Gender and Genre: From the Female Bildungsroman to the Postfeminist Coming-of-Age Novel

The paper draws attention to the fact that the introduction of gender perspectives into the studies of the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, has opened up the possibility of delineating specific female versions of the genre, ranging from the classic female Bildungsroman, through the feminist Bildungsroman to the postfeminist coming-of-age novel. The following discussion of heroines in British novels of development focuses on the changing socio-cultural factors that have influenced the representations of women’s emancipatory struggles in works by female authors over recent centuries. The selected examples reveal that the transformations of the classic female Bildungsroman which emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought about a series of significant innovations that include not only new types of heroines whose self-realization can be achieved in ways unthinkable for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors but also more significant thematic and formal variations on the genre.

Pillière, Linda. Intralingual Translation of British Novels. A Multimodal Stylistic Perspective. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 270 pages.

Book review

The Mysterious Talent

The article studies giftedness and talent representation in contemporary British literature by means of analysing three novels: “When We Were Orphans” by Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield and “Milton in America” by Peter Ackroyd. The topic of giftedness appears in these works as part of the genre and form game, which is an important immanent property of postmodern literature. The plots and themes are reconsidered and played with like a set of toy building blocks used to construct a new building that makes sense only in the context of the already existing constructions. The paper shows that the concept of giftedness appears in contemporary British novels mainly as part of a game of parody, which reflects the idea of the world as imagery and confusion.

Literary dialect as social deixis

The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems plausible that a cognitive poetic approach to the reading of dialect in literature would also be productive. In the current deictic theory, the dimension of social deixis captures a broad range of stylistic features including register and dialectal representations. Cognitive deictic theory draws on an explicitly spatial metaphor in which characters are positioned in conceptual space. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the effect of readerly positioning and dispositioning. This article revisits social deixis and its points of transition and textural variation from a theoretical perspective. It develops a new angle on the representation and significance of accented and dialectal forms in literary fiction, with some illustrative examples drawn from 19th and 20th century British novels.