Crime and Gender as Popularised Discourse in Maureen Jennings’ A Journeyman to Grief

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of the novel A Journeyman to Grief (2007) by the contemporary Canadian writer Maureen Jennings with the aim to detect the occurrence of popularised samples of specialised knowledge and communication flanked by the evocative language of the Crime Fiction genre profiling literary womanhood. Handled by – or significantly referring to – female characters, the language is observed in order to comprehend the effectiveness and the compatibility of the different codes conveyed by the medium through a narrative perspective, which is linguistically entrusted to a gender-bound proficiency.
Besides, being the plot set in a fictional but plausible historical reconstruction of late XIX century Toronto, the observation includes the examination of discourse events within different communicative situations and the related criteria of perceptibility, familiarity and acceptability of the detechnified terminology transmitted. The linguistic study also considers the social roles embodied by the characters – most of them being male – in contrast with the profiles of the female heroes and villains on the scene and, in accordance with narrative stylistic praxes, with the stereotypes associated with femininity.