The social status of the female characters in popular Persian novels (1988–2017): Extended abstract

This extended abstract summarises an MA thesis on the representation of women in the highest-circulation Iranian novels of the three decades following the Iran–Iraq war (1988–2017). Rather than selecting its corpus by critical judgement, the study used the print-run statistics of Khaneye Ketab (the Iranian Book House) to identify the four most widely printed original Iranian adult novels of each decade, and catalogued all 199 female characters in the resulting twelve novels, coding each on twelve features grouped into three analytic axes: education, employment and art. The quantitative results were read against plot, characterisation and narrative outcome through the sociology of literature (Escarpit, Leenhardt, Duverger) and a feminist critique of representation. The three decades form an arc from pervasive stereotyping, through a controlled and conditional redefinition of women's roles, to systematic marginalisation under exclusively male authorship. The study argues that the sex of the author is not a sufficient condition for feminist representation: the women authors of the first two decades reproduced the patriarchal order as reliably as the men of the third. The decisive variable is whether the text allows the woman to be the agent, and not merely the subject, of its narrative. Extended abstract of an MA thesis submitted to the Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran, in September 2022. The full thesis (163 pages) is in Persian.