Female Bildungsroman in the Narrative of African Women Writers

This paper addresses the ‘Bildungsroman’ genre in African postcolonial narratives. It mainly focuses on African women writers’ literary works and, specifically, aims to shed light on how they blend female subjugation with an unknown genre in the narrative of female characterization and autobiographies. The study also evidences that, even though, the term ‘Bildungsroman’ is German in origin, i.e., ‘bildung’, which means apprenticeship, self-cultivation, formation, etc; and the word ‘roman’ which means novel, the concept is fully adapted and adopted in African male and female writers’ literary discourses. Thus the paper seeks to demonstrate that colonization in Africa has had intellectual impacts on modern African literature, as the pioneers of contemporary African literature have used foreign languages to write back, claim cultural retrieval, independence and represent their own experience through their own perspective and narrative in the midst of their protagonists’ psychological and physical transformation.

Virginia Woolf in the Canon of Women’s Literature Narrative Futures of The Feminist Novel

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

The Uniqueness Heroines Depicted In Gillian Flynn’s Novels Entitled Gone Girl And Dark Places

This article is aimed to study the uniqueness of female character or heroine in Gillian Flynn’s novels entitled Dark Places (2009) dan Gone Girl (2012). The concept of heroin and gynocriticism approaches is used to examine the uniqueness of the main character in both novels. Amy Dunne in Gone Girl and Libby Day pada Dark Places can be considered as antiheroine. From the result of the analysis, it can be concluded that Flynn introduced an interesting female characterization. The anti-heroine characters are portrayed in an intriguing plot. She presents woman as offender and sexual manipulation interestingly. The exploration of feminine vulnerability to undermine the dominancy of masculine privilege has brought the themes of both novels to.

The Snow Queer? Female Characterization in Walt Disney’s Frozen

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Snow Queen’ (1845) and its film adaptations have been examined from multiple perspectives by previous scholarly criticism. Recently, Gender and Queer theories have placed particular emphasis on the presence of non-normative romantic relationships between characters, namely, attraction between a young boy and an older woman (Kay and the Snow Queen), homoeroticism (Gerda and the Robber Girl), and even incestuous desire (Kay and Gerda), among others. In this paper, we will concentrate on how the original fairy-tale female characters and their interrelationships have been reworked in Walt Disney’s Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013), and we will analyse how the film’s representations of love, desire, and femininity simultaneously resemble and differ from its literary source. Firstly, we will explore how Andersen’s alluringly dangerous Snow Queen has been turned into a sympathetic character, Queen Elsa. Secondly, we argue that Gerda and Kay’s friendship has been transformed into sisterly love between the two female protagonists in the film, Elsa and Anna, whereas romantic heterosexual love, on the other hand, seems to have been relegated to a secondary narrative arc or done away with altogether, as the absence of a romantic partner for Elsa shows. Interestingly, having a Disney queen whose quest does not involve finding a husband has led some Frozen fans to speculate that Elsa could be the first lesbian Disney princess. Thus, we will also analyse Elsa’s character in connection with the different definitions of ‘queerness’. In light of all this, we discuss that Frozen is an example of the recent Disney trend to redefine true love and prioritize female bonding and empowerment. However, if we compare it to its literary precedent, the Disney adaptation seems to be less daring when it comes to portraying non-normative manifestations of love and femininity than Andersen’s original.

Voicing The Silences: Women In Contemporary Pakistani Fiction In English

Indigenous women of Pakistan have long been struggling with the patriarchal norms. Categorization of their existence in the conventional oppressions connotes diversified victimization. Grappling with such assorted repressions and articulating the subsequent silences, women writers of Pakistan and the social activists are incessantly engaged to empower women from societal peripheries. The selected fiction exposes how the indigenous woman is controlled and exploited on the name of religio-cultural rhetoric. The present article outlines the historical developments in changing the social positioning of women after independence by highlighting the urgency of raising women consciousness in the academic sphere to form an alliance for collective identity. This article evaluates Ice Candy Man (1988), My Feudal Lord (1994) and Trespassing (2003) to explore the changing images of indigenous Pakistani women after partition. It aims to highlight the struggle and resistance of female characters against the patriarchal propriety of Pakistani society. The study is significant to highlight the struggles of women writers to articulate the silences of assorted exploitation buried under the hegemony of socio-historical discourses. The study concludes that through female characterization the women writers organize specific academic movement of awakening that provides situational analysis to relate with the turbulences of the fictional world to correspond the real challenges.

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

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.