The Perils of Reading Fiction
The Female Quixote and the Thai New Woman
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13014628 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thosaeng Chaochuti (0009-0001-0274-6338, Chulalongkorn University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 75-84 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TRaNS Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2051-364X • E-ISSN: 2051-3658 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/trn.2021.5 |
| OpenAlex | W4205418170 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
British literary history routinely associated women with reading fiction, especially the novel. This association seemingly threatened male hegemony and cultural authority. It led, therefore, to the portrayal of the woman reader as a female quixote who was prone to misreading and being misled by what she read. This representation became popular during the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the New Woman's emergence at the fin-de-siècle. Similar developments took place in Siam/Thailand where the birth of fiction, the advent of the woman reader, and the New Woman's rise roughly coincided in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By examining San Thewarak's novel Bandai haeng khwam rak [Stairways to Love] (1932), this paper demonstrates the trope of the female quixote's invocation to describe the emerging Thai (New) Woman reader and the threat that she embodied that had to be managed and controlled
Art · Hegemony · History of literature · Invocation · Literature · New Woman · Political science · Reading (process · Representation (politics · Sociology · Trope (literature · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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