Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism

1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 298
Author(s):  
Susan Hendricks Swetnam ◽  
Susan Merrill Squier
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wassila Hamza Reguig-Mouro

Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.


Author(s):  
Wassila HAMZA REGUIG MOURO

Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
Hasmina Domato Sarip

This inquiry sought to discover the images of women as portrayed in the contemporary short stories entitled “Fallout” by Maria L.M. Fres-Felix and “Language” by Sunantha Mendoza. Feminist Literary Criticism, specifically liberal, radical, Freudian, socio-cultural, stereotypical feminist perspective were employed to critically analyze the actions and feminist perspective of the female characters. The study attempted to meet the following objectives: 1) to describe the images of women as depicted by the authors in the stories; 2) to identify the dominant devices used in the stories; and, 3) to determine the feminist themes conveyed in the stories. Through examining and analyzing the short stories, different images of women were discovered. The close textual reading resulted in the researcher’s coming up with the following findings: female characters are portrayed as involved, sophisticated, strong-minded, competitive, independent and unconventional. The dominant devices are symbols, juxtaposition, foreshadowing, imagery, idiom, metaphor, irony and figures of speech were effectively utilized in the stories to probe the images of women that are found in each story. Indeed, women will come a long way in facing the battle against patriarchal values.


Author(s):  
Meenakshi Sharma Yadav ◽  
Manoj Kumar Yadav

<strong>Feminist literary criticism</strong> is a <a title="Literary criticism" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism">literary criticism</a> knowledgeable by <a title="Feminist theory" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_theory">feminist theory</a>, or, more broadly, by the politics of <a title="Feminism" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism">feminism</a>. It uses feminist principles and ideology to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narratives of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. Feminism emerged as an important force in the western world in 1960s when women realized the attitude of their male colleagues who swore about equality, was actually the strategy used by them to keep women subservient, then a revolution by women to fight against them, and against racism and sexism was felt. This awakening spread over and as a result feminist criticism emerged on as an off –shoot of women’s Liberation Movement. Beginning with the interrogation of male-centric literature that portrayed women in a demeaning and oppressed model, theorist such as Marry Ellman, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer challenged past imaginations of the feminine within literary scholarship. It is very important for us to know that who these women writers are, what did they write and what were the sources of their writings. The present paper focuses on some of the above said important aspects of feminist writings and some of famous feminist writers also.


Author(s):  
M. A. Lipina ◽  

The paper is dedicated to studying the oneiric text of S. Krzhizhanovsky’s novel “Sideline.” The topicality of the research is due to modern literary criticism interest in examining various aspects of artistic hypnology of Russian writers, as well as studying the works of “returned” authors, including S. Krzhizhanovsky. The realization specifics of the structural model of the literary dream in question can be presented as the following scheme: unconscious falling asleep – dream-journey – awakening by falling down. Different variants of artistic implementation of the main metaphors connected with dreaming are analyzed: “dream-life” in the image of briefcase-cushion and the image of “million-brained” dream of equality and brotherhood; “dream-death” in the image of the leader of a dream world, with the prevalence of thanatological vocabulary in the description of the city of dreams. The ways of imitating the space of real dreaming in the oneiric text of the novel are studied: awakening by falling, sudden muteness of characters, sudden change of location, etc. Also, the specifics of using the plot device of an unannounced dream is considered contributing to the illusion of “reality” of everything that happens to the character in the city of dreams. An attempt is made to consider the oneirotop of the novel in terms of classification by genre and function, plot and composition, images and esthetics and characters, as well as artistic functions of dreams in the literature (plot function, psychological function, idea, and symbolic function). The oneiric text of Krzhizhanosky’s novel “Sideline” is viewed as an artistic realization of the author’s original idea of the subconscious, dreamy origin of a communist utopia.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Samina Akhtar ◽  
Muhammad Rauf ◽  
Saima Ikram ◽  
Gulrukh Raees

This paper is an attempt to portray the plight of Mariam that she undergoes due to her illegitimate social status. The study focuses on the critical societal attitude towards the illegitimate unfortunate women. Mariam begins her life with a “harami” status; continues her struggle for personal identity, suffer and endures as a battered woman and leave this world as a woman of consequences by digging herself out of the lower social status that society attached to her. The study analyzes Mariam’s endurance, struggles and resistance in her strenuous journey to attain legitimate ending. The researcher used feminist literary criticism to interpret the text as a research methodology and adopted close textual analysis of the text by Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns.


Literator ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
J. W. Du Plessis ◽  
D. H. Steenberg

Feminists feel that in literary criticism not enough consideration is given to feminism as an ideology in the production of texts. According to them, existing literary criticism is strongly man-centred. This is especially true of the practice of South African literary criticism. Although feminism does not have at its disposal a formulated feminist literary criticism, a great deal of research has been done in this direction abroad. This is especially the case in Europe and America. Feminist literary critics apply themselves to the representation of the woman in works by male authors and an analysis of feminine experience in the production of texts by women. This article is an exploration of the Anglo-American and French approaches in feminist literary criticism. An attempt is made to formulate the aims of a possible South African feminist literary criticism in order that not only the general norms, but also the feminist codes in the production of a text, speak towards the final interpretation of a work.


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