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Emancipatie en de roman. Vrouwelijke personages in Nederlandstalige romans tussen 1960 en 2010
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Nederlandse Letterkunde, Volume 29, Issue 2, Dec 2024, p. 180 - 210
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- 01 Dec 2024
Abstract
The democratic, progressive and emancipatory potential of the novel has been emphasized many times by literary theorists. But although it has become a commonplace to frame the medium of the novel in this way, there is hardly any empirical evidence that novels historically reflect or shape social progress. Comparing two large corpora of Dutch novels from the 1960s and the 2010s, this article hypothesizes that gender representation in modern novels transforms in light of the changing societal position of women. This hypothesis is rejected on four grounds. 1) Female characters do not become more visible in this period of approximately fifty years, neither in terms of how often they occur, nor in terms of the amount of words used for their characterization. 2) In terms of their social networks, female characters do not increasingly take up more central roles. 3) In terms of most distinctive words used for the characterization of men and women, the literary discourse on female gender remains highly stereotypical (more than for male gender). 4) There is no shift in the ‘distance’ between male and female gender, suggesting that these categories are not becoming more fluid and less restricted in this period. Based on these four arguments, the article concludes that gender representation is remarkably stable between the 1960s and the 2010s. More generally, these findings are used to reconsider the novel’s alleged democratic, progressive and emancipatory potential.