LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND RESISTANCE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND BRITISH LITERATURES: A STYLISTIC STUDY OF ALICE WALKER, TONI MORRISON, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of language, gender, and resistance in African American and British literatures through a stylistic analysis of selected works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf. While operating in distinct cultural and historical contexts, these writers foreground women’s voices against patriarchal dominance, employing language as both a tool of resistance and a site of empowerment. By examining narrative techniques, dialogic structures, metaphorical patterns, and lexical choices, the study highlights how each author reshapes linguistic forms to challenge prevailing discourses of gender. Morrison and Walker situate African American women’s experiences within histories of racialized oppression, using oral traditions, vernacular speech, and polyphonic voices to reclaim cultural identity. Woolf, writing from early 20th-century Britain, deploys stream-of-consciousness and experimental syntax to interrogate the silences imposed on women within male-centered literary traditions. Methodologically, the paper combines feminist stylistics with discourse analysis, demonstrating how language operates as an instrument of both subjugation and liberation. The comparative approach foregrounds how literature functions not merely as cultural representation but also as linguistic performance that redefines identity and agency. The study contributes to feminist literary criticism, sociolinguistics, and stylistics by offering an interdisciplinary framework that situates textual strategies within wider socio-political struggles. It underscores the enduring relevance of women’s writing in shaping discourses of equality and human rights across English literatures.