The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel

Armstrong, Nancy

doi:10.2307/1345220

Cited by 16 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In parallel fashion, fiction is often gendered as “female,” a female mode from its birth, dominated by works often stereotyped as “chick lit” (recall bias against romantic fiction as studied by Radway, ). Also see Nancy Armstrong () and Virginia Woolf's famous addresses and essay “A Room of One's Own” () on the parallel rise of feminine authority, the “feminine voice,” and concern about “domestic” concerns in the early English novel as well as Ian Watts' well‐known Rise of the Novel (). A related reason for the relative neglect of fiction in information studies that cannot be explored here is the presumption in most of the English‐speaking world of a sharp distinction between fiction and non‐fiction.…”

Section: Why Has Information Studies Generally Ignored Fiction?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an understanding of fiction and information behavior

Broussard

Doty

2016

Proc. Assoc. Info. Sci. Tech.

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The study of information science and technology has expanded over the years to include more kinds of people, more kinds of behavior, more methods, and a broader inclusion of fields. There is at least one area, however, where very few information studies scholars have tread: entertainment, particularly fiction. Yet many fields indicate that information studies should consider fiction. In this paper, we discuss how fiction is an informative genre and reasons why information studies scholars have mostly ignored fiction. We also identify potential research directions for studying fiction. We provide a summary of works about fiction and information, discuss motivations for expanding (and not expanding) information studies beyond what it is and has been, and we use an exploratory study of one example of a fiction-interaction -reading Young Adult novels -to illustrate how fiction is important to information behavior.

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Section: Why Has Information Studies Generally Ignored Fiction?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an understanding of fiction and information behavior

Broussard

Doty

2016

Proc. Assoc. Info. Sci. Tech.

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“…Frederic Rowton confirmed as much in his populist anthology of women’s poetry, half a century later: ‘Woman has to bear invisible sway over the hidden mechanisms of the heart; and her endowments are of a meek, persuasive, quiet, and subjective kind. Man rules the mind of the world, woman its heart’ (Armstrong, 1982, p. 130). Of course, in the very process of writing about such matters, in revealing to the public gaze the ‘iceberg of everyday misery’ which had hitherto lain largely unseen beneath the superficial calm of middle English domesticity, this particular prejudice was critically undercut (Vickery, 2003, p. 73; Surridge, 2005, pp.…”

Section: Have Deserved a Better Fatementioning

confidence: 99%

The prejudices of Mary Hays

Ward¹

2009

International Journal of Law in Context

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During the 1790s, Mary Hays was one of the most influential radical novelists and polemicists in England. She counted amongst her closest friends and mentors the likes of Joseph Johnson, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. During this tumultuous final decade of the century, she published two novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. Both were controversial in the extreme, attracting the opprobrium of conservative critics. What caused such consternation was not merely their vivid description of the myriad political and social injustices suffered by her female compatriots, but the role of the law in perpetuating such injustices. For much of the last two hundred years Hays has been a largely forgotten figure, her novels occasioning rare interest amongst literary critics and historians, rarer interest still amongst jurists. The purpose of this article is to address this neglect, and to recommend Hays as one of the most intriguing and urgent prophets of modern literary and jurisprudential feminism.

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“…More specifically, since the market, rather than patrons, came to control literature, speed and copious writing became valued and expected. Privileging these aspects of writing also shaped the content: literature became more focused on desire, thoughts, feelings, opinions on daily events and became more leisurely and self-reflective-all reasons why this writing was deemed very feminine in nature (Watt, 1957;Kvande, 2013;Armstrong, 1982 and1987). Goldsmith (1989) specifically focuses on what was attractive about women's writing in this new marketplace, explaining that publishers "were quick to recognize the easy marketability of a woman's private correspondence, and ultimately of a literary genre based on women's letters" (p. vii).…”

Section: Marketplacementioning

confidence: 99%

Pens, print, and pixels : gendered writing and the epistolary genre in transitional eras.

Mathis¹

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This dissertation proposes a retheorization of rhetorical genres, media, and modes, with a particular emphasis on how this interrelationship reinstantiates and/or subverts deeply entrenched power dynamics over time. Current scholarship often depicts genres and media in a one-to-one relationship that obscures the intricate ways rhetorical genres and media rely on one another to enable (or hinder) writers' participation in particular discourse communities. This project primarily focuses on gendered power and analyzes letters-a traditionally feminized genre-in three distinct time periods marked by media transition. Specifically, I explore ways women employ genre and media affordances together to assume positions of greater authority and examine how texts mediate who can exercise power. The first chapter reviews scholarship on rhetorical genre theory, media studies, and multimodal composition and introduces a new theoretical model. The first case focuses on Renaissance women's manuscript letterwriting in the Bagot family collection (Chapter Two). The second case examines Samuel Richardson's gendered epistolary writing in his vernacular letters, printed manuals, and fiction (Chapter Three). Finally, viii Chapter Four examines epistolary conventions of social media posts in Pantsuit Nation. Using these cases, I drew conclusions about how genres and media can continue to exclude and/or promote certain writers' voices in and over time-even when the genres and media appear more accessible and inclusive. The project emphasizes how genres and media influence our lives and enable us to make space for ourselves in the world. Genres and media shape each other in recurrent, dynamic processes through their modal affordances and respond to the social and cultural exigencies of a particular moment. As a field committed to inclusivity and the study of power in language, we must retheorize the dynamic processes involved in writing platforms if we are to empower students and other writers and citizens with whom we work.

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The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Toward an understanding of fiction and information behavior

Toward an understanding of fiction and information behavior

The prejudices of Mary Hays

Pens, print, and pixels : gendered writing and the epistolary genre in transitional eras.

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