Male-authored Texts Research Articles

Gendered Authorship of the Female Identity: A Gynocritical Comparative Study between Norwegian Wood and the God of Small Things

The paper seeks to elucidate the differences in the representation of women in male- and female-authored texts, specifically analyzing Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Numerous critics over the years have noted that male and female authors often portray femininity in markedly different ways. While male authors tend to perpetuate prejudiced or stereotypical views of women, female authors, drawing from their direct experiences of womanhood, provide more authentic depictions that foster female empowerment. Theoretically identifying this marked difference is thus the primary aim of this paper and hence this study employs a qualitative textual analysis, utilizing theoretical frameworks such as Michel Foucault’s discourses of sexuality, Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism, Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, Judith Butler’s gender performativity, and Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of gender stereotypes. The findings reveal a significant divergence in the way that male- and female-authored texts characterize female figures. Murakami, in his portrayal of Naoko and Midori, has often associated reductive and stereotypical attributes that in essence undermine their agencies and voices; their attributes and mannerisms were shown to be limited to emotional and/or sexual contexts that conflate the female experience and undermine gender fluidity. In contrast, Roy depicted Ammu and Rahel in accordance to feminist sensibilities as they can be seen to portray androgyny as well as employ their sexualities to challenge and subvert social norms and stereotypes. The study therefore concludes that women-authored narratives provide more nuanced and authentic representations of female experiences, whereas male-authored texts frequently reinforce patriarchal frameworks and stereotypical assumptions of one-dimensional gender linearity.

‘Those who can’t, teach’: Pregnancy, Professors, and the Anxiety of Transmission in Waterland and Common Ground

Pregnancy remains a rare diegetic occurrence in literature. When it appears, it has been remarked, most recently by writer Jessie Greengrass, that pregnancy struggles to ‘stand both for itself and for something other’ (Greengrass 2018). Pregnancy and maternity are at best metaphors or allegories for something else, a tendency that is not exclusively found but most often observed and most problematic in male-authored texts (Friedman 1987; Hanson 2015). While this is true of texts in which pregnancy and maternity are ‘despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’ (Greengrass), it hardly applies to two contemporary male-authored texts in which pregnancy and maternity are central to the diegesis: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996). This article shows that these texts’ anxious male perspectives offer ‘a new figure of the father’, one whose language makes manifest that which ‘does not signify’ and restores balance between tenor and vehicles in metaphors of pregnancy and maternity (Miller 2005).

The Negative Portrayal of Women in Francis Nyamnjoh’s A Nose for Money as a Challenge to Male Oppression

African female critics in general oppose negative portrayals of female characters in African literature and advocate for more positive depictions of these characters. Even though women’s rights are more widely recognised today, patriarchy still adversely affects women’s lives. It is therefore not surprising that African male-authored texts would reflect this situation. This article thus draws on African feminist theory to examine Francis Nyamnjoh’s negative portrayal of female characters in his novel A Nose for Money (2006). It focuses on the protagonist’s four wives and their relationships with their husband and each other. It argues that African male writers can use negative portrayals of female characters to highlight women’s predicaments in order to stir change in society. The article concludes that the negative portrayal of female characters in the novel serves a positive purpose given that it challenges male oppression.

Quantifying Gender Disparity in Pre-Modern English Literature using Natural Language Processing

Research has continued to shed light on the extent and significance of gender disparity in social, cultural and economic spheres. More recently, computational tools from the data science and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities have been proposed for measuring such disparity at scale using empirically rigorous methodologies. In this article, we contribute to this line of research by studying gender disparity in 2,443 copyright-expired literary texts published in the pre-modern period, defined in this work as the period ranging from the beginning of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Using a replicable data science methodology relying on publicly available and established NLP components, we extract three different gendered character prevalence measures within these texts. We use an extensive set of statistical tests to robustly demonstrate a significant disparity between the prevalence of female characters and male characters in pre-modern literature. We also show that the proportion of female characters in literary texts significantly increases in female-authored texts compared to the same proportion in male-authored texts. However, regression-based analysis shows that, over the 120 year period covered by the corpus, female character prevalence does not change significantly over time, and remains below the parity level of 50%, regardless of the gender of the author. Qualitative analyses further show that descriptions associated with female characters across the corpus are markedly different (and stereotypical) from the descriptions associated with male characters.

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

:Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800

:<i>Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800</i>

Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860–1910)

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr's monograph examines racial science, Indigenous peoples, and nation building in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina through the lens of gender. As she notes, this period of Argentine history has been studied by many scholars and from many different angles. Kerr contributes to this existing literature through her multifaceted focus on gender, which she argues has been largely absent in previous scholarship and prompts a reevaluation of the scientists and literary authors whose work she highlights. Kerr compellingly demonstrates the value of gender analysis here, and although the book contains some missed opportunities in terms of engagement with existing scholarship, it makes a valuable contribution to the field that will interest historians and literary scholars alike.Some particularly strong analytical cases here include Kerr's examination in chapter 2 of Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, in which she offers a thought-provoking reading of Carmen, the Indigenous woman tasked with communicating with Mansilla during his negotiations with cacique Mariano Rosas. Kerr reads Mansilla against the grain to argue that Carmen actively used her own gender positionality to manipulate Mansilla, even as he thought that he was manipulating her. Likewise, Kerr's discussion of both the Sociedad de Beneficencia's efforts to distribute Indigenous women and children among wealthy Argentine families after the Conquest of the Desert and the Catholic Church's proposal for Indigenous boarding schools underlines not only the importance of gender in understanding Argentine ideas about race and nation in this period but also Argentina's provocative connections to similar experiences faced by Indigenous peoples elsewhere. In addition, Kerr's analysis of the photographs taken by Samuel Boote (images of Indigenous peoples in captivity during the 1880s) challenges readers to consider the silences and unanswered questions at which the photographs hint. She argues that even if many of these questions cannot be answered, they are nonetheless important to ask because they reveal “a strong historical bias against the details of women's lives and the intimate aspects of history” (p. 93). Finally, analysis of masculinity is perhaps the most powerful part of this book, not least because most of the available sources were written by men. Kerr effectively deconstructs what it meant to be a man (including as citizens and as scientists), as well as men's views of women's roles in creole and Indigenous society. In dialogue with her analysis of women authors like Florence Dixie and Eduarda Mansilla, Kerr reads her male-authored texts against the grain in search of women's agency, often to great effect.Kerr's interesting and wide-ranging study also contains some missed opportunities. Some of the assertions that Kerr makes about existing scholarship overlook research that could have contributed to her own analysis. She argues, for instance, that many historians “have tended to accept nineteenth-century scientific productions and first-person observations at face value, often citing the very texts they have needed to interrogate” (p. 10). This statement seems to ignore the work of ethnohistorians, historians of science, and others who have read these texts critically and whose work could in fact support Kerr's arguments. Similarly, Kerr suggests that existing scholarship has been caught in a false “dichotomy between [understanding nineteenth-century anthropology as] heroic science and genocide,” which discounts the work of historians and cultural studies scholars who have examined the moral complexities of nineteenth-century anthropology (p. 68). Kerr's contribution to the field speaks for itself, and these statements unfortunately distract from the value of her arguments. The absence from the book of scholarship that could support its arguments and even help to answer some of the questions posed as rhetorical (including the work of Axel Lazzari, Ana Ramos, and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, among many others) perhaps simply reflects a difference of disciplinary approach and certainly is a perennial challenge for interdisciplinary scholarship.Kerr's book compellingly demonstrates the presence and importance of women as actors in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions about racial science, Indigenous peoples, and national belonging in Argentina. She also makes clear that gender-based analysis of these historical developments, as well as some of the key literary texts that helped shape these events, is fruitful for generating new questions and insight. This book will be valuable to historians and literary scholars of Argentina, as well as to other scholars interested in gender, race, and Indigeneity in other settings.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The African Woman as a Symbol of her Continent in Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel

This paper is intended to offer a feminist reading of Wole Soyinka’s play The Lion and the Jewel by showing that its main women figures are constructed as tropes of Africa rather than being depicted as full-fledged individuals. Besides being deprived of self-determining agency, these women act as symbols who represent the traditional cultural values of Africa, and hence they never attempt to subvert the system of patriarchy which is rationalised by these values. Even more so, they are “idealised” by the dramatist so that they can convey his social vision of the African continent during its historical transition from tradition to modernity. More precisely, through their stories the playwright stresses the need of Africans to resist cultural changes that undermine their sense of black identity. Thus, Soyinka’s play confirms the view held by many Postcolonial Feminist critics such as Florence Stratton and Elleke Boehmer who argue that the importance of the African woman in many of the African male-authored texts lies mainly in her ability to represent what her continent represents. In conclusion, the female figures in Soyinka’s play are primarily given a voice as Africans who indict modernity rather than as women subjects who deplore their subordinate position in society.

Namibian Life Stories from the ‘Struggle Days’

Abstract This article analyses representative life stories that reflect the experiences of people who participated in the Namibian liberation struggle, as well as one narrative that reflects the traumatic effect of the brutal murder of her mother witnessed by a five year old girl. The stories detail the vicious nature of settler colonialism in South West Africa and the motive that drove youths to abscond from school to join SWAPO camps in neighbouring countries. Two of the male authored texts focus on the political dimensions of the struggle, with minimal personal details; the two accounts penned by women who obtained secondary and tertiary education in exile and underwent military training foreground the personal dimension that is understated in the male accounts. The human side of war, suffering and discrimination is captured in all the accounts, in differing degrees. The strong Christian beliefs of the selected authors are a striking feature in most of the life stories.

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

De invloed van het gender van auteurs op de literaire waardering van hun teksten

Abstract Male-authored books are generally rated higher than books written by women; witness, for instance, the 2017 list of ‘Best Books’ in de Volkskrant, where out of 51 books, only 8 were authored by women. In order to examine whether male-authored texts are actually different from female-authored texts, this article examines whether readers can derive the author’s gender from two paragraphs of anonymous text, whether a computer programme can derive the author’s gender from a corpus of texts, and whether a gendered author’s name has any effect on the evaluation of the text’s literary quality by non-professional readers. Results show that readers are able to derive the author’s gender from a small fragment of text. This is in contrast with computerized research, which shows mixed results across corpora. Finally, the name of the author does not seem to have an effect on the evaluation of the literary quality.

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Changing the concept of womanhood: male feminists and the Nigeria feminist novel

The Nigeria feminist novel has experienced a remarkable growth in recent years. In spite of the negative portrayal of female characters in the works authored by male novelists, female writers have shown a commitment to portraying and revealing the subjugating plight of women in patriarchal societies and the positive contributions that they make to the development of their society in their works. Nonetheless, in recent years, male authors are beginning to showcase their feminist inclinations by creating awareness and sensitising their readers on the need to ensure that the woman is liberated from patriarchal subjugation and oppression. This paper discussed some of the works of some of male novelists such as Abubakar Gimba, Tanure Ojaide and Felix Ogoanah and the conscious effort made towards promoting a positive portrayal of women in male authored texts. The study concluded that these male feminists have shown that the woman can only be emancipated when men join hands with the women to ensure that all forms of discrimination and oppression are eliminated which will in turn engender peace and development in the society. Keywords: Nigeria feminist novel, patriarchal subjugation

After the Year of Henry James: The Undermining of Authority in Short Fictions by Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates

This essay argues that criticism of James’s role in recent fiction generally has focused on male-authored texts like Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author, excluding not only works by women writers but issues of genre and authority with which these female-authored works tend to engage. The essay addresses that gap by analyzing subversions of James’s authorship and of the author fiction genre in “Dictation” by Cynthia Ozick and “The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital” by Joyce Carol Oates.

Grammar and Gender: A Comparative Study of the Integration and Organisation of Meanings in Selected Male and Female-authored Proseworks

Studies have established gender-based variations in human’s use of language, particularly in the areas of grammar and lexis. This study investigated language use in prose-works involving male and female writers, aimed at finding out whether there were grammar related variations in the use of language by the selected male and female writers. The framework adopted for analysis was the Hallidayan notion of Clause Complexes and Embedded Clauses and how writers made conscious choices from the grammar of logical meaning in their different narratives. Five male-authored and five female-authored prose-works were selected for the study. A part of each prose-work containing fifty (50) consecutive sentences was randomly excised and analysed into clause simplexes, clause complexes and embedded clauses, and the frequencies of these clause types were determined. The result clearly showed that the male authors had higher frequencies of clause complexes than simplexes; whereas the female writers had lower frequencies of complexes but higher frequencies of simplexes. It also showed higher frequencies of embedded clauses in male-authored texts than in female-authored ones. The results therefore suggested that narratives of male writers tend to be more syntactically complex (because of higher frequencies of clustered clauses and varying functional and semantic relationships among component clauses) and semantically complex (because of a much tighter integration of meanings through clause clustering and embedding). The narratives of female writers, on the other hand, tend to be syntactically and semantically simple (with higher use of simplexes, but less use of complexes and embedded clauses).Keywords: Grammar, gender, clause complexes, clause simplexes, embedded clauses.

“what Is Your Mother’s Name?”: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature

Abstract Building on black women’s critical negotiations of black nationalist discourse, this essay names the matrix of black maternal sounds, songs, and approximated womb-spaces as the site of production for black nationalist ideologies and black male identity. Listening to audible traces of black maternity in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), the essay unearths the sonic frameworks through which black male subjectivity and ideologies of black nationalism are formulated. Masculinist black nationalist texts use black women’s sounds to enact the subjective rebirths of men, who then abandon black women, thereby erasing their labors in the constitution of black nationalist ideology. However, embedded within these texts are the resonant echoes of black women’s pain, which both haunt and structure their respective nationalist discourses. The article reveals the extended history of maternal disavowal in black male-authored nationalistic texts, and counterpoises black women authors’ critical responses to these texts in order to reveal that maternal sacrifice proves endemic to masculinist forms of black nationalism.

Joanna Mansbridge, Paula Vogel

Joanna Mansbridge’s Paula Vogel, an exploration of Vogel’s subversive dramaturgy and reappropriation of canonical male-authored texts, fills a significant hole in theatre studies scholarship and should appeal to both scholars and students across an array of disciplines.

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

The Women of Pliny's Letters by JO-ANN SHELTON

BOOK REVIEWS The Women of Pliny’s Letters. By JO-ANN SHELTON. Women of the Ancient World. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xiv + 436. Hardcover, $150.00. ISBN 978-0-415-37428-6. liny mentions 30 women by name and 40 unnamed, making his Letters a “significant source of information” (1) about the lives of mainly upperclass Roman women from the mid first to second centuries ad. Routledge’s “Women of the Ancient World” series has previously centered on biographies,1 but Shelton’s book is the first to explore a range of women in the work of one author. From Pliny’s epistles we gain insightinto Roman households and family life, and women’s involvement in court cases, property ownership, religion, social networks, and politics. Pliny’s typically positive exempla provide a “beneficial counterpoint” (1) to the more negative pictures of women in contemporaryworks byJuvenal, Tacitus, Suetoniusand Martial. The book’s goal, which accords with the series’ premise, is to “bring these women to the foreground, to examine their activities and relationships, and to illuminate their lives by viewing them in the context of the period in which they lived” (1). Given our often limited knowledge of these women, however, Shelton admits that the “biographies” she constructs must be “only very incomplete accounts ” (1). Shelton’s biographical portraits in the first two chapters, “Arria the Elder and the Heroism of Women” and “Arria’s Family and the Tradition of Dissent ,” are heavily prosopographical (some of it necessarily speculative) and contain much information about the careers of the women’s associated men. We often know little about the women independently, however, and the vicissitudes of a father’s, husband’sor son’s career could impact awoman directly, particularly if he were exiled or killed. Shelton argues that some elite women were not just bystanders to the political turmoil of the first and second centuries: Arria Maior (whose husband Aulus Caecina Paetus was convicted of conspiring against Claudius) committed suicide to goad on her hesitant husband before Claudius had him executed (Epist. 1 Either of individuals (e.g. Elizabeth Carney, Olympias: the Mother of Alexander the Great [New York: Routledge, 2006]), or of women in a small family group (e.g. Susan Treggiari, Terentia, Tullia and Publilia: the Women ofCicero’sFamily [New York: Routledge, 2007]). P BOOK REVIEWS 363 3.16); her daughter Arria Minor (wife of Thrasea Paetus, one of Nero’s most vocal critics) and granddaughter Fannia (wife of C. Helvidius Priscus, banished by Nero, then exiled and executed by Vespasian) carried on the family tradition of political dissent and were banished by Domitian for abetting biographies of their husbands (Epist. 3.11, 7.19, 9.13). Even if they could not take part in politics or be serious writers, women could “undertake projects that enhanced the accomplishments of the men in their families” and “might strive to be remembered for engagingin dangerous activities thatsupported male ambitions” (73). But this book is not solely a catalogue of women’s activities drawn from Pliny’s Letters. Shelton confronts two fundamental, intertwined problems: first, of drawing evidence about women from male-authored texts; and second, of assessing Pliny’s portraits in light of his political and social motivations for presentinghismaterial ashe does. On the range of opinion from Suzanne Dixon’s skepticism about the possibility of recovering genuine female voices to Anthony Barrett’s belief that some reality can be unearthed,2 Shelton sides with Barrett, stating that “it is possible to discover a reality in our sources, even where the appeal to stereotypes and ideals is pervasive” (4). Shelton is ather sharpest when addressing the problem of Pliny’s“filter.” She argues throughout that Pliny’s reports of female behavior were informed by wider Roman values, that he controlled his information and released only what he wanted people to read, and that he often used his associations with certain women for self-promotion. For example, chapter 2 contends that Pliny was keen to advertise (particularly in the post-Domitianic period) his connections to people such as Fannia and Arria Minor who had opposed Domitian (e.g. Epist. 3.11, 7.19 9.13), but he perhaps overstated both the length...