Women Writers Research Articles

Conflicts and Restrictions: Flora Nwapa's Visionary Exposé of Women's Struggles in Nigerian Marital Contexts

This paper investigates acclaimed Nigerian Author Flora Nwapa's nuanced literary portrayals of the challenges Nigerian women face within marital roles and relationships. Through textual analysis of characters and events across Nwapa's novels, short stories and folklore centered on women's experiences, the study illuminates critical perspectives on issues of patriarchy, lack of autonomy, rigid gender roles, and socioeconomic restrictions undermining women’s agency and fulfillment. Core themes highlighted in Nwapa's subtle social commentary include anguish over infertility, hardships from prolonged spousal absence, emotional tolls of polygamy, lack of personal choice in partners, limited educational and career opportunities, economic dependence, and domestic violence. Her visionary work gives voice to Nigerian women’s aspirations while exposing oppressive structures. Findings substantiate how Nwapa’s rich depictions of women navigating complex marital terrain reveal an array of postcolonial and patriarchal impediments to female empowerment. Her literary portrayal of restrictions, conflicts and oppression compels critical examination of norms inhibiting women’s advancement. By confronting gender-based inequities and envisioning transformative possibilities, Nwapa leads African women writers in catalyzing legal and sociocultural reforms to promote women’s full flourishing.

Via literary mothers: Kathleen Fraser and the ‘permission-giving’ moment of ‘projective verse’

ABSTRACT Poet, editor, and critic Kathleen Fraser underscored the significance of Charles Olson’s seminal manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, emphasising the vital role the text played in expanding the methodological possibilities of Avant Garde writing by women in the 1970s to the present day. I ask why Fraser, who maintained great concern surrounding the neglect of the female writers who pioneered the modernist tradition, and editorially and pedagogically resisted the continued marginality of innovative women writers in her contemporary, might controversially position ‘Projective Verse’ as an ‘immense, permission giving’ moment. Gesturing toward the importance of Fraser’s HOW(ever) and How2 journals, I make a case for the continued significance of Olson’s projective poetics in relation to feminist poetic practice in North America and across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom.

The Marriage Debate, Mona Caird and Her Feminist Radicalism

New Woman scholarship presents Mona Caird as a radical marriage reformer and emphasises how she challenged the patriarchal structure of Victorian marriage norms. However, this paper demonstrates Caird’s radicalness was not a challenge to marriage norms, but an attack on legal, cultural, and religious restrictions on womanhood. Caird developed her radical arguments through her interaction with her mentor John Stuart Mill, the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, and the influential Victorian anti-feminist writer Elizabeth Lynn Linton. This paper explores her relationship with these three writers regarding their thoughts on marriage, based on the study of her novels The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and The Wing of Azrael (1889), and the collection of her journalistic articles The Morality of Marriage (1897). Caird differed from these three writers by arguing for a more liberal and equal gender relationship, resisting eugenic theory, and challenging anti-feminist arguments. Caird was an undisciplined New Woman writer not only in the sense of her feminist stance but also her critical engagement with the patriarchal discourses of gender and class relationship.

Female images in Fet’s poems edited by Turgenev

The article sets out to reconstruct Turgenev’s objective in revising a collection of Fet’s poems to be published in 1856. 19th-c. censorship restricted the scope of literature approved for women’s reading, although the restrictions were circumvented where possible. Turgenev took an interest in literature produced by contemporary female authors, introduced characters of women writers and poets in his books, and may have tried to influence female audiences’ reading trends. Preparing the 1856 collection, Turgenev revised its structure compared to the 1850 edition, with the effect of emphasizing female characters and the theme of a woman’s feelings and love. Further changes concerned descriptions of women’s love-induced desires. Turgenev edited out their first-person expression, as well as explicit depictions of a woman’s body; at the same time, he kept first-person descriptions of divination by a lyrical heroine, as well as accounts of love and lovers’ assignations through the eyes of a male lyrical hero. However, such a revision of female images, with their subjectivity and sensuousness, clashed with Fet’s own objective stated in the poem ‘The Muse’ and earlier editions of his poems.

Debunking Patriarchy: A Feminist Critique of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), a renowned Victorian woman writer, is best known for the novel Jane Eyre (1847), which portrays the struggles of the protagonist Jane Eyre for becoming a successful and self -reliant woman in a male dominated society. In this novel, the writer focuses on class conflict, women’s identity crisis and inequality of sexes, and thus tries to establish equal rights for both male and female by portraying the brave character Jane Eyre who is not like other traditional women of Victorian age because she has tried to be a successful woman in life fighting with her ill fate and social taboos of patriarchal society throughout her journey of life. This paper, using feminist lens, tries to explore the obstacles of women to become successful and self-reliant in a male dominated society by focusing on Charlotte Bronte’s female protagonist Jane Eyre who, as we know, is the representative of Victorian women.

Introduction: Spanish Sapphic modernity: building bridges of solidarity

ABSTRACT In this special issue on Spanish Sapphic Modernity, we introduce artists, writers, and performers whose women-loving relationships and cultural production were connected to and through Spain, Europe (Ireland, Greece), the United States, and Hispanophone transatlantic spaces (Chile, Argentina). In light of decades of Anglophone modernist scholarship on female-authored life writing (e.g. Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness), conversation about Spain’s “las modernas,” women writers whose works queerness intersects, is relatively scant. However, modern Spanish women found queer and feminist ideas through Anglophone readings and intellectual contacts (often in translation) passed within their intellectual circles. Within a Sapphic framing, we approach often intersecting explorations of feminism, sexuality, community, modernity, and nationhood from the middle of the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth centuries, opening them to cross-section with a broad range of positive same-sex affect not limited to “queer” and “lesbian.” The seven contributors to this special issue situate Spanish agents and productions within wider modernist spaces of queer and feminist collaborations, conviviality, and coalition building in Spain, Europe, and spaces of Spanish exile in the Americas.

Intertwining Narrative and Technology: Reinterpreting European Cultural Heritage through the Voices of Latin American Women Writers

Travel literature not only provides relevant information about cultural heritage, such as authorship, chronology or location, but also reveals the impressions evoked by its reception. This article describes the methodology of the ongoing REWIND project, which explores European cultural heritage through the perspectives of Latin American women writers who travelled to Europe in the early twentieth century. The project seeks to amplify the voices of non-European women committed to feminism and sociocultural diversity to foster decolonial, inclusive and pluralistic historical narratives. On the one hand, we address the configuration of the project corpus, the semantic annotation process, and the design of the ontological modelling according to the deep data concept. On the other hand, we explain the analysis of the relationships between cultural heritage, time, space and emotion. The project uses travel literature in digital format to retrieve, study and interpret data on cultural heritage, creating a workflow that integrates information from various historical sources to raise further questions and provide new insights. The proposed methodology follows the FAIR principles and prioritizes using open-source software to ensure reproducibility and facilitate the use of deliverables in other studies.

Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670–1750 by Leah Orr

<i>Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670–1750</i> by Leah Orr

Correction to: Heather Meeks, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Correction to: Heather Meeks, <i>Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain</i>

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Women’s Representation in Maysaloon Hadi’s Novel The Black Eyes

This study applies a discourse analysis framework to explore the portrayal of women in Maysloon Hadi’s novel (The Black Eyes) (2011), using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Norman Fairclough’s tri-dimensional model (1989) as the analytical foundation. It investigates the roles and challenges women face in the novel. While there is growing interest in the portrayal of women in literature, Iraqi literature—especially from the perspective of Iraqi women writers remains underexplored. Hadi’s *The Black Eyes* provides a unique case to examine this intersection. Despite the novel’s rich narrative, which offers insight into Iraqi women’s lives, there is a lack of comprehensive CDA to understand how its language constructs and communicates the multifaceted roles, challenges, and images of women. The research fills this gap by analyzing specific passages from the novel using Fairclough’s model. The findings reveal a nuanced portrayal of women and underscore the value of CDA in analyzing such works. Further research is recommended to apply CDA to other Iraqi literary texts for broader insights.

LETTERATURA ITALIANA E COSTRUZIONE DELL’IDENTITÀ NAZIONALE NELL’OTTOCENTO

In this article we are commenting the weak points of the Italian literary canon built during the 19th century, which was, at that time, linked to the legitimating of national identity and independence. The idea that an Italian literary canon existed, even in the absence of a national state, had been discussed by Foscolo, Nievo, and Leopardi, and became a central point in Francesco de Sanctis’ History of Italian Literature. De Sanctis describes the evolution of Italian literature seen as a coherent pattern, starting with the Middle Ages and Dante Aligheri who is presented as a national poet. But this type of conception reduces the complexity and variety of regional and local cultures, like for example the poems in roman dialect by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, and completely ignores women writers, such as, for example, Cristina Trivulzio.

Women Writers’ Perspective on War

Abstract This article presents a comparative analysis of a specific corpus that centers around women writers (translators and artists) as heroines, within the so-called ‘female continent’ in the post-Yugoslav fiction (a concept defined by Tijana Matijević in 2020). The analysis is centered around three different generations of women writers’ perspectives on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, in three contemporary novels published in the 2010s: Svetlana Slapšak’s Ravnoteža (2016, Engl. Equilibrium), Ivančica Đerić’s Nesreća i stvarne potrebe (2012, Engl. Misfortune and Real Needs), and Lana Bastašić’s Uhvati zeca (2018; Engl. translation Catch the Rabbit, 2021). The comparative analysis is done with respect to three ‘circles’ of interpretation: a) the literature on anti-war women’s writing; b) the literature on the theme of exile in post-Yugoslav fiction and c) the literature on the history of anti-war feminist organizing during the nineties.

La coutume louable de l’écriture

Abstract This article examines the Responces from Catherine des Roches’ Secondes Œuvres (1583) with regards to the role that habit plays in the literary creation of women writers. The Responces, a genre in which women traditionally ‘answer’ men, reveal insights into the author’s literary exchange with her contemporaries, among whom were also women poets. Catherine des Roches reinterprets this genre by addressing both men and women and, furthermore, by using the Responces addressed to other women writers to communicate exclusively with women. Moreover, Catherine des Roches stresses the habitualization of the writing practice in order to prove the virtuousness of women writers on the one hand, and to engage in female community-fashioning through networking and mutual praise on the other hand.

Einleitung: Gewohnheit, Erfahrung und die ‚schreibende Frau‘

Abstract This introduction summarizes some of the main hypotheses that underly the contributions of this thematic issue of ARTES which is dedicated to the role of habit/custom and experience in the writing of some Early Modern women authors. One hypothesis is that references to habit and experience may have supported Early Modern women writers in their efforts to legitimize their arguments, knowledge and writing, the reason for this being that – due to various social restrictions and expectations – women were often denied access to other fields of knowledge, especially that of so-called book knowledge. Hence, the question arises to what extent the references to habit/custom and experience are connected to the question of female education and female strategies of (self-)empowerment. I will illustrate this using the prominent example of the medieval writer Christine de Pizan. Since the specific nature of female claims can only be assessed against the background of male writing practices, I will also make some introductory remarks on habit/custom and experience with reference to Early Modern male authors.

The Phases Of Showalter’s Feminist Criticism Prefigured In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Elaine Showalter (1941- ) is one of the most influential American literary critics and feminists who influenced feminist literary criticism by developing the concept and practice of gyno-criticism. She published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing in 1977 and whose expanded edition came out in 1999. By and large this book explicates Showalter’s groundwork to revive the interest in long-forgotten women writers in British literature history. It was a monumental work, indeed a kind of rediscovery, mapping widely rather than mining deeply the territory of women’s writing. In a sense, feminist criticism came of age with this book. Showalter suggests that women themselves were slowly growing aware of their separateness from men and leaving a record of that awareness in their works. It is the growth of a collective selfconsciousness—the history of a distinct literary subculture—that A Literature of Their Own sets out to record. ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ (1979) is one of her well known essays that focused on the feminist literary criticism of the literature. In this essay, Showalter has rejected the inevitability of the male theories and male models by tracing the history of women’s literature in the present writing. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Showalter also refers to the three phases of feminist literary criticism. The first phase is the feminine phase where women aimed to compete with male writers, and compared their craft with that of their male contemporaries. The second phase is the feminist phase where the critics focus on the injustices and wrongs done to women in literary texts, and reject the conventional roles of females. Finally, the female phase is independent of the dependency on and obsession with the male literature. It instead aims to focus on creating a female literary tradition that includes women's internal experiences and personal history. This theoretical literary presentation of Showalter can be dramatically viewed in the evolution of character Nora in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1828 -1906). Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. He was one of the founders of modernism in theatre and often called “the father of realism” and the most influential playwright of the 19th century. A Doll’s House is a three acts play through which Ibsen challenged the stereotypical representation of women in literature with his female characters and remains a great contribution to feminist literature

Keinen Verfasser, nur eine Verfasserin? Literarische agency schreibender und ‘geschriebener’ Frauen in Prag (1770–80)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the characteristics of female authorship in Prague in the 1770s. The moral weeklies Die Unsichtbare (1771) and Die Sichtbare (1771) highlight the differences between the Prague reading public's expectations for female writers to focus on superficial, feminine topics and the complex and sophisticated writing of the female authors themselves. Experiences of limitation due to writing in Bohemia, in less valued genres such as novels, and because of their gender in fact led to women writers such as Viktorie Rupp and Maria Anna Sager developing self-confidence as authors. A central aspect of this paper is the juxtaposition of male and female writing patterns and their contrasts, as illustrated by Sager in her novels Die verwechselten Töchter (1771) and Karolinens Tagebuch (1774). Finally, her contributions as a female writer are contextualized within the framework of contemporary literary criticism and the academic aesthetics surrounding the Prague professor Karl Heinrich Seibt.

Challenging Voices: Listening to Australian Women Writers across Time to Understand the Dynamics Shaping Creative Expression for Women Writing Today

This article argues for the critical need to value the voices and creative work of contemporary women writers in Australia. Historically, women writing in Australia have endured erasure, dismissal, and suppression. I argue that there is still, in the modern period, a continued lack of awareness, recognition and education on Australian women’s writing despite targeted awards and the achievements of the feminist movement. This piece reflects back across time, drawing on interviews I conducted and PhD thesis research with women writers in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, and maps how the legacies of gendered notions of writers impacted women at this pivotal era to consider what this may mean for women writing today. It also explores how feminist theories such as écriture féminine are helpful for framing and understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference and agency in writing. This article aims to provide insights into the complexities of liberation for women from the past to modern times, and the impact of gender on creative expression in Australia across changing social periods.

(Re)Looking at the Women of Indian Cinema in the Praxis of Conventional Rendering

Films significantly impact social consciousness as they have the power to shape opinions, influence perspectives, and contribute to cultural conversations. In shaping perceptions, films enable people to perceive certain issues, events, or groups of people from dissimilar viewpoints. This paper looks into the nuances of representation of Indian women in films, primarily in Hindi cinema, and how their portrayal differs when their identities are constructed by writers and directors of the opposite gender. It argues for an equitable position for representing women in cinema and highlights the role of intersectional relationships between race, class, sexuality, and ability for the same. With an emphasis on feminist film theory and its praxis, this paper traces the history of Indian cinematic renderings in giving agency to women in films and how the perspectives of women writers and directors seeps into their creations for a positive outcome, whereas the male centric industry hinders the proper portrayal of the lived experience. It finally advocates for an academic understanding of the lacunas that exist in the entire ecosystem and offers an expansive approach for devising actionable and sustainable solutions to the critical problem of representation.

A Perspective Study of Infamous Classic Women in the Novels of Vaishnavi Patel’s ‘Kaikeyi’ and Kavita Kane’s ‘Karna’s Wife: the Outcast’s Queen’

Abstract Indian Mythology has many complex characters that reflect contemporary issues. Vaishnavi Patel and Kavita Kane, renowned women writers, have reinterpreted the epic tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata through a modern perspective. This paper examines human behaviour using a psychological approach in Patel’s “Kaikeyi”and Kavita Kane’s “Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen”. Patel’s“Kaikeyi”explores the protagonist’s optimistic traits, her childhood longings, and her feminist qualities. Traditionally depicted as a villain in the Ramayana, Kaikeyi is recognized as Rama’s stepmother who instigates his exile. However, before assuming this role, she experienced a difficult and challenging childhood in the Kingdom of Kekaya. The novel sheds light on the darker aspects of Kaikeyi’s past, providing a deeper understanding of her character. Kavita Kane’s interest lies in unveiling the complexities of classic women in her literary works. In “Karna’s Wife”, Uruvi, the protagonist, is portrayed as the marginalized wife of Karna, who belongs to the Sutapura lineage. Uruvi, a princess from the Kshatriya family of Pukeya kingdom is depicted as an optimistic character with great skills, knowledge, and mental strength.These two novels focus on the lives of classic women, their behavioural changes, and their insecurities in different situations. Women are inherently multifaceted and encounter various challenges throughout their lives. Different approaches are required to address these challenges. According to Sigmund Freud, the human psyche consists of three aspects that interact and influence each other to create complex human behaviour. Freud’s psychological theory can be used to analyse the characters of Kaikeyi and Uruvi in these novels. The study attempts to highlight the need for women to overcome feelings of insecurity, emotional dependence, to achieve self-realization, and build resilience, which are essential qualities in the contemporary era.

Subjectivity in Women's Writing in the Cyber Age

Women's creativity has undergone a long and difficult development. The emergence of the intangible cultural heritage "Jiangyong Nvshu" gave women an exclusive language to express their life experiences, but in the feudal historical environment, women's self-consciousness was limited, not deep or firm enough,and they could not really fight against the structure, and the subjectivity of women's calligraphy was only a restricted narrative of suffering. With socio-economic development and the rise of Internet platforms, patriarchy and male power can no longer force women to be silent, and the situation of female creators has improved. The Internet is not only a platform for amplifying women's voices, but also a field for women and their creations to be discussed and interpreted again. The era of blogging is not only a time for women to bravely break into the public sphere to write about their subjectivity, but also a time when they may be pressurized and even violated by the words of the other on the Internet. Through the qualitative research methods of purposive sampling and semi-structured in-depth interviews, this paper investigates the personal experiences of four female Internet users to understand their feelings about contemporary female creators, and analyzes their interpretations of the public opinion environment in which female creators find themselves, taking Jia Ling's personal experience and the heated debates her work Yolo as an example on the Internet.The four interviewees are student MengQianye ,editor WangYanshi, operator Pangding and YouTuber HeNan.This paper explores the limitations and possibilities of female creators' writing subjectivity in the cyber era from public figures to the creators around them, and from the experience of the creative subject to the perception of the other, from multiple levels and perspectives.