Issues of Gender in Modernist Texts

Skip to main content. Log In Sign Up. A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India: The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the hub of Global North medical infrastructure and scientific advancement, at attractive Global South rates.

Now, however, it stands on the brink of being banned by a bill introduced in the Indian parliament in This essay advances the argument that the selling points of ICGS have been premised on structural and systemic inequalities of gender and class, as well as of biopolitical power. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West.

The tenacious struggle of a bereaved woman for her right to dignity and existence.. It is beyond the bounds of the likelihood that an individual can escape the consequences of war as witnessed in History. It impacts an individual; both physically and psychologically. This open-ended warfare in Kashmir has made the life of every human being even worse than hell. It is obvious, that physical injuries are noticeable but psychological injury often go unacknowledged. This research paper will put insight into the protagonist Haleema heartbreaking tenacious journey as a solitary woman who battle for her son — Imran whereabouts, her right to dignity and life till her last breath.

Literary discourses and Interpretations- Dr Sony. Literary discourses and Interpretations. This paper aims at describing the process of establishing dominance within a culture, either by brute force or by voluntary consent. It is through the active and passive voices in the plays that one comes to know about the Her Majesty the Woman.

Metaphysics of the Feminine. From Non-places to Places: The political partition of India in into a truncated India and the dominion of Pakistan witnessed a wave of forced migration, hitherto unseen in human history. The alteration of a singular national space into two separate The alteration of a singular national space into two separate nation-states based on religious identities forced the movement of almost twelve million people, in search of a new homeland. Although this exodus was experienced differently based on socioeconomic backgrounds—unfortunately in ways akin to any violent transition—women formed the most susceptible ground to the rigours of the Partition.

Gross and barbarous acts of violence perpetuated against women were derived from a hypermasculinized nationalist ideology: Partition historiography, however, has frequently privileged only the political circumstances and elided the traumatic human micro-histories, which dominated and continue to impinge on postcolonial subjectivities. This article explores a key facet of Partition history, which has often been relegated to the footnotes of both political and social narratives: Through an analysis of non-fictional testimonies and selected Partition fiction, I demonstrate how the transformation of these refugee rehabilitation camps—from transitory non-places into referential spatial locations or places—was facilitated through the quotidian performances of the female Partition Refugee.

• Feminism and Gender Issues in Indian Writing in English Research Papers - www.newyorkethnicfood.com.
• B. K. SCOTT, Gender and Modernism : Critical Concepts 4 vols?
• Spring 2013.
• Mis cinco fuentes de tormento (Spanish Edition)?
• Literature and Gender.
• The Wind and the Eagle.
• Choice and Change: Modern Women, – | Modernism / Modernity Print+.

Dalit literature as a form of resistance literature strongly rejects the hegemony of caste, power and tradition through which the dominant aesthetics and ideology of the Brahminical literature silenced the untouchable 'Other' for Dalit literature as a form of resistance literature strongly rejects the hegemony of caste, power and tradition through which the dominant aesthetics and ideology of the Brahminical literature silenced the untouchable 'Other' for generations.

It is the literature of anger, protest, resistance and rejection against the marginalization of the Outcaste as a subaltern. But through Dalit literature the Dalit subaltern has marked their presence not as a mute, voiceless speaking subject, but as an angry, protesting subaltern speaker whose voice will no longer be controlled or subjugated by any dominant power or authority of the Centre. Jaydeep Sarangi and Angana Dutta plays a subversive role to Spivak's notion of subaltern voice. Plath's poems begin in the personal but, through the use of myth and often the metaphysical symbolism of the natural world, they become universal statements about the quest for a place in the universe.

Anne Sexton's collections, To Bedlam and Part Way Back , All My Pretty Ones , Live or Die , Love Poems , Transformations , The Book of Folly , and The Death Notebooks , reveal not only Sexton's psychological travails but her physical trauma—menstruation, abortion, incest, drug abuse—that remained largely silenced in women's poetics before the woman's movement.

Sexton's direct language, repetition of words and phrases, and alternation of short, concise lines with long, languid stanzas help create a unique poetry that is at once light on the page but heavy in the mind of the reader. Although confessional poetry revolutionized women's poetics, other poets like Elizabeth Bishop, working from a more traditional vein, examined women's lives in profound ways. Bishop's tropes of exile and travel, her precise language and brilliant images, reflect a woman finding her self through a close examination of the world around her.

Wendy Martin and Sharon Becker

Adrienne Rich's poems reflect these changing concerns while also mirroring the transformations in Rich's personal life from wife and mother to lesbian and political activist. Rich's early poetry is relatively traditional with standard line breaks and rhythmical stanzas. However, by the s her poetry incorporates stylistic innovations such as punctuation suggested only by spaces within the stanzas, along with traditionally taboo poetic subjects such as pornography explored in rigidly constructed couplets in order to reflect the changing place of women in the world.

Though Rich commonly addressed woman as subject, poems of hers such as Diving into the Wreck are more political and the poetic process becomes a way for Rich to redress the wrongs of the contemporary world. The civil rights movement, women's liberation movements, and protests against the Vietnam War, and the accompanying social reverberations throughout the final decades of the twentieth century, helped to redefine the trajectory of American literature. In breaking through the wall of domination built by the hegemony of male literary precursors, women writers of the late twentieth century had a unique challenge.

Texts such as Tillie Olsen's One out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century and poems like Denise Levertov's Hypocrite Women openly sought to redefine the scope of women's literature and the way in which this literature spoke directly to women and excluded masculine influence. The proliferation of literary styles in African-American writing from the s through the end of the twentieth century can be attributed to the interest of African Americans in reframing black history as well as in recovering long-ignored black literary traditions.

African-American writers reactivated the painful ghost of slavery in order to understand the contemporary configuration of black American life. Additionally, writers like Alice Walker and Paule Marshall published stories about black life in a language uniquely crafted to convey the sounds of black English, which also dovetailed with the recovery of African-American oral storytelling traditions.

This language allowed African-American writers to shape a picture of life that existed outside the boundaries of white language and experience. Sonia Sanchez's first volume of poetry, Homecoming , set the tone for poetry by African Americans in the s and s. Sanchez's conversational style and black slang, set to a jazzy rhythm, was at once exuberant and political.

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Nikki Giovanni's assured and controversial stance of black militancy as the answer to white repression made her an instant subject of magazine articles and news reports. Audre Lorde's first book of poetry, The First Cities , published in , turns the rage African Americans felt about racism into a medium of positive self-definition. Lucille Clifton's poetry also takes on the project of racism in America, but Clifton does so by reanimating her own past as well as the history of Africans and African Americans.

Clifton uses spare language and short, concise lines to convey small moments of dignity in the lives of urban blacks. Bambara dedicates herself to the exploration of the African-American past and present through the use of black idiom and slang, both of which are used as a form of resistance to the hegemony of Western language and an affirmation of African-American culture.

Womanist Prose , the growth of art and literature by African-American women is explored. Walker asserts that though black women were not always allowed access to education, they nonetheless learned to express themselves artistically through crafts such as cooking, sewing, and oral storytelling. Though she faced criticism for her portrayal of black men as violent and sexually deviant, the novel was most often praised for its unflinching look at black life.

Walker's work is indicative of the changes present in literature by African-American women in the s. Though still political, writing by African-American women became more grounded in the richness of the individual experience and spoke of African-American lives not only in their extraordinariness, but also in their ordinariness.

Toni Morrison, author, teacher, and critic, saw her first novel, The Bluest Eye , published in In the decades since its publication, Morrison has become a household name, and she enjoys the unique status of being both critically respected and widely read.

Though her novels Sula , Song of Solomon , and Tar Baby were all best-sellers, her greatest achievement in fiction is considered to be Beloved , for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in The story of Sethe, a former slave who kills one of her children to prevent them from being taken into slavery, is told through a complicated narrative structure. The story weaves back and forth in time, creating a complex narrative quilt that raises Sethe's particular struggles both within and without slavery to a more general story about the ravages of slavery on African Americans as a community and the need to move forward with life.

While the past needs to be honored, it cannot be permitted to entrap future generations. By claiming her life for herself, Sethe symbolically embodies a level of freedom and self-possession available to black women courageous enough to embrace it. Native American intellectuals and writers created and enjoyed a cultural renaissance throughout the s, publishing books that offered a revisionist view of Native American history and creating novels, short stories, and plays that spoke dually of the Native American past and the dissatisfaction Indians felt in the twentieth-century world. By the s, writers like Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich further challenged American readers by focusing on the struggle of Native American women to reside in a space between both old and new worlds.

In her work, which includes the novels Love Medicine , The Beet Queen , and Tracks , Erdrich crafts unflinching visions of Native peoples who occupy increasingly complicated worlds. Using traditional Native American stories, a nonlinear narrative, and characters that border on being magical, Erdrich etches an indelible portrait of Native Americans living in a modern America while simultaneously trying to maintain ties to tradition. Joy Harjo's poetry provides a unique perspective on Native American life as she recovers the lost voices of her ancestors through her use of lyrical language and the rhythms of Native American speech and song.

Leslie Marmon Silko's quiet style reflects an oral storytelling tradition that relies on repetition and simple language, as exemplified in her frequently anthologized story, Lullaby , which encompasses the complexities of Native American life. Her characters, like Erdrich's, are caught between the ghosts of the past and the bleak landscape of the future. These Chicano activists sought to revitalize their community's connection to their historic past, while writers, musicians, and artists reclaimed Aztec roots, the use of Spanish, and traditional Mexican handiwork.

Writing as a Woman in the Twentieth Century

The New Mestiza , reflects not only this absorption of the Mexican past but also the incorporation of the feminist tradition. This interplay of texts is a physical manifestation of the cultural, social, and linguistic borderland contemporary Chicanas occupy. Cisneros's straightforward style, use of Spanglish, and commitment to telling stories about ordinary people offer an essential portrait of Latina life and culture in the larger context of American culture. Asian-American voices have also become an integral part of the landscape of American literature.

Memoirs of a Girlhood amongst Ghosts is at once an autobiography, a retelling of Chinese myths, and a fictionalized account of Kingston's family history. Kingston deftly criticizes the patriarchal traditions of Chinese culture while also indicting America's racism as having a devastating effect on Chinese-American women. Bharati Mukherjee prefers to categorize herself as an American writer, not a South Asian writer of Indian descent. Indeed, her novels— The Tiger's Daughter , Wife , Jasmine , and Holder of the World —are narratives not only of assimilation by Indian characters to American culture, but also the general quest by human beings for acceptance, love, and a constantly shifting definition of self.

If Edith Wharton's House of Mirth crystallized the plight of women at the turn of the twentieth century, then Toni Morrison's Beloved is a testament not only to the strength of African-American women, but is symbolic of the journey made by American women through the twentieth century. From a life begun in complete submission, Sethe not only endures, but claims her energy and life on her own terms, an accomplishment that Wharton's Lily Bart strove for but never reached. Each of the many texts written by women in the years between House of Mirth and Beloved is a tiny island upon which Edna could rest, gain strength, and move forward.

Standing so close to the end of the twentieth century makes it impossible to define the trends, themes, and writers who will endure the test of time. However, one can say with assurance that women in the late twentieth century occupy literary spaces not open to women at the beginning of the century. Contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama written by women no longer fit neatly into categories such as realism, regionalism, or modernism.

Instead, women's writing now encompasses a much larger range of experiences and is a more vivid and accurate reflection of American women's place in the twentieth century. Ammons's work encompasses the often ignored and maligned writing by women from the early s through the late s. A good reference guide for beginning scholars of American women writers. Each chapter provides a general essay on the time period, an annotated list of books and articles, biographical and critical information about the sixty-six featured authors, and a list of selected and featured writings by the authors discussed.

Cahill, Susan Neunzig, ed.

Gender and Sexuality in Modernism by Taylor Bayly on Prezi

Focuses on African-American women authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century through political, literary, and social lenses. Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, — Cutter argues that the goal of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers was to free language and storytelling from its masculine origins. Women Poets in America, — Provides biographical information on twenty-seven American women poets active in the early twentieth century, including Marianne Moore, Amy Lowell, and Louise Bogan.

A landmark study of women writers in which Gilbert and Gubar provide a thorough outline of the literary, historical, and social forces that shaped the writing of women in the twentieth century. Modern American Women Poets. African-American Women Novelists and History. An examination of African-American feminine identity in novels by twentieth-century black women writers.

Modernism and Feminism Representations of Women in Modernist Art and Literature

Also includes discussion of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other late-twentieth-century writers. Suffragists and the Right of Assembly. Communicates the approaches of early-twentieth-century suffragettes through newspaper accounts, autobiographies, and creative writing by women deeply involved in the movement.

Twentieth-Century American Women's Fiction: Reynolds views writing by women as inextricably linked to historical and social issues as well as the literary concerns pervasive throughout the twentieth century. Stansell is primarily interested in how the modernist movement played itself out among New York City writers, poets, political activists, and artists. A good overview of the movement as a whole that makes an argument for feminism as the central focus of both male and female modernists. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Walker attempts to recover and canonize women poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century left behind because of the restrictive construction of femininity during the modernist period.

Wheeler examines writing by women in English through four periods: Also includes a section on feminist theory and a bibliography of research resources. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Oxford Research Encyclopedias Literature. Writing as a Woman in the Twentieth Century. American Literature Online Publication Date: Memoir of a Revolution. Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories. Levenson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism pp. The Cambridge University Press.

Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, — University of Minnesota Press. The story of women and art: Hunting the hidden artists.