Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Literary Devices
The broader discussion women's cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history, but the specific study of women's writing as a distinct category of scholarly interest is relatively recent. There are examples in the 18th century of catalogs of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752); John Duncombe's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers; and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.^[2] Similarly, women have been treated as a distinct category by various misogynist writings, perhaps best exemplified by Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle.
Earlier discussion of women's broader cultural contributions can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405).
Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women writers being published. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume Female Biography. And, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; and by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers.^[3] There were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.^[4][5]
Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing recently: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals (such as Fireweed and Room of One's Own) which are dedicated for publishing the creative work of women writers, and there are a number of dedicated presses as well, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses.
The question of whether there a "women's tradition" remains vexing; some scholars and editors refer to a "women's canon" and women's "literary lineage," and seek to "identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns" in women's writing,^[6] but the range of women's writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of "women's writing" in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls "women's writing" an "unstable category."^[7] Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one "women's tradition". Some scholars, such as Roger Lonsdale, mentions that something of a commonality exists and that "it is not unreasonable to consider" women writers" in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behaviour they faced.".^[8] Using the term "women's writing" implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender.
Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-Modern literatures all include literary devices. The imagery may vary in intensity. The Victorian sweetness may by quite different from the graphic representation of Post-modernism. Bronte’s use of storm and wind represented the hostile environment of Wuthering Heights; Carson’s wind rips away the skin from the bone leaving it exposed. The use of wind is quite different. Although each uses wind to represent turbulence and difficulty Carson’s representation is far more graphic than Bronte’s stormy scene. Munro’s work is less graphic depicting country charm. Her description of the girl walking with her mother to the grocery store portrays the mother’s unhappiness with her social standing “she wears a good dress…a summer hat of white straw, pushed down on the side of her head…she walks serenely like a lady…past the housewives in loose beltless dresses torn under the arms” (Munro, 2006, p. 2780).