Male Writers Research Articles

Translating Gendered Paralysis in Dubliners: A Reflective Retranslation of James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’ through a Feminist Translation Approach

ABSTRACT While current Chinese translations of James Joyce's Dubliners are acclaimed, demonstrating a commendable effort to make this classic of English language world literature accessible to Chinese readers, the book's depiction of the way femininity, masculinity and broader society in early twentieth century Ireland are ‘paralysed’ could be further emphasised for young Chinese readers through specific translation strategies. This exegetical paper offers a reflective analysis based on a comparison between our feminist retranslation of one of the short stories in Dubliners, ‘A Painful Case’, and two of its existing translations. In doing so, this essay aims to demonstrate how specific translation strategies can encourage a more critical gender and cultural consciousness in a younger generation of Chinese readers, and sheds light on the benefits of applying feminist translation methods to the retranslation of a classic naturalistic short story by a male writer. This article also makes a fresh and distinctive contribution to the scholarship of Chinese studies of Joyce and the translation of his work, through the lens of gender and culture.

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.

The Proto-Hollywood Novel

Before the Hollywood novel emerged as a well-established literary genre in the early 1920s, various American authors were writing novels about moviemaking in both serial and book form. Not unlike the preclassical Hollywood movies of the 1910s, these “proto-Hollywood novels” were more than simple antecedents. Many were set in New York City and took their cues from novels about the theater world. Others were set in the Far West, including California, but before Hollywood had assumed its mythic identity. Of particular interest: most of these novels were feminist in their rhetoric and narratives. Some engaged issues of sexual harassment that would be picked up a century later by the #MeToo movement. This article focuses on the works of two male writers associated with the radical magazine The Masses—Robert Carlton Brown and James Oppenheim, and two women who were involved in screenwriting on the West Coast—B. M. Bower and Margaret Turnbull.

Traducción, comparatismo y ética. El problema de las identidades de género en la literatura nigeriana (traducida)

In this article, we intend to examine the relationship between ethics, comparative literary and translation studies (Bassnett, 1993; Bassnett & Lefevere, 1992; Berman, 1985 and Venuti, 1995/ 2018). In this sense, we evaluate the theoretical trajectory of two literary figures belonging to different periods, the Nigerian male writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) and the Nigerian woman writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977-) in their efforts to deconstruct an image of Africa that is seen embodied in “Colonialist Criticism” (1988) and “The Danger of A Single Story” (2018). In a complementary fashion, we explore the way in which the first generation of African male writers, in which Achebe is registered, and the third generation of contemporary African women writers, to which Adichie is associated, build figures of women and men in the narrative. Finally, we present different perspectives that address the way of ethically translating postcolonial, diasporic and translingual literature in which the works of Achebe and Adichie are framed (Federici & Fortunati, 2019; Ergun, 2021; Tissot, 2017; Vidal Claramonte, 2021).

"Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion": The Waves as a Modernist Symposium

Abstract: In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the "dark spots" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the "materialists"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian "allies" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.

"Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion": The Waves as a Modernist Symposium

Abstract: In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the "dark spots" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the "materialists"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian "allies" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.

Power, Narrative, and Magical Realism in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ

Abstract This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article explores the writer’s experimentation with narrative and storytelling within the context of the Omani literary tradition. On the other hand, it examines modes of women’s empowerment that work through articulative and enunciative practices in the face of linguistic frustration.

Feminist Ideas of V. Woolf on The Material of the Essay “A Room of One's Own” and “Professions for Women”

The term “feminism” (from Lat. femina – woman) was first introduced by French socialist theorist Charles Fourier in the beginning of the 19th century. Fourier wrote how what he called the “new woman” had the potential to change social life and the role of womanhood. He went as far as stating that “the empowerment of women is the main source of social progress”. Parallel to this new era of critical understanding, art needed to take not only new forms, but also contain completely new content. It is therefore not surprising that a peculiar refraction of the female image in English literature became reflected in the work of the leading figure of modernism —Virginia Woolf. Writing at the turn of the century, Woolf reimagined the place of women writers in literature, proclaiming for the first time women's right to express their own vision and experience, their right to write and to think differently. Women's literary works were perceived extremely critically by male writers specifically and the Victorian society at large. The target of Woold’s later essays would, therefore, be this very attitude towards women's intellectual creativity. In this article, our purpose is to consider Virgina Woolf’s ideas in her essays “A Room of One's Own”, and “Professions for Women” in the context of the feminist movement in England at the turn of twentieth century, determining their significance in the development of feminist critical literature. Keywords: [feminism, feminist ideas, women’s right, feminist movement]

An examination of the lyrical construction of Pop music

The current study examines the use of five different dimensions of language in popular music based on the sex of the performer. Theoretically grounded in both social cognitive theory and cultivation theory, the study analyzes popular music as a vehicle for enculturating gender norms within society. Sampling and analyzing over 700 popular songs, the lyrical construction of songs performed by females and males is compared. Similarities are found in many key areas, while differences are identified in the specific areas of power language and social language. Additional differences are identified and discussed when artists perform in mixed-sex groups. Based on the results, a discussion of the prominence of male writers and lack of female representation in the music industry is included.

Becoming a (Slovenian) Poet at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Male Censorship of Vida Jeraj’s Poetry

This article analyses the gendered censorship of male writers towards the poetics and writing of Vida Jeraj (1875–1932), the most prominent Slovenian female lyrical poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a member of the new wave of Slovenian women writers associated with the Trieste-based publication Slovenka. This case study demonstrates the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, for a woman from a small, conservative patriarchal society on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to become a poet and introduce new poetics and new imagination. This was due not only to patriarchal society in general, but also to the gendered censorship of Jeraj’s male colleagues and friends. We aim to analyse the gendered discourse with its misogynistic characteristics evident in the correspondence between the poet and male authors during her early period of writing, which had a profound impact on her poetic strategies. Two male critics in particular had a great influence on her style and shaped her poetic career: her friend Josip Murn-Aleksandrov (1879–1901), the impressionist poet of the Slovenian “moderna” literary movement; and Anton Aškerc (1856–1912), the most important and celebrated Slovenian poet of the older generation and the editor of the Slovenian newspaper Ljubljanski zvon. This male censorship also meant that the young poet was forced to self-censor, as her writer’s identity was very fragile. This was one of the reasons why her voice eventually fell silent.

Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata

One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.

Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture ed. by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer

Reviewed by: Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture ed. by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer Karin Baumgartner Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture. Edited by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. 280. Hardcover $110.00. ISBN 978-1640141056. Since 2000, the popularity of life writing has exploded. Prince Harry’s memoir Spare certainly confirms that memoir has become a central form of culture. It is just one very public example of trauma narratives mixed with historical recollections ostensibly presented by a non-professional writer (but in fact, ghostwritten). Spare exemplifies what editors Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer argue in their introduction: today, the genre is so broad as to be almost meaningless, and yet, here we are. Life writing, the term settled on by the editors, includes memoirs and autobiography (the editors use these two terms interchangeably), letters, diaries (including calendars and date books), blogs and Twitter messages, and comics. These varied expressions of life writing are united by the twin focus on the subject and its truth claims, which are often contested, if not entirely fictionalized. Let us not forget that Buckingham Palace responded to Prince Harry’s memories with the terse comment, “recollections may vary.” In the end, the editors of this collection settle on a broad definition following Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1996). The goal of the volume, the reader learns, is to “elucidate the theoretical contours and historical roots of the subgenres of life writing” (3). The introduction sketches the outlines of three categories—memoirs, diaries, and letters, and gives readers an overview of recent theory and the major contributors to the genre. In addition to Smith and Watson, the introduction touches on Nancy K. Miller, Phillippe Leujeune, and Liz Stanley and argues that the great success of the memoir is based on the low hurdle to entry (anybody with a good story might write a memoir), our era’s focus on authenticity, and the elasticity of the genre. The same might be said about letters and diaries, which are, however, not generally intended for publication. This genre allows minorities, women writers, and other non-professional writers to enter the literary sphere, as the first article in the volume—Laura Deiulio’s investigation of Rahel Levin Varnhagen—shows. [End Page 333] The remainder of the volume is not divided according to the editors’ initial criteria (memoir, letter, diaries); rather, the twelve essays focus on the genre as a way to a means; or in other words, the genre is used to convey agency and subjectivity (part 1), aesthetics (part 2), the processing of trauma (parts 3), and intergenerational and transnational history (part 4). The majority of the twelve essays focus on women writers, with only four essays dedicated to male writers. Many of the articles bring new voices onto the literary stage, reframe more known authors in light of their life writings, and investigate new media such as cartoons. The first part of the volume features the range of life writing. The volume begins with an essay on Rahel Varnhagen, perhaps the most famous letter writer in the German literary pantheon. Deiulio argues that Rahel’s letters, ostensibly written to an absent interlocutor, signify a form of autobiography. Letters fix a moment in time and space, and in conversation with the other, the self emerges over time. The second essay brings to light the work of Poet-Queen Carmen Sylva (Elisabeth, princess of Wied and queen of Romania), an underappreciated writer at the end of the nineteenth century, who used her memoir to create a collective female history centered on her person. The third article in this section addresses interview literature, one of the most collaborative genres. Shoults reveals how GDR authors Maxie Wander and Sarah Kirsch employed carefully crafted interviews to supplement the GDR’s official history with cultural memories that were perceived as authentic and individual. The next section examines two authors who wrote autofiction (autobiographical writing that includes fictional elements) avant la lettre. Müller looks at the friction between Döblin’s autobiographical practice and his theoretical misgivings about the genre. For Döblin, fictional and life writing were intricately related in that they...

Empowering the Virgin. Rethinking the Agency of the Feminine Characters in James Joyce’s Works

In the literary convention of ‘Blessed Virgin’, female purity and spirituality are most often emphasized, as represented by the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages and by the Angel in the House in the more secular nineteenth century. The patriarchal idealization of womanhood has deprived it of bodily desires and free will; the Blessed-Virgin women are praised and worshipped at the cost of individuality and sexuality. The Victorian conception of the ‘Angel in the House’ was the manifestation of the dominant patriarchal ideology of the nineteenth century, and was reflected in the works of a great number of male writers. As the heir apparent to the Victorian cultural heritage and the progeny of the Victorian literary forefathers, is James Joyce capable of transcending his own time? Or does Joyce actually expose the workings of ideology and desire in order to subvert such conventions, as some critics have argued? This article aims to rethink the issue of the centuries-old representation of the Blessed-Virgin and to reread James Joyce’s representation of Blessed-Virgin women in his works. The central argument of this paper is to demonstrate the Blessed-Virgin women’s individuality as thinking and desiring subjects, and their agency to influence the male consciousness and to challenge the patriarchal dominance, as exemplified by the feminine characters Gretta (“The Dead”), the Bird-Girl (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and Gerty (Ulysses), in Joyce’s works.

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Inca Religious Women in the Male Imagination

Abstract During the Spanish colonization of the Andes, enclosures housing Inca religious women became a near-universal topic for male writers, who used women's sexuality to debate Indigenous civilization, sovereignty, and morality. Eyewitness accounts emphasized enclosed women's labor, obscuring the sexual violence that the conquistadores perpetrated against them. In succeeding decades, the religious functions of women's enclosures inspired imperfect analogies that likened their occupants to Catholic nuns and vestal virgins. Spanish writers eventually incorporated Quechua terms for religious women (mamaconas) who served in temple complexes and oversaw the gendered training of chosen girls (acllas) in other enclosures. New details on women's enclosures appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century, including the first accounts of Christian men of Andean descent. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's 1609 chronicle synthesized Catholic, classical, and vernacular approaches, providing an authoritative source that subsequent authors consulted as they reduced Inca institutions to metaphors of gender subordination and conquest.

Literati Encomia on Embroidered Buddhist Icons, c.700-900 CE

Abstract This study examines all the surviving examples of short prose pieces written in praise of embroidery depicting Buddhist objects of worship between circa 700 and 900. The process whereby they were transmitted to the present is traced wherever possible, and the main themes are indicated by means of the identification of recurrent vocabulary items. Typically, the embroideries described are said to have been created by women for the posthumous benefit of their family members, both male and female; the male writers involved, whose work was generally deemed to possess literary merit, were usually connected by family or other ties to the creators of the embroideries. One or two pieces that seem to be less typical are also discussed, though the restriction of the total size of the corpus to a score of pieces by a handful of writers makes the task of establishing the scope of the conventions observed difficult to determine. But as a genre in which men praised the cultural production of women these texts may merit further research.

Daring to Dream: Contextualizing B. M. Bower’s The Eagle’s Wing with Colorado River Compact History

Daring to DreamContextualizing B. M. Bower’s The Eagle’s Wing with Colorado River Compact History Patricia J. Rettig (bio) For the seven US states of the Colorado River Basin, 2022 was to be the year for centennial celebrations of the Colorado River Compact, the multistate legal agreement that changed the West. Instead, as low river flows threatened water supplies for homes, farms, and power production, historical reflections were overridden by discussions of the increasingly urgent environmental and management challenges the Compact caused. Indeed, calls to renegotiate the Compact demonstrate the dire circumstances. An innovative document drafted and negotiated between January and November 1922, the Colorado River Compact, crafted to achieve solutions for its time, marked a turning point for the region. Most immediately the end goal for the seven southwestern states was to agree on how to share the river and thereby resolve the interstate conflicts impeding river development. By ensuring some level of certainty, the agreement enabled construction of dams for flood control, water storage, and power supply. Engaging creatively with this “subject of national importance and interest” the very same year, popular western writer B. M. Bower crafted a novel dedicated to the idea of damming the Colorado River. With the “timely” topic being an unconventional choice for Bower, The Eagle’s Wing: A Story of the Colorado became the first novel to depict the dam-building era of Colorado River development.1 In the book Bower presents a dramatic alternative approach to dam building, shaking characters out of their complacency and confronting readers with difficult questions. Contextualizing this otherwise obscure novel with primary sources conveying the history of the Colorado River Compact—especially [End Page 47] documents of originator Delph Carpenter—reveals how perceptively Bower commented on contemporary river issues. The novel generally aligned with the times but diverged in important ways as well. Examining The Eagle’s Wing in light of Colorado River Compact history shows the dominant interest in solving river problems through innovation, creativity, and action. This essay will draw on Colorado River Compact history after it first positions The Eagle’s Wing within the broader context of B. M. Bower’s work. Then, following a review of scholarship on Bower and The Eagle’s Wing, Delph Carpenter’s compact concept will be explored, primarily using a reflective essay he wrote. The successful process that brought about the Compact will be summarized through the Colorado River Commission meeting minutes and other historical documents. These contextualizing elements will then be used to illuminate how The Eagle’s Wing aligned with and diverged from its times, and what it can show us now. B. M. Bower and The Eagle’s Wing Though unknown to the public now but recently recovered by literary scholars, B. M. Bower (1871–1940) was, according to William Bloodworth, “the only woman to become an important writer of westerns” (95). Bower, whose complete name by 1921 was Bertha Muzzy Bower Sinclair Cowan,2 published more than one hundred short stories and nearly seventy novels between 1904 and 1941. Twenty years and more than thirty novels into her career with the publication of The Eagle’s Wing: A Story of the Colorado by Little, Brown and Company in 1924, Bower had built her nationally popular reputation on formula Westerns of the type involving cowboys, cattle, and conflict, where the good guy gets the girl. Having always incorporated less violence in her stories than did male writers, such as competitors Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford, Bower became comfortable with departures from the formula as her career progressed (Arbuckle 76; Baym 185; Bloodworth 101). In May 1922, when she was likely working on The Eagle’s Wing, Bower wrote to her publisher that she desired to “avoid that killing quality of sameness” across her novels.3 Though Bower wrote more than cowboy Westerns, these have been the focus for literary scholars recently recovering her work. [End Page 48] From the first to the most recent scholarship, Bower’s Chip of the Flying U (1904) and the related “Happy Family” books (fifteen in all) have garnered the most attention.4 These novels and stories, published over the course of thirty years, featured cowboy Chip...

Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus

Reviewed by: Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus Tessa Ashlin Nunn Marcus, Lisa Algazi. Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France. Liverpool UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-802-07064-4. Pp. viii + 176. This monograph examines representations of breast-feeding in literature, art, politics, and medical treaties from the late eighteenth century to 1900. Comparing depictions of nursing from various literary genres to statistics on wet-nursing, Marcus shows how male writers represented breast-feeding as a cultural signifier of motherhood despite the paucity of Frenchwomen actually nursing their own children. Marcus explains how Rousseau's writings on breast-feeding as a cure for social problems influenced authors' idealization of breast-feeding mothers. Contrasting men's texts with the midwife Marie-Angélique Le Rebours's 1767 breast-feeding manual, Marcus asserts that likening breast-feeding to a patriotic duty aimed to confine women to the domestic sphere without imparting any practical knowledge about nursing. With the rise of Romanticism, literary and visual descriptions of breast-feeding became rare. Marcus attributes this change to the Napoleonic Code's reduction of women to reproductive machines and the disappearance of the maternal icon of the Republic in favor of the masculine symbols of the Empire. Works by Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine represent nursing mothers as marginal, racialized, or grieving, and portray motherhood as superseding women's selfhood. In realist and naturalist novels, breast-feeding is associated with sexual pleasure or political agendas. Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola depict nursing through the male gaze either to present maternal nursing as crucial for the infant or to reveal a regressive identification with the suckling child. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, Marcus considers what is at stake when the male gaze constructs and controls maternal desire. The monograph offers an in-depth analysis of how Balzac compares motherhood to sexual gratification in Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841) and how Zola separates sexuality from motherhood in Fécondité (1899). In these novels, maternal jouissance, Marcus argues, exists for the pleasure of the male spectator. During the Third Republic, moralists, politicians, and novelists reclaimed the nursing mother as a symbol of Republican virtues and censured mercenary nursing as immoral and unsafe, though wet-nursing remained the norm in France until 1918 when pasteurized milk became readily available. Marcus examines the intertextuality between Fécondité and lesser-known texts, namely Alexandre Hepp's 1891 novel Le lait d'une autre, François Coppée's 1872 poem "La nourrice," and Eugène Brieux's 1901 play Les Remplaçantes, to investigate how these texts took part in political dialogues on depopulation, women's civic roles, and public assistance programs. The monograph's analysis of Marianne's breast as a Republican icon highlights how literature and art idealize or demonize the female body to advance political [End Page 282] goals. Though this book focuses predominantly on male authors, it points out that late-nineteenth-century feminists advocated for maternal breast-feeding and George Sand, who nursed her two children, represented breast-feeding as a normal aspect of life in three novels. Scholars researching or teaching the relationship between literature and politics in the nineteenth century as well as scholars in feminist studies will find this book a valuable resource. This accessible monograph could serve as supplemental reading for undergraduates studying Rousseau, Zola, or Balzac. [End Page 283] Tessa Ashlin Nunn Independent Scholar Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia, by Colleen Lucey

In her insightful analysis of literary and visual images of women who engaged in commodified sexual exchange in nineteenth-century Russia, Colleen Lucey shows that the very notion of women’s love being ‘for sale’ confounded the cultural elite. Increasing awareness of the slippery slope between engaging in commercial sex and marrying for money resulted in disorientation, inspiration, imitation and horror, all of which can be seen in late imperial Russian art and fiction. In the context of debates about gender, class and sexuality, the theme of prostitution served, writes Lucey, as a ‘metaphor to explore shifting economies of desire founded on transaction’ (p. 14). Starting with St Petersburg, ‘Russia’s Babylon’ (p. 19), Lucey demonstrates how the most Westernised city in the Empire functioned in the popular imagination as the most debauched. She analyses the way mid-century writings and drawings imagined commercial sex in the capital, both in terms of its erotic promises and perils. Redemption narratives, so common in Russian literature as to inspire parodies, reflected men’s fantasies of saving (and often having sex with) ‘fallen women’. Male writers, according to Lucey, got tangled up in their own confusion about sex and gender, especially when they tried to make sense of how encounters in urban spaces such as St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect blurred the lines between outright commercial and casual sexual encounters.

The Awakening of Female Consciousness under the Fusion of Chinese and Western Cultural Conflicts from the Perspective of Eat Drink Man Woman

Ang Lee's works fully reflect the conflict and fusion between Chinese and western cultures due to his own identity as a cross-cultural film communicator, which has also been the focus of academic attention. This theme is reflected in the film Eat Drink Man Woman, which focuses on an ordinary family in Taiwan. The father is more exposed to traditional Chinese cultural elements while the daughters are more influenced by western culture. The feminism embodied in the film forms a special characterization of the film, which is dominated by female characters, therefore making the element worth studying. This article uses textual analysis as the main research method, using the three sisters of the Zhu family and Jinrong as examples, and focuses on the analysis of character images and film content to study the various changes in the image of oriental women arising from the fusion of Chinese and western cultural conflicts, and to explore the embodiment of the awakening of female consciousness in the film from multiple perspectives in the direction of patriarchy, the concept of marriage, love, self-desire, and gender order. Ang Lee has always tried to find a balance between Chinese and western cultures that is acceptable to the world; because of his status as a male writer, the female characters can reflect a unique understanding of the female image and the awakening of female consciousness from a male's perspective, which is quite charming despite its limitations.