Maria Helena Svensson
Umeå University, Sweden
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Published in: NORLIT 2009
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 42:20, p. 239-257
Published: 2010-04-27
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3740 (print), 1650-3686 (online)
The interdisciplinary project “Cyber Echoes” analyses fan fiction; texts written by fans who use characters; places and themes from a source text; place them in a context they construct; and publish the texts on the Internet. One part of this project is linguistically oriented; and sets out to examine the language of a source text (a novel; a tv-series; a movie etc.) and the texts written by fans. This is where this paper is initiated. Is is also inspired by a Danish article by Scheuer (1995; english title: ‘His wife and her breasts’); who has made a quantitative study of the possessive pronouns in the dictionary “Den danske ordbog” (‘The Danish Dictionary’). What is interesting is of course not the pronouns themselfs; but rather what follows. “His” followed by a certain noun tells us something about male ownership; while what follows after “her” shows some relation between certain objects/ phenomena and women. While such a study can be interesting in itself; this paper aims to compare a source text – in this case Bridget Joness diary by Helen Fielding – with some fantexts that take place in the Bridget Jones universe. The object of the study is the nouns that follow the possessive pronouns; and the focus is to detect similarities and differences in the texts with a gender aspect in mind.
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