Women Novelists Research Articles

Bad Romance: Toxic Masculinity, Love, and Heartbreak in Interwar Italian and Turkish Women's Novels, 1923–32

Bad Romance: Toxic Masculinity, Love, and Heartbreak in Interwar Italian and Turkish Women's Novels, 1923–32

From Labor Reform to the Welfare State: The Critique of Capitalism in Three Postbellum Women's Novels

From Labor Reform to the Welfare State: The Critique of Capitalism in Three Postbellum Women's Novels

Panoramic Vista of Tradition and Culture in Preserving Cultural Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko's “Ceremony”

Leslie Marmon Silko is regarded as the most commendable writer and poet in the realm of Native American Literature. According to critic Alan Velie, Silkois one of his four Native American Literary Masters along with N. Scott Momaday. Being a Laguna Pueblo Indian woman novelist, she is most remarkable contributor in Native American Renaissance. Her writings hold plethora of information about indigenous culture and traditions of Native American identity. Her writing style is a quintessential embodiment of amalgamation of traditionalism with modernism. White people had callously criticized indigenous ways of living, culture, tradition and ceremony. Silko, through her classic works, conveyed that the traditions of storytelling have preserved the cultural heritage of the Native people. Native culture and traditions including religious practices, customs, rituals and legends were forbidden by the White people resulting in cultural conflicts and disharmony. Natives were grief stricken and lost their identity on account of dominant and aggressive approach of the White people. Silko succinctly depicts in her magnum opus work ‘Ceremony’ the identity crisis of Tayo as a protagonist as an emblem of half-breed. He is alienated by the obnoxious nature of white-people. This research paper primarily highlights on epiphany of Tayo regarding his roots of Laguna tradition and culture in the process of sustenance of Native American identity.

Ecofeminist approaches of indian women novelists

Ecofeminist approaches of indian women novelists

An Anaylsis of the Color Patterns of Feminine Beauty in Classic Novel

This study aimed to investigate the beauty standards for women during the Joseon Dynasty through the feminine beauty depicted in ancient novels written during the 17-19th centuries and to analyze the color patterns inherent to them. For this, first, the study looks at the definition of feminine beauty during the Joseon Dynasty. Second, it examines the symbolism used to describe the appearance of women in novels as compared to things and nature. Third, the study analyzes the color patterns of feminine beauty in novels. In terms of a research method, female appearances in ancient novels were classified by face and outer appearance and analyzed with the I.R.I Adjective Image Scale and the I.R.I Hue & Tone, and the results found the followings: First, in terms of feminine beauty during the Joseon Dynasty, a fragile and obedient young lady was understood as having beauty under influence of Confucianism. Second, a woman’s face and outer look were compared to nature and things. Third, according to the analysis of color patterns, white (Vp) was primarily used for the skin while red (V tone) and black (Dk) were applied for lips and head respectively. For the inner and outer beauty of women, furthermore, green (Dp) was most commonly used. This study found that for women from ancient novels, not only was their beautiful appearance described, but their inner aspects were also considered.

Halide Edib’in Maske ve Ruh’taki Savaş Karşıtı Duruşu

In Masks or Souls written by a well-known woman novelist and feminist activist, Halide Edib Adıvar in 1945, the world problems and threats encountered are approached from the perspective of Nasreddin Hodja, one of the important figures of Turkish humor and philosophy in the thirteenth-century. Her being influenced by the philosophy of Nasreddin Hodja in Akşehir inspired her to write such a work in this style. The major people in the play are William Shakespeare and Nasreddin Hodja. Halide Edib develops a fantasy about sending these two personalities to the world after death, and events develop in this direction. Consisting of a prologue and four acts, Masks or Souls is a work in which fragmentary expression is preferred, which does not depend on time and space elements. Spaces can be classified as earth and the hereafter or earth and sky in general. Criticizing the top-down structure of the reforms and westernization process that took place immediately after the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923 throughout the play, Halide Edib closely experienced the material and spiritual two-way nature of people in the war environment as a person who personally experienced the destructive effects of wars on the shaping of the soul and body. During the voluntary exile period that she preferred during her maturity years, she saw the east and the west on her trips to America and India and made a comparison. She wanted to bring together the writers and personalities she was influenced by and reveal the true face of the human being hidden behind masks because the meanings of the concepts of “good” and “bad” are intertwined. The objective of this paper is to show how Masks or Souls epitomizes Halide Edib’s anti-war stance and pacifist nationalism as an example of anti-war literature.

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

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

Traumatisme postrévolutionnaire et romans autobiographiques : La deuxième génération d’exilées iraniennes en France

The Islamic revolution of 1979 and its developments have been the major reasons for the mass migration of Iranian intellectuals to the West and the main topic of the Iranian diaspora’s literary texts. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially in France, a new generation of Iranian women novelists has created a shift in traditional post-revolutionary memoir writing by focusing on more individual themes such as childhood, the body, and trauma. In this article, the author explores the various ways in which two of these novelists, Negar Djavadi and Chahdortt Djavann, have represented levels of trauma in their auto-fictional narratives of the Islamic revolution. In this regard, starting from a conceptual representation of trauma as reliving the historical past by protagonists, it is shown how both psychological and cultural definitions of the trauma are depicted in these novels. The article suggests that this multidirectional approach allows the authors to overcome the alienation caused by the Islamic revolution's contradictory nature in a postcolonial era.

Sexuality and the politics of the body in Zainab Hifni’s Features

ABSTRACT The increasing interest in Saudi women’s literature written in recent years is mainly ignited by its audacity to address forbidden themes, and ability to shatter pre-existing stereotypes about them as oppressed and silent women. The fact that Saudi women novelists write about sex in a society that is typically perceived as pious, hermetically closed, and ultra-conservative, severely disrupts this notion. In effect, through these types of writings Saudi women novelists are leading a textual-sexual revolution. This article aims to investigate this emerging trend by analysing Zainab Hifni’s novel Features. Through the medium of this novel, Hifni dislocates traditional sexual and textual boundaries, and challenges social patriarchy in its core by demonstrating that the very men who are ‘in charge of women’ have in effect breached the patriarchal injunctions that restrict women’s existence.

Doris Lessing’s Science Fiction

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.

Metaphorical Verbalization of the Concept 'Woman' in the Victorian Novels of Mary Braddon

The representation of women in the written texts of the Victorian Era has received a great deal of attention and critics have analysed different strategies used for the description of women in novels. This paper looks at a particular device employed by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon in the representation of women, namely, the use of conceptual metaphors. Women and metaphors alike are at once meditational and relational. A woman serves to mediate between man and man, man and Nature, man and Spirit. The research deals with repeated metaphors presenting women in the guise of foods, animals, babies, parts of the body, members of the aristocracy and supernatural creatures. Bearing in mind the social force of metaphor in our understanding of the world and of ourselves as well as the important role language plays as a channel through which ideas and beliefs are transmitted and perpetuated, the present study attempts to offer a preliminary exploration of how images of women are transmitted and perpetuated by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon through linguistic metaphors.

Reality of Division and East Asian thought : Focusing on Women's Novels after the Korean War

Reality of Division and East Asian thought : Focusing on Women's Novels after the Korean War

TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED : AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

Toni Morrison, has been considered the most important and representative contemporary African-American woman novelist. She published her first novel in 1970and her most famous novel, Beloved, in 1987. She has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This paper will examine, by means of a close textual analysis, the dominant role that the traumatic past plays in the present. I will explore the traumatic & haunting nature of the past by investigating the question of who or what are the subjects and objects of the traumatic haunting. I want to discover what consequences the traumatic haunting has for the protagonists’ lives and how the characters deal with, deny or suppress the past. In order to analyse the novel’s general attitude towards the past, it will be important to find out how the characters escape the haunting, if at all. Before venturing into a discussion of the manifestations of traumatic haunting, I will conduct a preliminary investigation into the notion of the past and memory as represented in the novel, in order to embed the specific analyses into a general context

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Judith Maltby and Alison Shell (eds), Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James

Judith Maltby and Alison Shell (eds), <i>Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James</i>

Predicament of a Woman in Manju Kapur’s Home

Manju Kapur is an Indian novelist. She was born on 25th October 1948. She is an archetypal representative of the postcolonial women novelists. She was a professor of English Literature at her alma mater at Miranda House College, Delhi. But she is retired from there. She joined the growing number of Indian women novelists, who have contributed to the progression of Indian fiction i.e. Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy, Kamla Das, Geetha Hariharan, Anita Nair, Shobha De. Her novels reflect the position of women in the patriarchal society and the problems of women for their longing struggle in establishing their identity as an autonomous being. Her works not only gives voice to the society’s effort to improve its women population but it is for every woman’s self–consciousness in order to improve the society. She has written five novels, Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006), The Immigrant (2008), and Custody (2011). Kapur’s most memorable female characters are Virmati, Astha, Nisha, Nina, Shagun and so many others. All of them strive to assert themselves. These characters give us a rare glimpse of modernized Indian women who are in their aggression may enter into a scandalous relationship with her married neighbor, the professor or develop lesbian relationship as Virmati does in Difficult Daughters and Astha in A Married Woman. But Nisha in Home is different from her predecessors.

Love and Spirituality in Anita Desai’s ‘Cry, the Peacock’ and Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Breezy April’

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the first non-European and the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was awarded the prize for Gitanjali. Tagore was a multi-faceted personality who not only composed poems, verses, short stories, novels etc but also sketched and painted with equal brilliance. As a flag-bearer, he presented the best of India to the West and vice-versa. In Breezy April, Tagore combines romanticism with spiritualism. On the other hand, Anita Desai (born-1937) is the youngest among the women novelists of eminence in India. The spiritual aspect of human life is at the centre of attention in her works. Women protagonists of fragile exterior and strong interior take the lead in Anita Desai’s works of fiction. Spirituality is an integral part of most of her works. In her first novel Cry, the Peacock (1963), Desai minutely depicts both love as well as deep spiritual intricacies.

Images of Women and Politics of Domination in Helen Fields’ “Perfect Remains”

As feminism evolved and reshaped ideas on womanhood and its politics over the past three centuries, postmodernist writers seem to continuously present discriminated images of women in novels, including spy fiction. Unless it is properly addressed, these misrepresented images of women underlying its gender politics brings about questions on the effectiveness of gender education and its equality. This study problematized images of women in Fields’ Perfect Remains in order to understand the politics of domination between genders that suggest a continuous display of power. The analysis of the novel through the use of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework, enabled the identifying images of women and ways in which dominance is exerted in the discourse. Analysis revealed that postmodern societies through the novelist’s lens continue to remain remote towards women. In a period, which celebrates women’s achievement and freedom of speech, where they are thought to be strong and independent, men continue to ironically exert different methods of power in the strive to maintain their status quo, which is revealed in this research. This study contributes to the existing body of literature in the field of women studies and literature where it identified the presence of male dominance even in this modern era. On another hand, it also explores aspects of domination which appear in the form of intellect as a new field of study.

Expression of the concept of "emotion" in contemporary English-language discourse (based on material from female novels of the 21st century)

The article analyzes the theoretical and methodological base for the study of emotions and concepts in modern linguistics. The relationship between the conceptual and nominative fields is revealed, where the conceptual field has a multi-level structure with the possibility of distinguishing the core, central zone and periphery, and the nominative field of the concept consists of a combination of language means, objectifies the concept in a certain period of development of society. The conceptual component of the structure of the concept of "emotion" is defined. The features of actualization of the concepts of positive and negative emotions in women's novels by John Green are revealed. The frequency of occurrence of the concepts of positive and negative emotions in the art discourse is analyzed.

Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra R. Parker

Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra R. Parker