Language, Power, and Gender: A Stylistic Study of Female Voices in Contemporary English Novels

Abstract

In this paper, the complex correlation between language, power, and gender will be analyzed in line with the stylistic approach to female voices in the selected modern English novels. It examines how the female writers form female identities, labour around power, as well as confront patriarchal discourses using their language and word-style options. The paper has used the feminist stylistics and discourse analysis models to conceptualize how the feminist representation of woman experience and identity is achieved through the deployment of narrative structures, word choice, and speech acts. The corpus selected consists of literary works of such authors as Zadies Smith, Hilary Mantel and Arundhati Roy whose fiction depicts the transforming social and cultural interactions of gendered manifestation. Such aspects of the analysis as perspective, modality, metaphor, and dialogic interaction are investigated with the help of qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct the research. Much attention is paid to the way women utilize a language to evade being in power, identity and seek strength in a male-dominated social order. The textual analysis is critical in the paper to show that the voices of women are oftentimes an ironical intertextual and fragmented narration as a way to subvert and give themselves power. According to the findings, the style of innovation is used by contemporary female novelists not only to redefine the role of gender but also reconsider the nexus of language and agency. Having these textual strategies contextualized as components of bigger sociolinguistic frameworks, the work brings into the limelight the role of literary style as a site of ideological struggle and creative resistance. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of linguistic expression as one of the powerful tools of portraying female consciousness in twenty-first-century English fiction.