His eyes narrowed — her eyes downcast: contrastive corpus-stylistic analysis of female and male writing

Abstract

This study presents a comparative and cross-linguistic (English and Czech) examination of female and male characters in contemporary British and Czech fiction texts written by female and male authors. We approach the texts within the corpus stylistics framework using four broadly comparable corpora of British and Czech fiction. Our focus is on the most frequent nouns occurring with the possessive pronouns his and her and jeho and její, respectively. By examining the nouns we look at how female and male characters are linguistically represented: what are the main differences between their representation and to what extent they are similar. We also aim to look at whether the author’s gender plays a role in the process of characterisation. Further, we aim to pinpoint the differences in characterisation by comparing the British and Czech fiction texts.

Keywords

• gender and language
• gender in literature
• corpus stylistics
• comparable corpora