Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing
Author | : Anna Faktorovich |
Publisher | : CreateSpace |
Total Pages | : 298 |
Release | : 2015-04 |
ISBN-10 | : 1511888903 |
ISBN-13 | : 9781511888905 |
Rating | : 4/5 (03 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: "Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing" examines gender bias from the perspective of readers, writers and publishers, with a focus on the top two best-selling genres in modern fiction. It is a linguistic, literary stylistic, and structurally formalist analysis of the male and female "sentences" in the genres that have the greatest gender divide: romances and mysteries. The analysis will search for the historical roots that solidified what many think of today as a "natural" division. Virginia Woolf called it the fabricated "feminine sentence," and other linguists have also identified clear sex-preferential differences in Anglo-American, Swedish and French novels. Do female mystery writers adopt a masculine voice when they write mysteries? Are female-penned mysteries structurally or linguistically different from their male competitors', and vice versa among male romance writers? The first part can be used as a textbook for gender stylistics, as it provides an in-depth review of prior research. The second part is an analysis of the results of a survey on readers' perception of gender in passages from literature. The last part is a linguistic and structural analysis of actual statistical differences between the novels in the two genres, considering the impact of the author's gender. "A must-read for a mystery author like me, but also for every man and woman interested in the way we interact because art mimics reality... Or is it just the opposite...: ): ) " -Bob Van Laerhoven, winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize