Unhappy Texts
A Gendered and Computational Rereading of the Modern Breakthrough
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10736718 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirstine Nielsen Degn (0009-0003-0966-1358, Center for Applied Linguistics, corresponding author), Jens Bjerring-Hansen (0000-0001-5786-8300, Center for Applied Linguistics), Ali Al-Laith (0000-0001-6650-3469, Center for Applied Linguistics), Daniel Hershcovich (0000-0002-3966-8708, Center for Applied Linguistics) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-24 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Scandinavian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0036-5637 • E-ISSN: 2163-8195 |
| Publisher | University of Wisconsin Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.3368/sca.97.1.1 |
| OpenAlex | W4406359487 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
Our article discusses the hypothesis that the texts of women writers of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia were particularly unhappy. We examine this common claim, along with some of the quantitative and qualitative issues it raises. Does this correlation of gender and affect hold true for the entire spectrum of women’s literary production from the era? What about male authorship and its affectivity? And what does ‘unhappy’ even mean? We confront this hypothesis and the associated questions through two interventions. The first is a quantification made possible by new digital archives and methodologies, which allow for a radical upscaling of the investigation’s empirical foundation. The second is to approach the nineteenth-century texts with a framework from the fields of gender studies and affect theory. Our findings are the following: (1) The thesis of the unhappy text appears partially true, but importantly, women are even more overrepresented among the positive texts. (2) The affect category of neutrality is more significant. Neutrality turns out to be a male, canonical enterprise, while low neutrality is primarily associated with forgotten or neglected women authors. The most crucial gender bias in the affective economy of the texts is the lack of neutrality in literature by women. (3) This and other biases point to clear intersectional dynamics between the author’s gender, the affective qualities and quantities of the texts, and their social status
Art · Linguistics · Literature · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |