Negotiating Gender Through Language In Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ijll/Volume06Issue01-12Keywords:
Feminism, gender and language, feminist Linguistics, discourse analysisAbstract
This study examines the intersection of feminist literary criticism and sociolinguistics in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. While traditional scholarship focuses on thematic elements of patriarchy, this paper investigates the linguistic mechanisms—specifically politeness strategies, modality, and irony—used by Elizabeth Bennet to negotiate gendered expectations. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory and Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, the findings reveal that language serves as a primary site of resistance, allowing the protagonist to assert agency within the restrictive social hierarchies of the 19th century.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman.
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press.
Johnson, C. L. (1988). Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge University Press.
Newton, J. L. (1981). Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Sutherland, K. (2005). Jane Austen and the Myth of Propriety. Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Dusanova Muqaddas Xudayshukur qizi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
