Volume 15 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

By focusing on Rhoda Broughton’s debut novel, entitled Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), this paper sets out to explore the way the author succeeded in challenging conventional narrative models, besides subverting the customary depiction of “the Angel in the House”, the untarnished, submissive, cherub-like Victorian icon of womanhood so frequently portrayed in contemporary literature.

Female workers represent a fundamental component of the workforce to the extent that it is true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a huge debt. However, despite the unfair exploitation of many women in factories in which conditions resembled manslaughter, they have been often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. An interesting exception in the early Victorian period is represented by the writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her semi-fictional The Wrongs of Woman is a reform novel which sheds a controversial light on female working conditions. On the one hand she indeed deplores the inhuman treatment of female labourers, but on the other hand she also argues that female employment provokes a consequent increase in male unemployment! My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonna’s text and her attempt to alleviate working-class suffering.

Although the Victorian period was a time when the sexes were assigned distinct and complementary roles, these rigid gender-role divisions between the two sexes were beginning to dissolve as the nineteenth century was drawing to its close. Among the various factors that contributed to bringing the two genders closer was the cycling boom of the 1890s, and the first-wave feminists embraced the bicycle as a freedom machine and symbol of emancipation. Despite the fact, though, that cycling functioned at first as a gender equaliser, , it eventually segregated the sexes, as social norms promoted the idea of gendered cycling and enforced a model of domesticated or feminised cycling for women. This essay aims to explore how Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1895 story “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” reflects this complicated impact that cycling had on gender segregation and the possibilities it offered for gender fusion as well as the alternative expressions of sexuality it enabled.

This paper evaluates women characters of Elizabeth Gaskell0’s social novels set in England’s industrial era. While in some ways a traditional woman of her age, Gaskell assumes responsibility and nurture as a duty of men as well as women, and shows her powerful women escaping gender norms, making her worthy of more notice as a social critic than she often gains.

The 19th century saw an expression of women’s ardent desire for freedom, emancipation and assertion in the public space. Women hardly managed to assert themselves at all in the public sphere, as any deviation from their traditional role was seen as unnatural. The human soul knows no gender distinctions, so we can say that women face the same desire for fulfillment as men do. Today, women are more and more encouraged to develop their skills by undertaking activities within the public space that are different from those that form part of traditional domestic chores. The woman of the 19th century felt the need to be useful to society, to make her contribution visible in a variety of domains. A woman does not have to become masculine to get power. If she is successful in any important job, this does not mean that she thinks like a man, but that she thinks like a woman. Women have broken through the walls that cut them off from public life, activity and ambition. There are no hindrances that can prevent women from taking their place in society.

The subject matter of this paper is the interplay of the female body, law and the technologies of “domestic” animals in the novel Burial Rites (2013), a fictionalised biography of the last woman executed in Iceland. Drawing consistent parallels between the convicted woman and animals - lambs in the “killing pen” in particular - Hannah Kent problematises long-standing human institutions and traditions such as law, death sentence, patriarchy and the (ab)use of animals. Moreover, she demonstrates that “the animal” and “the criminal” are mutually supportive socio-legal constructs realised on the bodies of sentient beings via identical technologies.

Amanda Cross is the pen name Carolyn Heilbrun used for her mystery fiction. In two of her novels she employed the theme of androgyny. She also wrote the non-fiction, 1973 Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in which she promoted androgyny as aspect of her approach to feminism, an intellectual denial of any significant differences between the sexes. While that thread of American feminism has lost favor in current feminist ideologies, matters of gender identity are rising in prominence in American social and political thought, reviving the debate on male and female roles and identities in the United States.

This article explores the ways in which older Czech men construct their masculine identities. Profiting from the personal memories of individuals who witnessed dramatic social changes in 20^th century Czechoslovakia, the study draws on eight oral narratives that focus on the period of older men’s youth but also encompass their adult and later lives. The article identifies five recurrent themes through which older men construct their identities and discusses these outcomes in relation to the debate concerning the nature of gender order in the contemporary Czech Republic. It demonstrates the attachment of older men to the patriarchal masculine models of their youth, which are presented as masculine ideals, but also depicts their reservations towards such models. These reservations, however, do not cause older men to argue in favour of greater equality for women.

Despite a high growth rate and plentiful Government measures to encourage gender equality, the gender gap still exists in India. Lack of gender equality not only limits women’s access to resources and opportunities, but also imperils the life prospects of the future generation. In the present article an attempt has been made to examine the problem of gender inequality in India. In this process, the article not only discusses the extent, causes and consequences of the problem, but also suggests policy measures to reduce gender inequality in India.

The post global era is signified in terms of women’s changed status in the patriarchal society of India. Their participation in the work force is not experienced as good or as desired because they have to face rampant violence related to their reorganized desires. The media-bound culture is a prime cause of their mimetic behavior in lifestyle and other choices. This paper attempts to raise two questions: Might this be the major cause of the violence? Is there a relationship between consumerism and women’s body as sex commodity?

This paper presents an investigation into Nigerian female journalists’ definition of their role vis-à-vis the two concepts of women’s empowerment/emancipation and feminism. It examines the level to which the country’s media and social environment are conducive to feminist journalistic expression. The paper argues that although a good number of female media producers in the country, demonstrate a strong adherence to feminism and women’s empowerment/emancipation, they are hindered from fully materialising their orientation. These hindering factors include, among others, patriarchal socio-professional fixations, weak female representation at decision-making levels in the media, and limited financial resources to create gender sensitive programmes.

Lucky Jim is one of the novels that mark the beginning of a small subgenre of contemporary fiction called the campus novel. It was written and published in the 1950s, a period when more women and working-class people started attending universities. This paper analyses the representation of women in terms of their gender and class.

Pinter’s short dramatic piece questions the women’s rights discourse that USA-led Western hegemonic powers rely heavily upon when justifying their incursions into the territories of the Global South. The play blasts this posture apart by pointing to the patriarchal paradigm and gendered hierarchies that inform the structuration of Western capitalist societies and which neo-imperial Western powers in their search for bigger profits and new markets inevitably transplant into annexed territories under their direct or indirect control.

The aim of this paper is to study some of Lauren Beukes’ feminine characters and to draw a parallel between them and some famous South African personalities presented in her non-fiction work Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past. To this end, I will analyse three of her novels, Moxyland (2008), Zoo City (2010) and The Shining Girls (2012), in order to draw attention to the part played by South African women in Apartheid and post-Apartheid society.

Starting from Arab-American women’s narratives, this study explores to what extent hegemonic history excludes and silences female Arab bodies and their relation to sexuality. It will also address the issue of present day migration, as reflected by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami in her novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005).

While Holocaust historiography and literary criticism have typically been male-centred, on the presumption that the experiences of women and men were essentially identical, the aim of this study is to investigate gendered perceptions and representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Cynthia Ozick’s two-part fictional narrative The Shawl. The narrative focuses on the gender-based suffering of women and the murder of their innocent children and includes a brief account of a mother’s witnessing of her daughter’s electrocution in a concentration camp. The second part of the narrative represents an extended exposition of that atrocity’s psychological toll on the mother’s postwar life and her sense of being suspended in a liminal space between life and death, plagued by the constant intrusion of the Holocaust into her life.

This paper analyses the construction of two superheroines, one from the 1990s (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and one from the 2010s (Jessica Jones). I contend that popular feminism has changed between the 1990s and the present and that this is evident in the representation of televised superheroines. While in the 1990s superheroines were more conformist, today they are more transparent in their feminist intentions. I suggest that this is due to contemporary cultural trends in the United States.

The paper focuses on the fantasy universes created by J.R.R. Tolkien and by the more recent French writer, Muriel Barbery. The two authors excel in their depiction of the elusive world of the elves, each offering a deeply personal vision (a man writer’s and a woman writer’s) of what such magical beings may be like and how they may relate to humankind.