A formal and thematic analysis of the journalistic texts of fin-de-siècle women writers in Britain.

This postdoctoral project aims to analyse the non-fictional texts of fin-de-siècle women writers on the level of both content and form. It will focus on those women writers who were both journalists and fiction writers, namely Lucy Lane Clifford, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Hannah Lynch, and Alice Meynell. These authors wrote fiction, articles, polemical essays, and literary reviews for magazines as varied as The Westminster Gazette, Temple Bar and The Saturday Review. Meynell had a weekly column in the Pall Mall Gazette and Dixon was editor of The Englishwoman. I will analyse women's journalistic work from four different perspectives. First, I will investigate how the texts contribute to the wide range of fin-de-siècle debates that emerged from the "Woman Question", drawing specific attention to the rhetorical and discursive strategies that the women writers apply. Second, I will compare the formal aspects of the journalistic texts with those of the fictional writings. Third, I will investigate how the women writers rhetorically construct a persona as journalist and author. And finally, I will analyse in what ways women writers have contributed to the development of New Journalism, focusing on their use of New Journalist genres such as the interview (Lynch) and the sketch (Meynell). On a more general level, these analyses seek to offer new insights in feminist history and literary history, and to introduce a new point of view from which to examine the relationship between journalism and literature.

Keywords:Journalism, Rhetoric, Fin de siècle, Women writers, Gender studies, Short story

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies