Female Readers as Literary Critics: Reading Experiences of Kano Market Romance Fiction

This paper aims to explore the female readers reading experiences, views and feelings of Hausa romance novels found in most of the northern part of Nigeria. This article also examines some criticism and accusations against the readership and content of the Hausa romance genre. The study applied the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt’s (1978) as guide by selecting 7 female readers within the age ranges between 22-26 years from 2 book clubs to participate in the study. The findings revealed that all the readers individually were able to reveal their varied responses, beliefs, and experiences on the value of the romance novels which challenged the assertion made by the literary critics and traditional society that the books have no relevance in their life activities which supported their arguments and personal interpretive reading stance towards the Hausa romance genre. The finding yielded four themes were emerging: (a) promoting literacy development; (b) resistance to the traditional marriage system in society; (d) enlightening females on social inequality. These findings provided empirical support for the application of the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt (1978) outside classroom contexts to understand the role of African romance novels towards female social transformation.

Looking through the lens of Bourdieu: A corpus-based Study of English Romance Fiction Translation

Habitus is one of the key concepts of the Bourdieusian sociology which Translation Studies has benefited. Based on the Bourdieusian sociological model, this study investigated the translatorial habitus of the Iranian translators of English romance novels as far as the translation strategies of culture-specific items (CSIs) are concerned before and after the Cultural Revolution of 1980 in Iran. The research data include 4282 sentences containing CSIs extracted from Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, and The Great Gatsby, and their two Persian translations. The extracted data were analyzed, adopting a consolidated typology of translation procedures for CSIs. The strategies employed for translating CSIs are presented with frequencies and percentages using descriptive statistics. Moreover, the results were corroborated with a qualitative analysis of some archived interviews printed in Motarjem [the translator] journal. The investigation revealed three essential findings: a marked source-oriented tendency among Iranian translators of the English romance novels when translating CSIs in the Pre-Cultural Revolution era, maintaining the same tendency in the Post-Cultural Revolution era, and finally a growing tendency in moving from Pre- to Post-Cultural Revolution era. The results of the Chi-square test highlighted a significant difference between various strategies used in two eras.

Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels

The biblical texts about Bathsheba have notorious gaps, even by the laconic standards of Hebrew narrative. Post-biblical receptions of the story flesh out the terse chapters of 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, ascribing feelings and motives to Bathsheba and David that are not contained in the Hebrew text. This essay examines the intersection of reception history and feminist biblical scholarship by considering eleven novels about Bathsheba from the twentieth and twenty-first century. These novels expand Bathsheba’s character beyond the text, but in fairly gender stereotypical ways, such that feminist readers of the novels may be left wanting more.