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

The Will to Disempower? Nabokov and his Readers

Rodgers argues that aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy—specifically “master-slave morality” and the “will to power”—can articulate the interplay between author and reader in Nabokov’s work. Informed by Bernard Reginster’s interpretation of the will to power as the “activity of overcoming resistance,” the chapter claims that the disempowering distinction between elevated author and subjugated reader in Nabokov’s fiction engenders a readerly resistance. Rodgers illustrates this distinction by drawing on Nabokov’s published university lectures, on the epigraph and foreword to his novel Invitation to a Beheading, and on his short story “The Vane Sisters.” “The Will to Disempower? Nabokov and His Readers” focuses on the risks of readerly resistance as well as its empowering implications for “Nietzschean readers,” those who are conscious of Nabokov’s textual practice

Researching literary reading as social practice

This article first discusses 'the reader' as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literatur