Beaten, Broken and Burnt–The Violence Against the Bodies of the Female Protagonist in Three 21st Century Bestsellers Written by Women

Abstract

Three bestsellers published in the last ten years – Twilight (2005), The Hunger Games (2008) and Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) – present an impressive deal of violence against the female body, a fact that demands investigation considering it may shape their readers’ views on this. Therefore, this work aims at analyzing the discourses on violence against the female protagonist’s body through the study of linguistic features in extracts from those three books. The analysis is done under the light of Critical Discourse Analysis, verifying the discourses embedded in this violence and the repercussions these discourses may have in terms of perpetuating gender stereotypes, especially in literature. More specifically, the focus of this study is on the “justifications” for the violence against women and if these justifications come from and/or consolidate hegemonic ways of thinking regarding this subject.