GENDER INEQUALITY WITHIN A FAMILY: THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN’S NOVEL IN SOCIAL MEDIA

A topic about women is always interesting to discuss, including their works, such as a novel. Her life journey has been portrayed in a novel in detail. This paper aims to describe the representation of a women's novel in social media, the factors leading to it, and the values within. It employed a qualitative descriptive method with a feminist literary approach that examined the text from the women's side as a reader. Data were taken from a novel published online in social media and then printed. It was Elena. This study showed that women's novels in social media tend to experience marginalization/discrimination, stereotype/negative labeling, subordination, and excessive burden for women. The dominating cultural construction, patriarchy ideology, and familial ideology are the influencing factors. Women's novel also contains messages about religious values, education values, and the values of patience and endurance. It suggested that further research compared it with other novels published in social media or other media to provide a more comprehensive and varied description.

Women’s Fiction

This essay gives an overview of women’s fiction published between the late 18th and early 19th century, focusing on their interest in sensibility, education, and marriage. Women’s novels during this period were very much influenced by the literary genre called the novel of sensibility, which celebrates emotional concepts such as sentiment, delicacy, and sensibility. In promoting education for women, many female novelists not only vindicated women’s capacity to reason, but also recommended moral feeling for others. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier believed that women should embrace reason, they knew that domestic affections were necessary. Affectionate ties or compassion are key to understanding the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Possessing neither was detrimental to the happiness of heroines of this period, and this is typically observed in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) – pursuing one’s desire without restraint would lead to self-destruction. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were writing their novels when the radical movement connected to Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion about the need for women’s education had subsided: excessive indulgence of emotions and sexual appetite were cautioned against in their novels. Although in the early 19th-century sexual transgressions were condemned, some novelists such as Charlotte Dacre explored the theme of women’s sexual freedom.

“Sales leaders” or “prize-winning books”: tastes and preferences of the Slovak reader

The book market in Slovakia is very rich and diverse; it presents works of various genres and themes, aimed at readers with a variety of tastes. The article discusses approaches to the evaluation of literary products, on the one hand, from the point of view of the reading public, and, on the other hand, the members of the juries of a number of literary prizes awarded annually in the country. The largest Slovak publishing houses and bookstores conduct monitoring, constantly updating their data on the best-selling books. Among the bestsellers are, as a rule, works of popular genres, including detective stories, women’s novels, political thrillers, novels with elements of mysticism. Other criteria are put forward by the jury of prestigious literary competitions, first of all, the Anasoft Litera Award for the best original prose literary work in the Slovak language. In more detail, the article discusses the books of the winners in the recent years. These are Ondrej Štefánik (the novel “I am Paula”, 2016), Ivan Medeši (the collection of short stories “Eating”, 2018), Jana Sabuchová (the novel “Whisperers”, 2019). Etela Farkašová’s novel “The Script” (2017), due to its high artistic merits and humanistic orientation, was a great success with both critics and readers.