Women write the rights of woman: The sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

Anthropology as Science Fiction, or How Print Capitalism Enchanted Victorian Science

Global Challenges (FSW

Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction

The presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres), and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level.Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschapelijk Onderzoek (NWO

From Blindness to blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject

This chapter critically engages with the idea of heterogeneity that has been important to actor-network theory. By looking at the history of the museum and the kind of art associated with it at different points in time, the chapter shows how what we understand as heterogeneiety has changed over time. The history of the ordering and displaying role of the museum reveals different responses to an idea of heterogeneity and to consequential conceptualisations not only of vision and agency but also to subject-object relations. The idea of heterogeneity is caught up with these changing relations between subject and object and with the spatial configuration through which they are constituted. The museum is an important historical site through which such changing relations and changing understandings of heterogeneity can be analysed