Proceedings of the 2nd World Conference on Gender Equality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Change of the Value Paradigm in Women’s Prose
Gayane Yeghiazaryan, Ruzan Museyan
ABSTRACT:
Our study focuses on gender issues from the perspective of “women’s literature”, gives a brief overview of the female writers’ works from ancient times to the beginning of the 21st century, and explores how gender stereotypes have affected the texts created by women and about women. The point of view that literature is not gendered, and that there is simply good or bad literature which cannot be called either “masculine” or “feminine”, is the starting point of our research, but with one caveat: women bring to literature their own, unique female experience, bio-philosophy, their own hierarchy of values. The aim of our research is to confirm the belief that the “issue of woman”, in the context of which women’s literature, as well as the thematic and symbolic structures, character and value systems in women’s writings have undergone abrupt changes in the historical and cultural context, deconstructing seemingly intractable concepts and bringing out contexts that reflect the artistic picture of female writers. On the example of the works of British and American women writers of the late 20th and early 21st century, we can conclude that nowadays women’s prose is not inferior to men’s texts, and can even surpass them, with its symbolism, aesthetics, and significance. Contemporary female writers build their literary activity on a paradigm of individual’s psychological problems, thanks to which their works are identified by emotional and value-specific measurements presented in a new aesthetic and artistic fashion.
keywords: feminine, gender, literature, masculine, stereotype