Female Agency in English fiction from the 19th to the 21st centuries: an embodiment-focused approach.

• Applicant: Inna Livytska, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541082367

The project aims to develop an integrated embodiment-focused approach for the analysis of narrative agency evolution in order to shed new light on the question of how narrating agency reflects the cultural and emotional experiences of its historical period. Drawing on the definition of narratives as “biocultural hybrids” and the cultural implications of biosemiotics (Cobley 2016, Olteanu 2019), I will trace the evolution of the communicative patterns of female agency in narrative discourse from a cultural evolutionary perspective. Mainly, I will combine a traditional view on text analysis with an acknowledgement of the power of embodiment in the 4E paradigm, developing an embodiment-integrated systematic strategy for narrative agency analysis. Tracing the changes in narrative techniques conveying female protagonists’ embodiment, I will with the help of positioning theory (Harré and van Langenhove 1999) compile a catalogue of the emotional situations as operational units for agency emergence analysis in selected novels from the 19th to the 21st centuries. More specifically, I will investigate narrative techniques of female agency embodiment regarding the concept of marriage in 19th-century novels (application phase 1), socially accepted and new unconventional concepts of femininity in modernist novels (application phase 2), the transformation of female agency in experimental narratives of postmodernism (application phase 3). The analytical data representing the predominant narrative patterns in each period will be used to construct an evolutionary model of female agency from a diachronic perspective.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position