Language and Gender in American Fiction
Title | Language and Gender in American Fiction PDF eBook |
Author | Elsa Nettels |
Publisher | University of Virginia Press |
Total Pages | 230 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9780813917245 |
Between January 1880 and December 1889, Harper's Monthly Magazine published 263 works of fiction; half of these were written by women. Judging by the popularity of contemporary mass-circulation magazines. women writers of the late nineteenth century enjoyed equal opportunity in the world of commercial publishing. Yet although they wrote best-sellers and won prizes, the institutions that keep writers and their reputations alive chose not to sustain these writers, and few are familiar today; Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton. Elsa Nettels suggests that this lack of parity is not surprising in a culture that for centuries has used" masculine" to describe all things strong and dominant, while "feminine" has signified weakness and inferiority. In Victorian America, the relation of literary style to gender became of increasing interest as women writers became ever more prominent. In the influential magazines of the late nineteenth century -- Harper's, Century, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal -- writers directly or implicitly reflected society's views of the sexes and the proper roles of men and women. In this intelligent and accessible book, the author examines how William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather helped both to perpetuate and to subvert Victorian America's ideology of language and gender. All had fruitful careers as novelists, editors, and critics, and she demonstrates that each was in a unique position to affect popular language and gender stereotypes. To gauge their responses to the pervasive assumptions held by the magazines that published them, Nettels traces how these writersdefined "masculine" and "feminine" in their works, how they characterized women's speech and language, how they distinguished male and female discourse, and where they invested authority in matters of usage. Taking into account others engaged in the Victorian construction of gender such as grammarians, linguists, sociologists, and writers on etiquette, Nettels offers a compelling look at the cultural perpetuation of ideologies, as well as fascinating scholarship on four authors who manipulated social mores to establish their place in American literature.
Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919
Title | Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919 PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 274 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN | 1135851573 |
Women, Language and Linguistics
Title | Women, Language and Linguistics PDF eBook |
Author | Julia S. Falk |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 570 |
Release | 2002-01-31 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 1134786204 |
Rather than the standard American story of an increasingly triumphant march of scientific inquiry towards structural phonology, Women, Language and Linguistics reveals linguistics where its purpose was communication; the appeal of languages lay in their diversity; and the authority of language lay in its speakers and writers. Julia S Falk explores the vital part which women have played in preserving a linguistics based on the reality and experience of language; this book finally brings to light a neglected perspective for those working in linguistics and the history of linguistics.
Gender in American Literature and Culture
Title | Gender in American Literature and Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Jean M. Lutes |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 645 |
Release | 2021-04-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108805507 |
Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.
Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
Title | Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing PDF eBook |
Author | Dorri Beam |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | |
Release | 2010-06-03 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1139489232 |
In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.
Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature
Title | Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Emma Staniland |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 251 |
Release | 2015-10-05 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 1134614977 |
This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.
Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction
Title | Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction PDF eBook |
Author | M. Hurst |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 243 |
Release | 2011-04-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0230118267 |
Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.