Gender in the American Anthology Apparatus: A Linguistic Analysis

Laura Aull

English Department, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/als.2014.21008                

Abstract

Most American anthology and canon revision has focused on author and text selections but little on the anthology editorial apparatus. The following study responds to this gap by analyzing gender representation across prefaces and overviews of the Norton and Heath American anthologies (1979-2010). Through a combined rhetorical and corpus linguistic analysis, the study reveals disparate gender representation in these materials: women are increasingly mentioned over time, but men continue to emerge as individuals of importance while women are discussed primarily as a group. This examination suggests that the revisionist, feminist scrutiny of Norton and Heath inventory has not been brought to bear on the anthologies’ apparatus—and that discursive patterns therein remain largely invisible despite that they contradict efforts to revise gender bias in anthologies. In so doing, the study offers an exploratory analysis of new methods (combined linguistic and rhetorical analysis) and new sites (apparatus texts) for examining gender in canonical and pedagogical materials.

Keywords

Gender; American Anthologies; American Canon; Linguistic Analysis

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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