Theoretical Preliminaries. The X-Ray of the Female Character in 19th Century Prose

Abstract

The present paper is meant to be part of a larger study of women’s images in several of the 19th-century pieces of prose. By means of our endeavor, we have observed that the literary representation of women changes its semantic content depending on the evolution of cultural mentality, within the shift from a Romantic perspective of the world (and implicitly of women) to a Realist one. We selected our authors and texts so as to have the possibility to make a comparison between various women’s character expression in the 19th-century literature, as well as according to an evolutionary line we used to structure our study.