scholarly journals Inventando la Heroína de las Mil Caras: una propuesta didáctica de creación literaria. Inventing the Heroine of a Thousand Faces: a Literary Creation Didactic Proposal

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
Catalina Millán Scheiding
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Escritura Creativa ◽  
Ideological Context

Esta propuesta didáctica ejemplifica el uso de la escritura creativa como una forma de acercarse al discurso de género, a través de la generación de un héroe o heroína de fantasía. Se ofrece una actividad en la que se trabaja el conflicto aparente y el conflicto subyacente, donde los roles de género pueden ofrecer respuestas diferentes y redefinir las estructuras narratológicas. El alumnado trabaja sobre su propia creación literaria para definir sus expectativas literarias y los conflictos hegemónicos que se presentan en las historias de fantasía y ficción de su contexto social e ideológico. El contraste de los textos de creación propia con el análisis de textos y ejemplos audiovisuales de fantasía y ciencia ficción de creadoras literarias y de personajes femeninos, presenta una oportunidad para generar un espacio contrastivo y constructivo, a la vez que enlaza con competencias educativas y facilita un acercamiento comparativo a la critica literaria. This didactic proposal exemplifies the use of creative writing as a way to approach gender studies, through the creation of a fantasy hero. The activity offers the possibility of working both the apparent and underlaying conflicts, where gender roles can offer different answers and redefine narratological structures. The students work on their own literary creation to define their literary expectations and the predominant conflicts that appear in fantasy and fiction stories in their social and ideological context. The contrast of their own textual creations with the analyses of textual and audiovisual examples from fantasy and science fiction by female authors and including female characters offers the possibility of generating a contrastive and constructivespace, which also links to educational competences and facilitates a comparatist approach to literary criticism.

The Housewife's Tale: Maternal Poetics in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 209-222
Author(s):  
Corinne Dale
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Development ◽  
Stages Of Development ◽  
The World ◽  
Delta Wedding ◽  
Domestic Ritual

Abstract In Delta Wedding, Welty immerses the reader in the world of the traditional home-centered woman. The novel explores the transformational, even sacred, nature of housework and domestic ritual through the experiences of five female characters at different stages of development, from 9-year-old Laura to Ellen, the "mother of them all." Structurally, the novel is organized by the intertwined and repeated circular journeys of the women, journeys that echo primal stories of female development. The repetition and sense of stasis that are integral to these elements as archetypal female experiences have irritated some critics. But the novel provides a framework for the maternal ethic of "holding" and offers a feminist poetics, essential for fully appreciating other texts that celebrate traditional female experiences. (Literary criticism; gender studies)

Enforcing Performance: Disciplining Girls in British Co-educational Boarding School Stories, 1928–58

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
CLARE HOLLOWELL
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Educational Setting ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
School Stories ◽  
School Story ◽  
Girls School ◽  
A Site

This paper examines girls and power in British co-educational boarding school stories published from 1928 to 1958. While feminist scholars have hailed the girls’ school story as a site of potential resistance to constricting gender roles, the same can not be said of the co-educational school story. While the genres share many tropes and characterisation, the move from an all-female world to a co-educational setting allows the characters access to a narrower range of gender roles, and renders the female characters significantly less powerful. The disciplinary structures of the co-educational schools, mirroring those in real life, operate in a supposedly progressive manner that in fact removes girls from access to power.

Feminist Shakespeares: Adapting Shakespeare for a Modern Audience in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Etman
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Female Characterization

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.

scholarly journals Bloody Women: How Female Authors Have Transformed the Scottish Contemporary Crime Fiction Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Lorna Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Abstract This study will explore the role of female authors in contemporary Scottish crime fiction. Over the past thirty years, women writers have overhauled the traditionally male dominated genre of crime fiction by writing about strong female characters who drive the plot and solve the crimes. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Lin Anderson are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender and genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, both journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series, I wish to explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives. This essay documents the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research which involves writing a crime novel set in a post referendum Scotland. I examine a progressive and contemporary Scottish society, where women hold many senior positions in public life, and investigate whether this has an effect on the outcome of crimes. Through this narrative, my main character will focus on the current and largely hidden crimes of human trafficking and domestic abuse. By doing this I examine the ways in which the modern crime novel has evolved to cross genre boundaries. In addition to focusing on a crime, the victims and witnesses, today’s crime novels are tackling social issues to reflect society’s changing attitudes and values.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

Plants and Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan McHugh
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Hybrid Plant ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
A Minor

In countless ways, plants have been in literature from the start. They literally provide surfaces and tools of inscription, as well as figuratively inspire a diverse body of writing that ranges from documenting changing social and ecological conditions to probing the limits of the human imagination. The dependence of human along with all other life on vegetal bodies assures their omnipresence in literatures across all periods and cultures, positioning them as ready reference points for metaphors, similes, and other creative devices. As comestibles, landscape features, home décor, and of course paper, plants appear in the pages of virtually every literary text. But depictions of botanical life in action often prove portentous, particularly when they remind readers that plants move in mysterious ways. At the frontiers of ancient and medieval European settlements, the plant communities of forests served as vital sources of material and imaginative sustenance. Consequently, early modern literature registers widespread deforestation of these alluring and dangerous borderlands as threats to economic and social along with ecological flourishing, a pattern repeated through the literatures of settler colonialism. Although appearing in the earliest of literatures, appreciation for the ways in which plants inscribe stories of their own lives remains a minor theme, although with accelerating climate change an increasingly urgent one. Myths and legends of hybrid plant-men, trees of life, and man-eating plants are among the many sources informing key challenges to representing plants in modern and contemporary literature, most obviously in popular genre fictions like mystery, horror, and science fiction (sf). Further enlightening these developments are studies that reveal how botanical writing emerges as a site of struggle from the early modern period, deeply entrenched in attempts to systematize and regulate species in tandem with other differences. The scientific triumph of the Linnaean “sexual system” bears a mixed legacy in feminist plant writing, complicated further by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) writers’ creative engagements with the unevenly felt consequences of professionalized plant science. Empowered by critical plant studies, an interdisciplinary formation that rises to the ethical challenges of emergent scientific affirmations of vegetal sentience, literature and literary criticism are reexamining these histories and modeling alternatives. In the early 21st century with less than a fraction of 1 percent of the remaining old growth under conservation protection worldwide, plants appear as never before in fragile and contested communal terrains, overshadowed by people and other animals, all of whose existence depends on ongoing botanical adaptation.

scholarly journals Depicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Humera Iqbal ◽  
Saba Zulfiqar
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Authors

The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.

The Bhāgavata Speaks of Woman

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Gopal K. Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
Positive Light

Indic texts have played a crucial role in constructing, and greatly influencing, gender roles and social norms in Indian society. Scholarship on these texts has identified problems of identity and hegemony that are thoroughly discussed in such fields as subaltern studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and the like. Because of cultural practices such as satῑ‎ and religious laws for widows, Hinduism and some of its associated texts tend to have a reputation for patriarchal misogyny. In her Encyclopedia of Feminism, Lisa Tuttle advises scholars to ask “new questions of old texts;” following her lead, this chapter intends to examine the gender discourse contained in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, focusing on the text’s characterization of women as māyā, which we have here defined as God’s deluding or covering potency. The analysis should make it plain that while the Bhāgavata does support patriarchal institutions and practices, on a deeper level it portrays women in a far more positive light, holding them in a more esteemed position than one may assume.

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