstract The intent of this paper is to examine the use, by nineteenth-century American authors, of the temperance novel, a popular literary sub-genre in antebellum America, as a literary means for presenting the widespread controversy in the nation as regards the achievements of temperance societies. Moreover, my goal is to show that the popularity of temperance novels, in spite of their didactic and moralistic nature, displays the public’s readiness to consume temperance literature, thus reciprocating the attempt of writers to promote social ideals and heal social ills. Finally, since Rebekah Hyneman, a convert to Judaism, is the only Jewish-American writer who wrote a temperance novel, and is one among a small number of female writers who used this genre, it is interesting to examine if and how her double “Otherness” (being a Jew and a female novelist) distinguishes her from her literary Christian male and/or female counterparts. Hyneman’s novel Leaves of the Upas Tree: A Story for Every Household (1854–55) serves as a case in point of a temperance novel that demonstrates how a dysfunctional American family operates as a microcosm and how temperance and other charitable societies fail to cope with individuals’ tribulations. More importantly, the novel aims to attest that a familial defective unit, affected by excessive drinking, breeds a ruthless societal macrocosm, lacking compassion, empathy, and social and communal support. The merciless, xenophobic and anti-Semitic community depicted in the novel serves as a prism through which the author presents much more acute plagues afflicting America.

A Review of English Novel Studies in Korea

This study reviews English novel studies in Korea for the past 60 years, to examine the ways in which English novel studies in Korea have developed and further contribute to the future of English scholarship in Korea. Since reflecting on all the English novel studies in Korea is immense, this study focuses on articles published in Studies in British and American Language and Literature from 1960 to 2019. Organizing the articles by decades, this review attempts to indicate the notable features of each decade and shows who was researched most actively. While Henry James was researched the most by far, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf were the most favorite novelists throughout the last 6 decades. Female novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf, were first introduced in the 1970s, which shed some light on the sharp increase in the study of female novelists for the coming years: Jane Austen topped the list in the 2000s and Toni Morrison in the 2010s. 2000s saw the most remarkable expansion in research: the number of the articles doubled and novelists from countries other than the British and American were first introduced. Korean scholarship on English novel studies has expanded not just in its number of articles, but also in its diversity.

French ‘Radiation’ in the Works of Serbian Female Novelists of the First-Half of the 20th Century

Review of: Đuric, Vladimir (2019), Francuska veza. Stvaralastvo srpskih spisateljica prve polovine XX veka u kontekstu francuske književnosti i kulture , Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga.

Identifying the Linguistic Genderlects of the Style of Writing of Arab Male and Female Novelists

The studies of differences in language used by males and females appear mainly to have been focused on the spoken word and rarely on writing. This paper examines some linguistic differences that exist in male and female writing styles of Arabic novels. Some classes of lexical and syntactic features that identify the author’s gender are specified. The paper finds significant differences in the frequent use of some features such as colour, tag questions, verb vs. noun in initiating paragraphs, slang, taboo and euphemistic terms. inparticular, males tend to use many more nouns in initial paragraphs compared to females who tend to use fewer of this category. Females are more conservative in using sex-related words whether implicitly or explicitly. Females generally speaking seem to be more atten-tive and more likely to pay specific attention to detail, which in turn influences their style. Finally, anoticeable correlation between the characteristics of male-female writing and the literary genre (novel) is demonstrated. The source material consists of two modern novels written by amale and afemale, who are native speakers of Arabic and considered as canonical figures by some Arab and Jordanian critics.

Estratégias cimarronas para narrar a negritude no século XIX em "Autobiografía" de Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba, 1835) e "Úrsula" (Brasil, 1859)

This reflection will analyze the strategies used by two Latin American black writers to present the theme of blackness in the 19th century. On one side, the autobiography written by the cuban Juan Francisco Manzano (1835), the only autobiography text that shows one Latin American semiliterate slave black man that nar-rates your life in exchange for your liberty. On the other side the narrative written by Maria Firmina dos Reis, a free black woman considered the first female novelist in Brazil: Úrsula (1859), an abolitionist text whose main characters are white, surprises by giving voice to the slave people, who narrate their memories in Africa and are aware of their condition. Theoretical references will be used about the novel as a form of projection of an ideal future (Sommer, 2004), abolitionist texts as thesis novel (Jeffers, 2013), mask of speechlessness (Kilomba, 2019) and cimarronagem’s pedagogy (Mendes, 2019) intending to revise the Latin American literary canon in an inclusion proposal the two narratives to mandatory readings in the Litera-ture studies in the Latin American universities.

The notion of feminism in the works of charlotte bronte

It aims at casting light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most prominent female novelist in the nineteenth century. It also traces Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist is concerned to convey a subjective impression. The study provides a historical and critical background of her age in which she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which affected and swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her writings. The study concludes, Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and social problems such as the position of women, but evades a solution to the complications by dropping the problem and substituting the conventional solution of love and marriage.

Feminism in the Novels of Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s genius was not recognized either by her contemperaries or even by her successors. But about 1890 the tide of appreciation and popularity markedly turned in favour and correspondingly, against her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. She always strives in her art to remain full conscious of her responsibility to life as an artist. She is known as the last blossom of the 18th century. She has six novels to her credit-‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park, ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’. Though she created her stories in her above-mentioned novels more than 200 years ago, her novels were forerunners of feminism. According to a critic, “Jane Austen was a published female novelist, who wrote under her own name, which can be seen as an important feminist quality”.

“Made of Sterner Stuff”: Female Agency and Resilience in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls

SummaryThe focus of this article is on the literary representations of women in postcolonial wartime narratives by African female novelists. An important assumption drives this article, namely, that women are largely absent from discussions on the interventions they can make to help fight social injustice, even though violence and resistance to injustice are mostly mediated through images of women and their bodies. Specifically, the article examines how Nadifa Mohamed employs agency as a discursive technique for negotiating female identities and dismantling oppressive structures in The Orchard of Lost Souls. The article is cognizant of Annie Gagiano's views that recent African female authors' novels have gained prominence in tackling national(ist) issues through their imagination of the nation with moral profundity and historical force, placing the women themselves at the centre of this national imagination. I argue that the leading female characters in Mohamed's novel reconstruct their subalternity all too predictably to fight gendered violence and social vice, thereby contributing to the nationalist fervour that is underway in the narrative context of the novel.

Annie Romein-Verschoor et son Miroir de femmes

The communist and feminist world view of Annie Romein-Verschoor (1895-1978) has left its mark on her extensive critical work. In her PhD thesis Vrouwenspiegel. De Nederlandse romanschrijfster na 1880 (“Women’s mirror. The Dutch female novelist from 1880 to the present”) she wonders in which respects “the class character of literature expressed itself, in which images, forms of style, and prototypes, or in which built-in moral”. She describes her method as “literary-sociological”. This article will analyze the extent of her claims.

A Study on different culture called ‘unmarried’ in Japanese literature -Focused on the works of female novelists-

A Study on different culture called ‘unmarried’ in Japanese literature -Focused on the works of female novelists-