Women's Genres Research Articles

Translator’s ideology: the accented critique of the Church and the missing feminist authorial voice in the translation of Sara Joseph’s Othappu

ABSTRACT Exploring the interactions of female sexuality and spirituality from a feminist lens, Othappu by Sara Joseph, is influential in the genre of women’s writing in Malayalam. Through a textual analysis of the novel’s prize-winning translation by Rev. Valson Thampu, the paper examines how the author’s voicing of female resistance to patriarchal institutions gets effaced in the translation process. The translation appears to be stripped of its explicitly feminist authorial voice, where the specific articulations of female subjectivity get replaced by a universally-appealing critical voice, accenting the translator’s ideology. Contrary to Joseph’s emphasis on the text’s engagement with a woman’s response to religion, Thampu voices his reading of the text as an “individual’s” conflict with faith. The attempt is to locate the discursive presence of the translator and how the translator’s ideological leanings influence the transference of the feminist politics of the source text. Apart from closely comparing the original text to the translation in terms of the specificities of the language and analysis of the paratextual elements, a macro-dimension approach which locates the social context and ideological premise examining the translator’s role as creator of a new social narrative through translation is also employed.

Was the Tale a Women's Genre? Tellers, Collectors, and Writers of Tales in 19th-Century Hungary

AbstractIn 1858 a leading Hungarian literary critic as well as collector and editor of folk poetry started a debate about the possible literary career of women, arguing that literature and other forms of public artistic activity are fields that should not be open to women as it may cause serious moral and social problems. Yet, he noted that in case women still insist on becoming literary authors, they should turn only to certain genres, such as tales. The article investigates how the tale became a gendered genre, and presents women tellers, collectors and writers of tales as well as the diverse ways they were represented in Hungarian culture in the 19th century.

Women and Stoic ethics in early modern England

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of women's engagement with Stoic ethics in early modern England (c. 1600–1700). It builds on recent literature in the field by demonstrating that there is a positive gender‐inclusive narrative to be told about Stoic philosophy in this time—one that incorporates women's specific concerns and responds to women's lived experiences. To support this claim, we take an interdisciplinary approach and examine several different genres of women's writing in the period, including letters, poems, plays, educational texts, and moral essays. In these writings, we argue, a distinctive conception of Stoic therapy emerges. Women embrace well‐known aspects of the Stoic philosophy—such as living in agreement with nature, the importance of self‐government, and the ideal of freedom from the passions—but they also allow room for the cultivation of eupatheiai or life‐affirmative feelings, such as feelings of respect, affection, and good will toward other people.

Gender and Genre: Women's Performance Practices in Dersim

Abstract Significant numbers of ethnographic studies from different parts of the world emphasize lament as a women's genre, with cross-cultural analyses indicating that women predominate among the genre's performers. These performances are often signified by ritual wailing, but researchers typically overlook how the genre is given ritual form through mundane activities in everyday life. Everyday experience and ritual experience are often cast as contradictory. Everyday speech and poetic discourse have been mainly separated in the literature. Rather than positing two distinct selves opposed to each other in everyday speech and in performance, it makes more sense to argue that the poetic self may contain contradictory statements. Focusing on the women's performance practices in Dersim, a region in eastern Turkey, where Zazaki- and Kurdish-speaking Alevis live, I consider how classification of genres relates to gender and power. Rather than associating the possibility of raising one's voice with resisting the social order, I attempt to explore the genre's contextualization process and its connections to women's agency.

The textual terrain: developments and directions in women's writing, 1500–1700

AbstractThis article assesses our much-expanded view of the texts produced by early modern women in Ireland, surveying what is available to present-day researchers and considering emerging methodologies for the analysis of early modern female voices. The range of genres with which we now know early modern women engaged owes much to feminist literary historians’ capacious approach to defining literature, expanding beyond traditionally elite genres (drama, poetry, fiction) to encompass writing in all its forms. Thus, the present corpus includes letters and petitions, life writing, devotional prose, legal depositions, as well as all kinds of verse and song, in multiple languages. Moreover, where the primary evidence in Ireland sometimes seems sparse, international perspectives have illuminated the currents of women's writing. Interpretative paradigms from other fields — book history and the history of reading, culinary and medical history, network analysis — are being applied to yield fresh insights about this material. The question of how early modern Ireland was experienced by women has been explored in studies that address such texts as articulations of subjectivity, in the light of the history of emotions. The wide range of situations and genres of women's writing in early modern Ireland is now firmly evident, inspiring a host of new approaches.

Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly

<i>Faraway Women and the</i> Atlantic Monthly

Становление жанра женского журнала в Германии (XVIII век): к постановке проблемы

The article deals with the problem of the genre formation of women’s magazine in Germany in the XVIII century and its role in gender dis-course of the epoch. The author highlights the historical context of the origin and development of female periodicals and emphasizes its controversial nature. The article introduces the dominant theories of the 18th century about the «special» purpose of women, which had their origins in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Further it examines the main typological features of the genre of women’s magazine in the process of its gradual transformation. Based on the works of leading German researchers, the author reproduces the key stages in the development of the phenomena of the female public and female journalism. In addition, the article reveals the issue of women’s education in Germany in the 18th century, which is inextricably linked with the educational and moralizing concept of women’s magazines.

Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman

Reviewed by: Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman Margaret J.M. Ezell Editing Early Modern Women, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2016. Pp. xii + 299. $99.99. This thought-provoking collection, produced by two highly regarded scholars of early modern women's writings and including contributions by established editors working with early modern women's texts, will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of anyone who teaches critical bibliography, scholarly editing, and/or who works with women's texts as part of their scholarship and in the classroom. Ms. Ross and Mr. Salzman's useful introduction gives an overview of the varied traditions of editing of early modern women's works. It also draws attention to the ways in which, in the twentieth century, these texts forced new editorial issues to be considered and dealt with that diverged from those codified by editions of mainstream canonical authors such as Jonson, Milton, and Melville. These are editorial choices that continue to be problematic today. "How do we edit texts that have no editorial history, or whose editorial history is concerned with oddity and exemplarity rather than canonicity?" is the first of their guiding questions, followed by "how do we edit texts that do not fit easily into conventional taxonomies of 'literature,' and what contexts should we present for them?" Finally, "how can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims?" These are important, central questions confronting twenty-first-century editors in general and not just those devoted to the recovery and preservation of works by women or lesser-known male authors. The volume is divided into four parts. The first deals with "Editorial Ideologies," followed by "Editing Female Forms: Gender, Genre, and Editing," "Out of the Archives, Into the Classroom," and "Editorial Possibilities," the last dealing with editing in the digital age. Many of the essays deal with major figures and familiar texts produced by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Danielle Clarke's "Producing Gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and Her Early Editors," Susan M. Felch's "The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Prayerbook," Ramona Wray on Elizabeth [End Page 166] Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Leah S. Marcus on editing Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Ellen Lamb on Mary Wroth's Urania. Other essays address generic issues, including editing women's letters for print publication by Diana G. Barnes and Marian WynneDavies's chapter on editing dramas for performance. Essays that will have particular interest for the readers of The Scriblerian include ones looking at women writing during the English Civil War, including Lucy Hutchinson, Anne, Lady Halkett, and Katherine Philips, as well as to what extent lesser-known women writing in the Interregnum and Restoration need modernization for the classroom. Elizabeth Clarke, Suzanne Trill, and Marie-Louise Coolahan tackle editing issues raised by individual texts and authors. Ms. Clarke, who is one of the team of editors producing the OUP complete works of Lucy Hutchinson, points out in "Contextualizing the Woman Writer: Editing Lucy Hutchinson's Religious Prose" that a male-authored, seventeenth-century theological treatise would be edited in the context of printed, public theological writings. However, Hutchinson's Principles is devised in the form of a long letter to her daughter Barbara. Hutchinson expects others will read her text, but she will not publish it: "I write not for the presse, to boast my owne weaknesses to the world but to imprint on your hart the characters I have received of God." Ms. Clarke thus argues the importance of situating the work in part in the context of the popular seventeenth-century women's genre, the "mother's legacy," suggesting that the choice of "a consciously feminized genre" is important in the assumptions the writer is making about her readers and the type of theological knowledge they will bring to the text. Similarly, in "Critical Categories: Towards an Archaeology of Anne, Lady Halkett's Archive," Ms. Trill looks at the way in which earlier editing of Halkett's "life and works" has created different "lives" in different times. She begins with...

Cosmopolitanism, colonial shopping, and the servant problem: nurse Ida E. Cliffe’s travels in wartime India

ABSTRACTIda E. Cliffe was posted in India as a nurse during the First World War. In a travel memoir published sixty years later, she captures her extensive travels across wartime colonial India. Her travel diary combines two distinct positions – that of the woman-coloniser recording her travel in the colonies, and that of the nurse in a war-zone. It focuses on the British coloniser’s home-life in India, the picturesque landscape of the country, the cosmopolitanism of its people, and its recent history. This article explores the problematic nuances in Cliffe’s celebration of colonial cosmopolitanism, her shopping for colonial artefacts and her appreciation of the picturesque embedded within the subtext of pride in British imperialism. It demonstrates not only the complexities in the figure of the female imperial traveller, but also the heteroglossia in the genre of women’s travel writing.

The difference between the genres of women’s discourse and the identity of “Byeolgungon”

The difference between the genres of women’s discourse and the identity of “Byeolgungon”

Asian American Media Studies and the Problem of Legibility

Asian American Media Studies and the Problem of Legibility Peter X Feng (bio) In February 2016, I participated in a roundtable discussion about Master of None, the Netflix series created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang (2015–present). Hosted by the Asian Arts Initiative, a multidisciplinary arts center based in Philadelphia's Chinatown, the evening brought together fans of a post–network TV series for a lively discussion. At one point, filmmaker (and curator) Sara Zia Ebrahimi commented that there was a remarkable degree of narrative experimentation across the ten-episode season that may have affected the show's accessibility; it seems likely that a network concerned about building a week-by-week following would not have allowed Ansari and Yang to play with the show's tone and narrative structure to the extent allowed by Netflix. Toward the end of the evening, an audience member asked the panel to comment on her sense that Master of None was well received in the Asian American community while The Mindy Project (created by Mindy Kaling; Fox, 2012–2015; Hulu, 2015–present) was subject to extended criticism. Inspired by Ebrahimi's observation, I noted that The Mindy Project engaged with the conventions of the sitcom and the romantic comedy in an entirely accessible way, and that while creator Mindy Kaling was clearly engaged in an ongoing commentary on those forms, she had just as clearly embraced their conventions to make her points. (Furthermore, an unexamined bias against the romantic comedy and other "women's genres" likely contributed to the critical dismissal of The Mindy Project.) Following Thomas Schatz, I understand genres like the romantic comedy as articulating fundamentally irreconcilable ideological contradictions (even as they produce narrative closure through a symbolic resolution of those contradictions).1 By contrast, Master of None's open-ended narratives force the audience to consider social issues that do not have easy answers. Master of None refuses to leave "the mind at rest" with a palatable narrative resolution that minority audiences may perceive as accommodating mainstream audiences.2 [End Page 125] I think this point becomes even clearer when we compare both shows with the ABC network's two Asian American sitcoms, Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–present) and Dr. Ken (ABC, 2015–present), which are extremely legible as prime-time sitcoms. Dr. Ken is a multicamera family-and-workplace sitcom with archetypal sitcom characters (nutty dad, grounded mom, boundary-pushing teenage daughter, nerdy prepubescent son, and four varieties of coworker: sassy, naïve, arrogant-oblivious, and gay)—in fact, Dr. Ken feels like a cryogenically preserved 1980s sitcom. Fresh off the Boat draws from more contemporary trends (e.g., the tightly edited cutaway gags that interrupt expository dialogue) but also features archetypal characters (Old World–values mom, New World–loving dad, hardheaded but good-hearted teenage son, two precocious younger brothers, and acid-tongued grandmother). While Master of None is the smartest and riskiest of the four, the Asian American community is perhaps most excited about Fresh off the Boat, which is set in the 1990s and thereby softens its racial commentary by locating it in a less enlightened but still familiar time. Fresh off the Boat is identifiably Asian American but also accessible to ABC's viewers. The contradiction between originality and comprehensibility is foregrounded by the rhetorical backflips that mainstream media outlets perform when promoting programs that ostensibly present minority viewpoints. At the Television Critics Association press tour, the president of ABC Entertainment Group observed that ABC's fall 2014 slate was "a mission statement to reflect America. . . . In a way it's not so much diversity as it is authenticity."3 He then went on to say: "We picked them up because they were great television . . . but they sort of for us unleashed a creative vein that was unmissable. We think these shows are deeply relatable (to broad audiences). When I watch Fresh off the Boat, or Blackish or Cristela—I am those families. . . . Great stories about great characters will resonate in the heart and gut anywhere in the world."4 In other words, these shows are specific enough that racial minorities will find them authentic, but they are relatable enough that they...

Chaucer's Feminine Pretexts: Gendered Genres in Three Frame Moments

Abstract In the construction of his authorial persona, Chaucer sought to identify himself with genres of literature that may have been associated with female readership in the medieval cultural imagination, including vernacular devotional writing (Pseudo-Origen's De Maria Magdalena), conduct literature (the Tale of Melibee), and hagiography (the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale). By exploiting the cultural resonances of these stereotypically women's genres, Chaucer positioned himself as a writer for an emerging bourgeois audience and distinguished his works as compassionate and socially productive.

Females and Footnotes: Excavating the Genre of Eighteenth-Century Women’s Scholarly Verse

Throughout the eighteenth century, the genre of women’s poetry heavily annotated with editorializing commentary (a genre I term “scholarly verse”) became increasingly prevalent. Such poetry presents an ironic reversal of conventions of gender and authority by incorporating the literal margins of the page: the female voice commands the majority of the page, while the masculine voice of empiricism, authority, and scholarly reason is pushed to the margins. This essay offers a distant reading of the range of annotations women poets provided, in order to begin new conversations about the ways women’s poetry served as a site of and structure for intellectual exploration in the eighteenth century.

Devotion and horror in a women's genre: exploring subalternity in cinema

Devotion and horror in a women's genre: exploring subalternity in cinema

Review: Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing, by Alice L. McLean

Review: <i>Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing</i>, by Alice L. McLean

Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education

This article will explore the intersection between ‘literature’ and ‘science’ in one key area, the botanical poem with scientific notes. It reveals significant aspects of the way knowledge was gendered in the Enlightenment, which is relevant to the present-day education of girls in science. It aims to illustrate how members of the Lichfield Botanical Society (headed by Erasmus Darwin) became implicated in debates around the education of women in Linnaean botany. The Society’s translations from Linnaeus inspired a new genre of women’s educational writing, the botanical poem with scientific notes, which emerged at this time. It focuses in particular on a poem by Anna Seward and argues that significant problems regarding the representation of the Linnaean sexual system of botany are found in such works and that women in the culture of botany struggled to give voice to a subject which was judged improper for female education. The story of this unique poem and the surrounding controversies can teach us much about how gender impacted upon women’s scientific writing in eighteenth century Britain, and how it shaped the language and terminology of botany in works for female education. In particular, it demonstrates how the sexuality of plants uncovered by Linnaeus is a paradigmatic illustration of how societal forces can simultaneously both constrict and stimulate women’s involvement in science. Despite the vast changes to women’s access in scientific knowledge of the present day, this ‘fair sexing’ of botany illustrates the struggle that women have undergone to give voice to their botanical knowledge.

‘He reflected, and not for the first time, that it was a great pity he suffered from a middle-class male reluctance to thump his wife’: Backlash, misogyny, and the consequences of self-fulfilment in the fiction of Joanna Trollope

Joanna Trollope began her career writing historical novels in the early 1980s, but it is for her contribution to the Aga-saga genre that she is best known. Trollope is synonymous with this popular category of women's writing, selling approximately 500,000 copies per title. Despite Trollope's popularity (and that of the Aga-saga more broadly) little research has been done on these novels. As part of a renewed interest by feminist critics in ‘women's genres’, Janine Liladhar (2000) and Deborah Philips (2006 [2007]) have done something to remedy this absence of scholarship, discussing Trollope and the Aga-saga in relation to romance and melodrama respectively. They characterize Aga-sagas as ‘reassuring’ narratives that, whilst often depicting women's dissatisfaction and frustration, always offer a contented image of domesticity. This article, however, argues that these accounts of Trollope's work have overlooked the negative depictions of women that run beneath the novels' celebration of domestic femininity. I maintain that at the heart of these novels is the suggestion that the price of women's pursuit of self-fulfilment is damage to children, the emasculation of husbands, and the dissolution of relationships.

Cechy i funkcje przekazów literackich na łamach dziewiętnastowiecznej prasy kobiecej

The article attempts to answer the question about the role of the nineteenth- -century periodicals in the dissemination of readership among women. This type of publications from the very beginning acted as a medium for literature and was often classified as a literary magazine due to the lack of distinctive typological profile. Particularly early periodicals for women from the years 1820–1860 (predominantly until the November Uprising) morphologically remained literary magazines because of expanded fictional sections. The article discusses forms of that kind of message, its functions, evolution in the second half of the nineteenth-century, when new genres of women’s press were distinguished, regarding wider thematic spectrum and reading practices aimed for women with particular reference to their social status at that time.

The Study of Women and Music in Morocco

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

Beyond the Feminine: Intersectionality and Hybridity in Talk Shows

This essay analyzes the assumption often expressed or implied in feminist scholarship that the talk show is a feminine and even feminist genre. Tracing the origins of this trend to feminist television criticism's early focus on women's genres, the author argues that a preoccupation with femininity and feminism obscures the intersectionality and hybridity of the genre, as talk shows' obsessive thematization of race-, class-, and sexuality-based marginality is far more central to their composition and reception than gender.