Literary historians have long made an issue of the extent to which the modernist novel broke with conventions established in the nineteenth century. One of the most debated questions is the occurrence, or dating, of an “inward turn,” a rupture with the external orientation of the realist and the naturalist novels, in favor of greater psychological depth and complexity. Such a turn has been located in the early years of modernism by critics like Robert Humphrey (1954), Malcolm Bradbury (1995 [1976]), and Stanley Sultan (1987) and in the late nineteenth century by scholars like Morton Levitt (2006) and Pericles Lewis (2007). One of the most common but seldom tested presuppositions about the alleged “inward turn” is that the linguistic innovations of the modernist period helped portray the mental states of characters in a more advanced manner. This article reviews the debates on the differences between realist and modernist forms of thought representation and uses quantitative techniques to determine whether, and to what extent, there was linguistic and stylistic innovation in how the French novel represented thought before and during the “inward turn” of the 1910s and 1920s. By tracing the use of reporting clauses and mental verbs (e.g., “she thought” and “he said to himself”) in a large sample of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French fiction, I measure the frequency of several key markers of represented thought in a range of novels, authors, and decades between 1800 and 1929. I conclude that these common reporting clauses and mental verbs appeared in a wide variety of texts, particularly in the French novels of the 1830s, 1910s, and 1920s, alongside other, “free” techniques, which are more often studied. There is, thus, very little evidence that such “free” forms (notably free indirect thought) displaced their marked counterparts (e.g., plain indirect thought). Indeed, the modernist “inward turn” in France, on which this article concentrates, included a continued recourse to the supposedly more “primitive” (i.e., marked) forms of thought representation associated with the realist novel: the 1910s and 1920s even saw an increase in markers of represented thought that were frequently used in the nineteenth-century French novel.
One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.
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