Women Readers Research Articles

Socialising feminism and diversity: the use of gender in young female readers' literary attachments and exclusions

AbstractThis article discusses young women's reading practices and the social uses of literature for enabling gender equality that are present in those practices. Through a digital ethnography study where six young women collaborated as participants, I asked the data: How is literature, precisely its capacity to be used, conceived by young women readers in the search for gender equality? These women's reading engagements are tightly woven with a gender perspective. What are these readers embracing, and what are they rejecting by assuming a gender lens? By tracing these attachments and exclusions, I describe how books affect readers' perspectives and practices on their identities, their choice of authors, the cultural value of books, the social representations of books and reading as education. Participants' close and distant connections between the book and their desire for gender equality allow me to discuss the literature's pedagogical instrumentality and uselessness for achieving gender‐inclusive literacy. Finally, I argue that a plural and non‐functional approach to literature could offer young people heterogeneous and more creative forms to approach the challenge of gender equality.

Subliminal Violence Against Women in Flores y Perlas (1883-84), a Periodical by and for the bello sexo: Two Case Studies

The article presents a formal and content-related analysis of Flores y Perlas, a journal created for women readers which relied almost exclusively on female collaborators. The weekly journal was founded by María del Pilar Sinués who edited it for the first four months. The publication was short-lived (27 issues came out between March 1883 and October 1884) and switched from being a “periódico literario, recreativo y moral dedicado al bello sexo” to a “periódico literario, moral y religioso publicado bajo la censura eclesiástica” for the last two issues, which were edited by Eulalia González de Barbarroja. The objective is to identify in the two articles selected forms of subliminal violence exerted by the authors on their own gender.

Pendampingan Halaqah Tahsin Guna Meningkatkan Kualitas Baca Qur’an Muslimah Sinjai

This service aims to provide halaqah tahsin assistance to improve the quality of Sinjai Muslim women's reading of the Qur'an. The method for implementing this assistance is divided into three stages, namely (1) The preparation and planning stage, carried out for a week, namely in the form of field observations, entering into a cooperation agreement with the ustazah as the mudarrisah at the halaqah tahsin. (2) The implementation stage is carried out by carrying out a mentoring process for Sinjai Muslim women who learn to improve their reading of the Qur'an (tahsin) guided by the ustazah as mudarrisah. At this stage, before the ustazah delivers the Tahsin material, the ustazah first invites each Muslim woman to take turns reading the Koran starting from juz 30 where at each meeting there will be a revised reading of one to 3 surahs. Then, the ustazah explains the tahsin material in a structured manner to Muslim women as in the tahsin manual while providing example verses so that Muslim women can more easily understand the material. (3) Evaluation and reporting stage where the author evaluates the ability or understanding of Muslim women during the process of improving their reading of the Qur'an in the halaqah tahsin. The results of this halaqah tahsin assistance show an increase in the quality of Qur'an reading among Sinjai Muslim women. After following the assistance in halaqah tahsin, the ability to read the Koran of Sinjai Muslim women gradually improved and became better, in accordance with the rules of tajwid.

„Wyrywałam sobie kawałeczki ciała…” – między sztuką a dyskursem maladycznym. Ciało okaleczone w narracji Racheli Fajgenberg

This article attempts to create a multivariant story about a community of women in the Polish-Jewish contact zone based on the text of Rakhel Feygenberg’s Di kinder-yorn [Polish title: A Girl’s Years: Childhood in a Polesie Shtetl], an autobiography of a Jewish young woman who grew up in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Using personal insights and documentary evidence she portrays a community of women read-ers who are engaged in never-ending rounds of watching and sounding each other.

Ο εκδότης Ν. Π. Ιγγλέσης και το περιοδικό Εύα (1923-1924)

Publisher N. P. Inglessis and the magazine Eva (1923-1924)
 Publisher of one French and five Greek-language publications, daily and weekly, during the 1920s, N. P. Inglessis has remained to this day a rather invisible case in the history of the Greek Press. Born in the late 1870s in Constantinople, he studied at the Chalki School of Commerce, and probably in London, and worked as an employee and then manager of the Bank of Athens before turning to publishing. My research in the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece provided biographicaland financial material, which allows us to assume the origin of the funds that supported the turn in his professional life. His publications were short-lived, but pioneering and insightful, seeking to fill thematic gaps, and reach the interested audiences. His popular magazine Eva, presented in more detail here, addressed a large number of women readers and often popularized positions of the women’s movement, especially those related to work, spreading them to wider and lower social strata, whocould not access the original collectives and theoretical discourses. Eva has probably worked as a model for similar publications, which circulated the following years in Greece. Accordingly, Inglessis’ Kinimatografos/Cinema, the first Greek magazine of its kind, dedicated to film, had also a clearly targeted readership, as well as his last and final attempt, Athlitika Chronika/Athletic Chronicles. Interestingly, N. P. Inglessis was the father of the first Greek film critic Iris Skaravaiou, indicating a path through which women could enter the journalist profession.

The Orthodox Woman: Jerome on the Relation Between Asceticism, Orthodoxy, and Gender

Abstract While previous scholarship has shown that the rhetorical figure of the “heretical woman” was important in Jerome’s slandering of male rivals, this article argues that the “orthodox woman” played a just as important role in his self-presentation as an orthodox teacher. The “orthodox woman” is characterized by true asceticism which, according to Jerome’s ascetic theology, implies that she transcends her sex. Rather than being a “woman”, in the ordinary sense of the word, she is an angelic being with a supernatural understanding, which allows her to discern the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures and to distinguish between orthodoxy and heresy. It is argued that the presentation of the “orthodox woman” as very learned, independent and strong-willed makes her the direct opposite of Jerome’s “heretical woman”, and that such a portrayal suited Jerome’s purposes, as his great reliance on women readers called for a defence of female spiritual authority.

The Neo-Victorian Feminist Afterlife of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016)

Anne Brontë’s deliberate exposition in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of gendered violence as the consequence of the structurally embedded sexism in the Victorian patriarchal socio-legal system is a daring example of feminist critique that was ahead of its time. This article examines the afterlife of Brontë’s feminism in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016), a neo-Victorian domestic noir thriller which re(dis)covers and repurposes Brontë’s novel for contemporary women readers. Baker uncovers the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and sexism in professional spheres that persist despite the progress achieved by Western feminist movements to secure women’s rights in the last century. We argue that The Woman Who Ran demonstrates just how generative Anne Brontë’s writing remains for conceptualising feminist issues in the twenty-first century.

Christian Women’s Journals and Vernacular Christianity: A Case Study of Vivekavathi in Telugu-Speaking Regions

This article investigates the Vivekavathi journal, established in 1909 by Protestant Christian female missionaries for women readers in the Telugu-speaking regions of the Madras Presidency, India. The study delves into the journal’s influence on the formation and dissemination of Christian beliefs and values within the Telugu society during the early twentieth century, a period marked by the rise of a reading public facilitated by colonial state efforts and Christian missionary initiatives. Furthermore, the article reveals how Protestant female missionaries utilised the journal to promote a novel concept of womanhood among the Telugu-speaking population. The research underscores the journal’s effective engagement with women, highlighting their active participation in shaping religious practices, an exceptional accomplishment in light of the pervasive patriarchal systems and values that often imply limited agency for women in religious contexts.

Sofia Khatun’s Silsila: A Genealogy of Foremothers in Print

Between 1922 and 1925, Sofia Khatun, a Muslim woman writer, published over 25 essays in some of Calcutta’s most widely circulated Bengali periodicals. Among these essays, her accounts of women’s position in premodern Greece, Rome, India and Egypt and her speculation on the originary sites of women’s movements are particularly interesting. Khatun here challenges the primacy of western actors and explicitly connects women’s emancipation with the era of Islamization in West Asia and North Africa. While reconfiguring dominant narratives of women’s social and political activism, she seeks foremothers in both obvious and obscure milieux. In doing so, Khatun traces a silsila or chain of predecessors, who are sources of inspiration to herself as well as her contemporary readers. A time-honoured tradition in Islamicate cultures, salasil (plural) usually foreground Sufi pirs (spiritual guides) and transmitters of Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet), more often men than women. Khatun reorients this practice to showcase women activists as key players in a male-dominated textual space. The conceptual metaphor of silsila captures her bringing together of Anglo-American suffragists, Arabian sultanas and African women warriors within a single genealogy. Khatun draws on two genres popular in medieval Arabia to enable her eclectic assemblage of foremothers to speak to the concerns of women readers in twentieth-century Bengal. The first, tabaqat, are biographical dictionaries that provide emulative paradigms. The second, a set of belletristic genres encompassed within the term adab, are short prose pieces and precedents to the ‘modern’ essay. Building on the former’s didactic function and the latter’s anecdotal quality, Khatun allows her foremothers to articulate multiple models of gender justice pursued at different times and across transregional spaces. By upholding such pluralistic and heterodox feminist pasts, she pays attention to the intersectional nature of gender inequity and addresses the ‘woman question’ in all its complexity in late colonial Bengal.

Women Reading and Women Writing and Men Writing Women Who Read and Write: (Re-) Considering Women's Literate Practices and the Ethics of Women's Literacy in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: Sir Thomas Malory's efforts in his Morte Darthur to represent Queen Gwenyvere and Queen Isode as being no more or less flawed than their male counterparts betray his own ethical uncertainty as author and adapter of his source materials for an audience including women.

INDIAN WOMEN'S WRITING: FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

Indian women have been writing for millennia but their voices have been lost in a male dominated conservative world. This is being remedied by scholars who wish to provide readers and students of literature with a balanced view of literature as an activity undertaken by both men and women. This provides women readers, students and academics with selfesteem when they realise that women have been writing for ages and literature has not just been written by DWEMs (Dead White European Males). Women’s writing should be moved to the centre of literary discourse from the margins where it has stagnated for centuries. For men it provides a corrective to a male centric world, which can also restrict men with stereotypes of expected masculinities.

Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (eds). Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production

Institutions of Literature updates historical accounts of institutions (societies, libraries, and museums) by tracing their influence on literary culture and production before and after the Romantic period. In their introduction, Mee and Sangster address how literary criticism too often conflates small, ramshackle institutions with leviathan-like bureaucracies. For instance, early eighteenth-century institutions like the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, an antiquarian foundation where members first met at a local coffee house, are hardly the kind of Foucauldian monster that comes to mind for suspicious literary scholars. Yet, the volume wrestles with a simple fact: literary studies are uncomfortable with institutional authority. For good reason, the editors see it as no coincidence that Institutions of Literature ‘appears at a time when academics are feeling increasingly alienated by institutional forms’ (p. 3). However, writers and academics remain active participants in the same institutional structures they resist. This conflict dates back to early institutions. As Anne H. Stevens’s chapter on circulating libraries argues, ‘Institutions shape the long history of the novel’, a genre first condemned as immoral and harmful to women readers (p. 127). Furthermore, Romantic notions of literary freedom and authenticity beyond institutional confines seem in tension with the lives of writers like Coleridge and Hazlitt who were star lecturers at institutions throughout the 1810s (p. 19). Mee and Sangster’s study scrutinises webs of literary production and dissemination—in Britain, the British Empire, and elsewhere in Europe—that make institutions and literature inextricably linked.

Shakespeare for Women: Middlebrow Feminism in Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters

This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.

The role of women's reading groups

The women’s reading group has played different roles throughout history: as a vehicle for education and self-improvement; as a place to network and build social capital; as a political space in which to discuss feminism and reflect on female identity. In this think piece the author considers how a contemporary example of a women’s reading group at the University of the Highlands and Islands performs many of these historical functions.

Radical feminist translations and strategies: A South Korean case

ABSTRACT In South Korea, a recent wave of feminism has brought about substantial changes in the book industry. Many publishing houses have expanded their list of feminism-related titles to cater for a growing number of women readers who seek awareness-raising. In addition, small-scale ventures dedicated to feminist publishing emerged to serve as a new platform for feminist activism. Among these ventures is Yeolda Books, a radical feminist publisher that openly advocates for “trans-exclusionary radical feminism” (TERF) and its translators use experimental language to emphasize women’s experiences in a creative and disruptive way. Against this backdrop, the present study discusses various textual representations of radical feminist translation, drawing on four translations by Hyedam Yu, one of Yeolda’s translators. The primary focus of this study is a theoretical formulation of feminist writing strategies derived from Yu’s translations. Findings could broaden the scope of discussion of (radical) feminist translation performed in a non-Western context.

“Let Black Girls Be”: The (Insta)poetry of Upile Chisala and its resistance to coloniality of being

ABSTRACT The production and circulation of poetry on social media has gained critical attention over the past decade. Known popularly as Instapoetry, this digital literary phenomenon has been celebrated in the Global North for increased printed poetry sales and changing readership patterns. Little has been written about Instapoetry from the Global South despite its popularity amongst black women readers and sharers, especially in South Africa. By offering a Southern analysis of the poetry and Instagram profile of Malawian storyteller and instapoet Upile Chisala, grounded in decolonial theory, this paper suggests that the oft-cited criticism against Instapoetry as “not poetry” fails to acknowledge its location on “the other side of the line.” Chisala’s poetry is an example of post-abyssality: it draws attention to the abyssal line and seeks to overcome it. The paper argues that Chisala’s call to voice and self-love is a “re-humaning” ethic that is useful for challenging coloniality of being. Her poetry therefore contributes to reimagining the being of black women and girls.

Reading work with Claire-Louise Bennett and Doireann Ní Ghríofa

ABSTRACT Varied acts of reading play formative roles across a diverse range of contemporary Irish women’s writing. In this article I ask perhaps a strange question: is reading work? Or rather, when is reading work? In order to explore this, I look at representations of reading in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020). By considering how represented reading has an impact on form in these hybrid texts of autofiction and memoir, I engage with and query recent attempts within postcritique to reconceptualise critical reading. In this article I first establish the centrality of reading in both Checkout and Ghost, before detailing how these texts use form to show what reading can do. From here, I examine the ways in which Checkout and Ghost engage with the relationships between reading and temporality. This leads me to focus on notions of “lay” and “professional” reading. Bennett and Ní Ghríofa, I argue, expose the fragility of divisions between “lay/professional” or “uncritical/critical” reading and readers – in part through their representations of the figure of the woman reader. Finally, this article addresses our own academic reading work (and, very briefly, its relationship to financial remuneration).

Chaucer's Proleptic Palinode

Abstract: Chaucer intervenes in late medieval debates about the dangers of fictive mimesis by reimagining the unanticipated woman reader's role in the repentant narrative of the vita Ovidiana . To defend the Ars amatoria from accusations of immorality, Ovid had claimed that it had been misinterpreted by women readers he had not anticipated. The medieval Ovid tradition absorbed this feminized figure into the biography it retroactively constructed for him; the Heroides became a palinode, an apology for or corrective to the youthful poetic indiscretions that supposedly misled these women readers. Chaucer turns this tradition knowingly on its head. In Troilus and Criseyde , he not only sets the stage for his own Heroides by giving himself something to apologize for, but also revalues the unanticipated woman reader and her interpretive faults. His sustained engagement with the vita Ovidiana in turn elucidates the literary-theoretical stakes of The Legend of Good Women , which defends the ethical value of narrative fiction, without moralizing commentary, even as it asks the reader to remain alert to its risks.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas

Reviewed by: The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas Elizabeth Allen alfred thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 225. isbn: 978-1-8438-4566-9. $105. Over more than two decades, Alfred Thomas has brought to light for an English readership the international court culture of medieval Bohemia and its influence in England. Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) took Anne's marriage to Richard II as the justification for a masterful survey of Czech literature with an eye to inviting comparisons with English literature. Thomas's subsequent work on Czech and English literature, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2007), cemented this essential scholarly project of making known in English a thoroughly cosmopolitan eastern European literary history; a deeper dive into the Bohemian connections to Chaucer's works came in Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). From Thomas' erudite and meticulous body of work, scholars of late-medieval English literature have gained crucial insight into the cultural relations between [End Page 158] England and Bohemia. Thomas' work is essential to an important twenty-first century scholarly undertaking—spearheaded by David Wallace (Europe: A Literary History) and taken further by scholars like Candace Barrington (Global Chaucers) and Marion Turner (Chaucer: A European Life)—to widen the context of English literary culture to include all of Europe and indeed, the rest of the globe. In his present monograph on the subject, Thomas details Bohemian art, literature, and statecraft in order to pursue readings of late fourteenth-century works by Chaucer, Gower, the writer of the Alliterative Morte Darthur, and the Pearl poet. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture is a handsome volume: printed on clay-covered paper, it contains 40 high-resolution, full color in-line illustrations. These visual materials draw a particularly vivid picture of the ties between Bohemia and England: the shared materials, styles, and themes which, Thomas argues, emphasize not so much national identities as 'familial and dynastic affiliations that transcended the west-east European divide' (p. xvi). This book consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter One, Thomas establishes that Richard II's court found creative inspiration in the multilingualism of Anne's Bohemian relatives, especially her father, Emperor Charles VI, and her half brother, King Wenceslas IV. This political link creates occasions for reading the English poetry of the late fourteenth century in an international context. In Chapter Two, Thomas treats Anne as the real-life corollary to Venus in Gower's Confessio Amantis and to Alceste in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, where the 'collaboration' with the patron 'is clearly not working out' (p. 71). In a series of short sections, Thomas explores the literary culture of female patronage in other works by Chaucer and by other authors including Dante, Petrarch, and Machaut. Chapter Three turns to more sustained readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Darthur, arguing that both poems, far from provincial, register the international court culture he describes. In Gawain's seduction scenes, he finds a reflection of Robert de Vere's scandalous affair with Anne's lady in waiting, Agnes Lancecrona; in the Morte, he finds in King Arthur's grief a reflection of Richard II's grief for de Vere upon his death. In both poems Thomas finds an ambivalence about the moral and political values that international court culture seems to embrace. Chapter Four finds that Pearl's 'curious blend of consolatio and courtly love motifs' (p. 167) registers links to Bohemian architectural, visual, and poetic texts: Karlstein Castle outside Prague, and the Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here and in the book's conclusion, Thomas describes Richard's political ambition and his investment in the ideology of sacral kingship as thoroughly embedded in an international court culture shared by England and Bohemia—an international culture that, after Richard's death, gave way to the comparative insularity of the Lancastrians. Thomas' work proceeds by testing associations (as opposed...