| Summary: | In this essay, I analyze and compare the representation of social actors in six different author presentations from the teaching aid Svenska Impulser 2, (2012). More specifically, I investigate similarities and differences in the representation of men and women and, thus, what meanings are ascribed to these gender categories. Consequently, these presentations belong to three different literary epochs or -isms: the enlightenment (Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Anna Maria Lenngren); romanticism (Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley), and modernism (James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). The analysis is further grounded on Judith Butler’s theory on performative gender and systemic functional grammar as developed and defined by Michael Halliday. The method of analysis is critical discourse analysis (CDA) where I quantify and analyze different types of representational strategies and process and participant functions (transitivity). In addition, these two sections of quantifications are each followed by a qualitative analysis with a certain focus on different epiteths, attributes, general descriptions, and agency. My findings show that the presentations of women are more populated and, that they are portrayed as dependent on men, whereas men are portrayed as independent explorers, innovators, influencers, rebels or radical political debaters and thinkers. While some of these qualities are implied, however more or less muted, in the presentations of women, they are explicated or, by other means, more evident in the presentations of men. Moreover, my analysis shows that the women’s gender identity is marked and thus emphasized in their presentations to a significantly greater degree than the men’s gender identity is in their presentations.
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