Women better represented in Victorian novels than modern, finds study

Analysis finds proportion of female authors and characters fell after 19th century, with male authors remaining ‘remarkably resistant’ to writing women Women in novels have tended to “feel”, while men “get”; women smile or laugh, while men grin or chuckle. An analysis of more than 100,000 novels spanning more than 200 years shows how gendered even seemingly innocuous words can be – as well as revealing an unexpected decline in the proportion of female novelists from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.Academics from the universities of Illinois and California at Berkeley used an algorithm to examine 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007, drawn mostly from HathiTrust Digital Library. The algorithm identified both author and character genders. The academics expected to see an increase in the prominence of female characters in literature across the two centuries. Instead, “from the 19th century through the early 1960s we see a story of steady decline,” write Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee in their paper The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction, which has just been published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics.No one has been willing to advance the dismal suggestion that the whole story from 1800 to 1960 was a story of declineOn average, men remain remarkably resistant to giving women more than a third of the character-space in their stories Related: Pushing back: why it's time for women to rewrite the story Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2018-02-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #early 1960s #steady decline #english-language fiction #stories related #pushing back

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How Womb House Became the Internet’s Favorite ‘Women-Driven’ Bookstore

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In 'Expats,' Lulu Wang centers not only the lives of women but a changing Hong Kong

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Three trailblazing women in media who've been forgotten – until now

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Katherine Min was ahead of her time. Four years after her death, her second novel proves it

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This L.A. flash-fiction star thinks novels are 'saggy.' Her own debut proves her wrong

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The people’s hero Keanu Reeves has written a novel with China Miéville.

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