Female Readers Research Articles

The Persistence of Bias in German Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Persistence of Bias in German Eighteenth-Century Studies Margaretmary Daley In my recent book on German women novelists around 1800, I argue that a canon of German literature around 1800 exists, whether scholars desire it or not. Optimists might counterargue that there are multiple canons, multiple methods by which titles are selected. A more pessimistic view would look at the field of German studies and see the persistence of a gendered, not to say sexist lens, despite at least three waves of change brought on by feminist literary critics and theorists. Opinion is certainly divided. In this think piece, I take the pessimistic view that yes, we have a canon and despite inroads and new research, it unfortunately skews persistently toward male bias. I put forth this viewpoint in hopes of stimulating discussion and contributing actively to positive change in the field. To support my opinion, I argue as a scholar for other scholars and begin by looking back at the same relevant issues of canonicity and period themselves and measure both how times have changed and how they have not, comparing the specific case of women authors in German literature to more general developments in the humanities overall. In 1783, Sophie von La Roche published the passage below in her journal, Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter, addressing her readers directly, speaking as a woman to women about women: Ich hoffe meine Leserinnen sind mit mir zufrieden, daß ich sie vorerst mit den Verdiensten unsers Geschlechts bekannt mache, weil ich sie dadurch ihre eigene [sic] Fähigkeiten näher kennen lehre, und vielleicht den edlen Ehrgeitz erwecke, auch in ihrer Art und nach ihren Umständen Vorzüge des Wissens und der Beschäftigungen zu erwerben.1 I hope that my readers are satisfied with me, in that I shall first make them familiar with the accomplishments of our sex, because through this, I can make them aware of their own capabilities, and perhaps arouse in them the noble ambition to acquire the advantages of knowledge and of occupation, each in her own way and according to her situation. Here, in the context of a think piece for the Goethe Yearbook, I wish to draw attention to multiple aspects of La Roche's direct apostrophe of her readers and the passage overall. First, La Roche's implicit pedagogical strategy notes that an effective preliminary step to a critical understanding of [End Page 63] literature recognizes how important identity politics are. It takes into consideration how individuals learn by seeking out similar people and identifying as a group—here, female readers with female authors. Second, the educational project of Pomona2 can remind us of the sometimes not obvious pedagogical impact of our own contemporary academic journals.3 For example, reading articles published in the Yearbook implicitly continues the education of the reader, even though, unlike Pomona's readers, many of these are peers of the article authors, with expertise as profound as that of the contributors. When speaking of and to her readers from 250 years ago, La Roche theorizes ways of reading that implicitly acknowledge a power differential between men—who had more frequent and open access to a wide range of texts—and women, who read through a less privileged lens as mere "female readers." While new approaches in academic publications are exciting, they continue to school their readers and may bear implicit bias. Finally, because the quotation stems from 1783, it exemplifies two general challenges for contemporary scholars of German literature around 1800. The first challenge is the age of the text: for example, the use of the word "Geschlecht" in 1783 differs from its use in 2022. The second challenge occurs at the level of the persistence of culturally biased valorization. One instance is the negative judgment against the original text, with the author's dropping of the secondary ending on the adjective "eigene." Had Pomona long been treated as an important contribution to all literary history and not merely women's literary history, a standardized modern, critical edition of the journal might exist. Had there been centuries of unbiased respect, such an edition might note the conditions of female education in the...

“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood ed. by Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo

Reviewed by: “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood ed. by Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo Shuli Barzilai Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo, eds., “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. xiii + 421 pp. The reiterated “It” in the main title of this book is identified in the subtitle: The Bible. Among its varied functions in Atwood’s writings, the Bible may represent a dangerous object, to be kept under lock and key from unauthorized readers. The referents of the reiterated “We” in the book title are such forbidden (mostly female) readers. Thus in Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, rather than regarding the Bible as a sacred text to be communally shared and interpreted, the totalitarian rulers of Gilead recognize its potential to undermine their hegemony. The narrator Offred’s ironic question — “Who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?” — underscores her subjugation in Gilead as a “handmaid,” a two-legged womb, who is not allowed to read and write, even while designating the insubordinate thoughts that the regime has not succeeded in quelling or eradicating. In contrast to the Bible oppressively interpreted and utilized in Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible encompasses many texts for Atwood. As Rhiannon Graybill and Peter Sabo observe at the outset of their introductory essay, “The work of Margaret Atwood is full of Bibles” (1). Her biblically literate reach extends not only to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament but also to non-canonical texts. Atwood got her hands on it/them, so to speak, from the beginning of her decades- long career. As the contributors to The Bible and Margaret Atwood fully demonstrate, Atwood’s Bibles, including apocalyptic literature, provide a continual source of inspiration, appearing in multiple explicit references and allusions throughout her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Moreover, biblical texts are made to do different types of narrative work and perform wide-ranging functions. Atwood draws upon the Bible for themes, motifs, (in)tangible objects, storylines, subtexts, and more. The essays collected here substantiate the extraordinary frequency and variability of her uses of the Bible. However, despite the critical discussion surrounding Atwood’s works as well as the media attention focused on her public persona, this significant aspect of her literary production has been largely under-examined and neglected to date. The Bible and Margaret Atwood identifies and fills a gap in the existing scholarship. In addition to the editors’ excellent “Introduction” and “Afterword,” the collection contains fifteen essays equally divided among five parts. Each part bears the name of an Atwoodian work or phrase: “Surfacing,” “In Other Worlds,” “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” “Scales and Tails,” and “Negotiating with the Dead.” [End Page 173] The three essays presented in Part One, “Surfacing,” exemplify the informative and often innovative analyses presented in this collection. The section opens with Hannah Strømmen’s overview, “‘Always a Potent Object’?: The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels,” which persuasively shows that from The Edible Woman (1969) to The Testaments (2019) Atwood’s fiction has reflected a variety of attitudes and approaches to the Bible in the modern world. Along with the secularizing trends that characterize contemporary culture, her novels also present the Bible as a powerful and potent factor on disparate individual, sociopolitical, and ideological levels. Strømmen’s definitive summation is corroborated by many of the essays that follow: “As Atwood’s characters find themselves constrained by different scripts — sexist, classist, nationalist, religious — their fictional lives demonstrate the possibilities of resisting and rewriting these scripts, sometimes through a rewriting of scripture itself” (49). In “Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian Nation-Building,” Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla assess Atwood’s impact as an expressly Canadian writer. Her early critical work revealed or even discovered a national literary pattern: an obsession with survival both in the literal sense, given Canada’s vast harsh wilderness, and in the sense of self...

Neurotic Stars and Spellbound Viewers: Louis Bisch and Psychoanalytic Film Theory in Silent-Era Photoplay

ABSTRACT: Responding to the popular fascination with psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Photoplay magazine commissioned American neuropsychiatrist Louis Bisch to write a series of articles that applied Freudian concepts to questions of film stardom and spectatorship, genres, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus. Markedly different from the 1970s canonical texts in the field, Bisch’s work articulated a psychoanalytic theory that embraces cinema’s lowbrow mass appeal and encourages spectators to adopt a demystified perspective on Hollywood. This article discusses Bisch’s texts as an early instance of film theory written primarily for a female readership and as a forgotten anti-modernist road not taken in the history of theorizing cinema.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

Contemporary Chinese Romantic Fiction: Analyzing the “Female Young Werther and Male Charlotte” Genre

On the one hand, to a certain extent, romantic fictions satisfy female readers’ fantasies about love. On the other hand, these novels are also a kind of embodiment of social values. They play an important role in contemporary popular culture. In Chinese mainland today, a large number of romantic fictions have been adapted into films or drama series with large market value. However, contemporary Chinese romantic fiction has not attracted much academic attention. In order to address the lack of academic research in this area, this study mainly focuses on the characters in contemporary Chinese romantic fictions, especially female characters, as well as the social value of these novels. This paper takes the Female Young Werther and Male Charlotte (FYW&MC) genre as an example to analyze and discuss the character image and social value of contemporary Chinese romantic fiction. Here, I divide the FYW&MC genre into three subtypes and select three representative works, Qiyue and Ansheng, Cry Me A Sad River, and The Best of Us, as case studies to analyze and explain the social value and character image of the FYW&MC genre. In addition, readers’ emotional responses towards the works or characters are also among the points of concern in this study.

Interrogating Desire in Contemporary Literature: Iterations around Gender and Its Relationship with the Culture of the Digital Realm

Concerns around desire and its murkiness inside contemporary literature mirror anxieties that are distinct to conversations that are happening online. Instead of attempting to structurally demystify these anxieties through fiction, the market calls for more books that intentionally blur the lines of morality so that these stories permit even as they punish. This paper would argue this thread in recent books by authors ranging from Lillian Fishman to Miranda Popkey and their multiple iterations of women’s sexuality through the lens of establishing a political conversation by way of portraying relationships that mirror larger societal concerns. By problematizing the genre of the auto fiction, I would also invoke their contrast with the works of Annie Ernaux and her distinctly French matter-of-fact approach to articulating desire. In way of doing that, I would talk about the influence these books have on the larger literary culture and what that says about the future of literature dealing with similar themes of female desire, as predicted by the likes of affect-theorists Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai. Even though the argument is built primarily through American literature, they encompass a larger trend of cultural conversations as reflected in digital platforms like Tiktok and Instagram where books are marketed primarily through their proclivity to appeal to the underlying anxieties and the sentimental susceptibilities of young female readers. This, in turn, influences iterations and priorities of contemporary feminism as observed in these digital realms. As we also encounter more of these disillusioned complex female characters in media, the inclination is towards dissociative assimilation with problematic desire as the agencies of these women tend to push and pull according to what is digestible.

Physiological Illustration and a Women’s Fashion Magazine: Vasilii Timm’s Satirical Cartoons in Listok dlia svetskikh liudei, 1843–1844

Abstract The women’s fashion magazine Listok dlia svetskikh liudei (1839–1845) printed satirical lithographs by the Russo-Baltic artist Vasilii Fedorovich Timm in 1843–1844, providing an important forum for merging the physiological sketch with the fashion press. Listok presented Timm with a serialized format, whereby his satirical cartoons adapted the physiological sketch to a largely female readership, commenting on courtship, relationships, male vices, as well as social ills, urban life, and the state of journalism in the 1840s. Listok offered visual commentary on issues important to female readers as well as broader observations of Petersburg life and Russian society.

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

Cheek, Pamela L. Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

Cheek, Pamela L. <i>Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>

Marrying Christ: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Song of Songs in Aemilia Lanyer’s "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"

In 1611, an Englishwoman named Aemilia Lanyer published a volume of poetry and prose titled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Throughout the volume, which centres on an 1800-line retelling of Christ’s death and resurrection, Lanyer draws from the Song of Songs as well as other biblical texts to produce an image of Christ as a Bridegroom. In so doing, Lanyer inserts herself into a hermeneutical genealogy populated by both Protestant and Catholic writers. A key figure in this interpretive tradition is the twelfth-century abbot and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, whose sermon cycle on the first part of the Song of Songs offers a detailed character study of the Bridegroom. This article examines the cross-confessional nature of the bridal-mystical tradition epitomized by Bernard before conducting a close reading of the images that Lanyer associates with Christ. Ultimately, this article suggests that Lanyer puts bridal theology to a new communal use by producing a devotional poetic space in which female readers can engage with each other through Christ and with Christ through each other.

Reading Benjamin Franklin’s life story in Bareilly

ABSTRACT This essay follows the print history of Benjamin Franklin’s life story. It appears first in William and Robert Chambers’ The Moral Class Book (1839) in Edinburgh and later in the Bareilly Tattvabodhini Sabha’s Niti Pradip (1870). As we juxtapose the English Franklin alongside the Hindi Franklin, it becomes possible to see the pliancy and polysemic character of a life story that emerges at the intersections of history and literature. It absorbs different meanings for readers separated by race, nation, language and gender and becomes an unpredictable vehicle for contradictory aspirations among male and female readers. At times illuminating a commitment to entrepreneurial and working class aspirations, particularly those of printer-publishers, it signals an interest in modernity and its institutions. At the same time, the themes of publicness and statesmanship make Franklin’s life an unusual pedagogical device for women readers in late colonial India. As we trace the Franklin life story through shifting linguistic and interpretative frames, it calls attention to the fraught dynamic in cultural and educational debates of the late colonial period in north India.

Female Development and Fairy Tale Transformations in Frances Browne’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair, and its Tales of Fairy Times (1856)

Focusing on the changing publishing trends in children’s Irish and British fiction in the mid-nineteenth century, this essay examines Frances Browne’s popular fairy-tale collection, Granny’s Wonderful Chair, and its Tales of Fairy Times (1856), as part of a wider turn towards fantasy and fairy tale in the period. For Browne and others, the appeal of the genre lies in its ability to both entertain children, as well as instruct them in moral and social principles. As this essay aims to demonstrate, however, Browne’s text forges a significant challenge to conventional gendered patterns of social behaviour for women and imagines alternative life pathways for its young female readership as part of its didactic function. By focusing on the girl protagonist of the collection’s frame story, and her journey of maturation and acculturation, this essay finally reads Browne’s text not only for its transgressive subtext on gender conventions, but also for its implied critique of the power hierarchies that uphold the patriarchal order at the heart of these gendered social principles.

Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de Gaula to Don Quixote

Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de Gaula to Don Quixote

“Don’t fake the big O”: Portrayals of faking orgasm among women inCosmoandGlamour

Many women report faking orgasm, at least on occasion, during heterosex (i.e., heterosexual sexual activities). The reasons for the practice include validating the skill of a male lover, a way of ending sexual encounters, and to avoid pathologization that is often associated with orgasmic absence. Constructions of heterosex, female sexuality, and sexual pleasure are influenced by multiple sources including the media. However, there is a lack of systematic research on how faking orgasm is presented in the media. This gap in research provided an opportunity to investigate women’s magazines’ portrayals of the practice. Using constructionist thematic analysis, 69 online articles, published by two popular women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, were analyzed. From the examined articles, two major themes emerged: faking as a common practice (especially via women’s first-hand accounts) and instructing the reader not to fake. It is our contention that together the two themes create a distinctly postfeminist portrayal of faking orgasm. On the one hand, the magazines included and highlighted women’s own experiences and reasons for faking orgasm. On the other hand, female readers were instructed to avoid faking in the name of personal responsibility and empowerment. Notably, the magazines omitted any discussion of gender power relations in their appeals for choice and sexual agency. Overall, this study expands our understanding of women magazines’ contradictory portrayals of women’s sexuality, sexual pleasure, and navigation of its absence.

Kryminały (są) dla dziewczyn… — refleksje wokół cyklu detektywistycznego Karen Karbo o Minervie Clark

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in detective literature among the youngest readers. The appeal of this type of literature is confirmed not only by a kind of “publication overproduction” observable in the segment of books for children and young adults, but also by reader rankings. The latter also show two significant trends: firstly — the declining age of the youngest readers who choose detective stories, secondly — girls are beginning to prevail among the young recipients of this literature.&#x0D; The goal of the article is to seek an answer to the question why young girls increasingly often choose detective literature and what makes it attractive from the reception perspective. The example which is the focus of attention is the mystery-type trilogy written by American author Karen Karbo about the adventures of an eccentric teenager Minerva Clark. The series consists of the following volumes: Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs, and Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, all of which can be categorized as classical detective stories.&#x0D; The latest detective fiction for young girls, which readily utilizes gender and feminist topics, features more and more characters of brave and independent female amateur detectives. Minerva Clark has joined this colorful gallery of characters, who appeared in the twentieth-century literature thanks to Miss Marple novels authored by Agatha Christie. The literary character of Minerva Clark arouses associations with another fictional character meant for female teenage readers — Nancy Drew, the titular hero of American novels Nancy Drew Mystery Series, published in the USA since the 1930s.&#x0D; Minerva Clark has become part of the contemporary discourse on femininity and the role of gender in popular culture. The popularity of the trilogy in question as well as the whole trend of detective stories for girls can be explained in several ways. Apart from the feminine topic repertoire, the literary factors are of significance: suspense-keeping stories, captivating plots, young people’s slang, and most of all — humor, highly thought of by the young audience. In Karen Karbo’s series we are dealing with verbal-intellectual and situational comedy as well as that of characters. The content-related comedy-making factors in the trilogy about Minerva Clark also include humorous narration (play on words), situational scenes, and a happy ending. Books about female teenage detectives such as Minerva evoke a substantial response among their gender also because they are written with present-day girls and their needs in mind.

Images and Self-Reflection in the Meditationes Vitae Christi

Personal prayer books often contained portraits of their patrons engaged in devotion, which were gazed at during prayer or meditative reading and could shape the readers’ devotional state of mind and conduct. In this article, I examine images that allowed a female reader to see herself in an illuminated manuscript of a different sort: the well-known Franciscan text, the Meditationes Vitae Christi, now Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410. I will show that the book’s illuminations compel the reader’s identification with the accompanying text through their emotional intensity or singularity, illustrating and constructing various facets of contemplation.&#x0D; The images I discuss are not the patron or reader portraits that appear in personal prayer books nor are they designed solely to allow the reader to imaginatively place herself within the vita Christi narrative. Rather, they depict figures who take part in the biblical story and invite the reader’s identification. This article considers two images of Mary and other, less prominent figures that could project the manuscript’s reader, very likely a Poor Clare, into the text and teach her how to use it to achieve contemplative ascent. The illuminations instruct her to remain focused on her ceaseless search for God, relentless prayer, and Passion meditation, which will ultimately lead to an unmediated encounter with the divine.

Capturing the Queen: Establishing Agency through Narrative Strategies and Royal Materiality in Charlotte Papendiek's Memoirs

Writing in the popular nineteenth-century genre of queens’ lives, Charlotte Papendiek's memoirs, published under the title Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte, chronicle both the life of the queen as well as that of Papendiek. Papendiek establishes her agency within the court of King George III and Queen Charlotte in the 1780s at Windsor by narrating the parallels between her life and the lives of the royals, the points of intersection between them, and the material exchanges with them that enhance her status in society and emphasize her centrality in her memoirs. She explores the bond between her family and the royal family: her father was one of three servants Queen Charlotte brought with her from her home when she came to England in 1761, her husband was page to the princess royal, and she herself was playmate to princes as a child and servant to the queen in her later years; she shows how this bond is represented by gifts given and received, by furniture and musical instruments bought from the royals and displayed or played in the Papendiek home, and by occasions upon which she stands proxy for the queen. Papendiek exploits her connection with the royals in her narrative, and, in particular, with Queen Charlotte, in order to solidify her own importance in her memoirs. She thereby achieves the centrality that the lives of queens insisted upon for their subjects and modeled for their female readers.

How Qajar Iranian Princess Taj al-Saltana Saw a 19th Century Global Pandemic

Persianate cultures have been greatly influenced by the “mirror for princes” genre, which offers monarchs advice on how to treat their subjects justly and methods of being an ideal ruler. While scholars have chosen to study this genre from a male-centered perspective, how royal women shaped this genre has remained under-examined by current scholarship. This presentation argues that Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity (1884-1936) by Iranian Qajar Princess Taj al-Saltana, offers new ways of seeing how women used memoir writing to challenge the dominance of their male counterparts during times of pandemics. As the daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, Princess Taj al-Saltana, was able to carefully document one of the many cholera epidemics that ravaged late 19th century Iran from her unique perspective as a recognized intellectual and activist who advocated constitutionalism, freedom, and women’s rights in Iran. In addition to chronicling a cholera epidemic in Iran over one hundred years ago, Taj al-Saltana’s memoir holds interest for modern scholars interested in her handling of genre conventions, specifically how she indicts the ruling patriarchy of the Qajar government of Iran and its corruption which led to the failure to control cholera in the country, while simultaneously instructing female readers about the conduct of an ideal female ruler to build a healthier Iran. This presentation aims to show the way Crowning Anguish functions as a “mirror for princesses” and how we can come up with better strategies of resistance especially in the age of COVID-19 with the failures of patriarchal governments to stop pandemics.

Searching for an Inclusive Approach to Biblical Laws Relating to Women: Observing Innertextual Developments in the Dead Sea Scrolls as an Instructive Tool

Despite the existence of biblical laws pertaining to women, Cheryl Anderson, in her work Ancient Laws and Contemporary Controversies, observes that these same laws do not take into account the perspectives of women. Instead, they are formed from a “male perspective” with which female readers learn to identify through “immasculation.” Anderson proposes an alternative, liberationist, and inclusive approach, in which the realities of the marginalized serve as the point of departure, and suggests that one way to perform this task entails observing innerbiblical development between texts, drawing on the work of Terence Fretheim. Similar innertextual changes are also observable between interpretations of scriptural law, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This essay therefore expands on the work of Anderson to compare certain biblical laws concerning women with examples of rewriting within the Scrolls. In this way, contemporary readers can observe a range of responses that may spark readings in which the marginalized voices of women are included.

Text-to-Speech Software as a Resource for Independent Interpreting Practice by Undergraduate Interpreting Students

This article proposes a model for integrating text-to-speech software (TTS) in students’ interpreting training and practice. It shows the aims of the model, the definition of TTS, the advantages of using TTS, how to search for TTS, instructional stages with TTS, and the interpreting instructor’s role. The students can use TTS software online; download it to their laptop, use a Google Chrome extension to listen to webpages, online ebooks, Google Docs, webpages, and emails; or use a TTS mobile app. Practicing interpreting with TTS starts with introducing students to the TTS, how to copy and paste a text in the text area block, choosing a male or female reader, American or British accent, and reading speed. The students practice interpreting with TTS on their own, out of class. They listen and interpret without looking at the screen. They practice different interpreting modes (simultaneous, consecutive, liaison and sight interpreting). They can take notes only in consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. In sight interpreting, they interpret while reading the text from the screen silently without listening to the text being read. They practice individually, in pairs or small groups where they can listen to each other’s interpreting and provide feedback ad comments on the quality and errors. The instructor serves as a facilitator. She can help the students find and download TTS that meet their needs and may select texts and exercises for the students to practice. She follows the students up to make sure they are making the best use of the TTS software. The article concludes with some recommendations for interpreting practice with TTS and other forms of technologies that can be utilized in student-interpreters’ training and self-study.