A Sociopragmatic Analysis of Women and Gender Roles in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy

This study is concerned with investigating the treatment of women and gender roles in Glasworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy from a sociopragmatic perspective. The texts studied for this paper have not been evaluated to socio-pragmatic analysis that reflects the little application of this approach to literary works. As thus, the goal of this paper is to advance sociopragmatic analysis to these novels—there is salience from the style, narrative techniques, and language utilized by both writers in their books, which indeed points to pragmatic undercurrents that must be explored. The results indicate that social and political aspects are key elements for understanding women and gender issues in the selected texts. The integration of these contextual elements revealed how the two authors manipulated literary discourse to reflect on the power relations and struggles between men and women of their age. It can be claimed that sociopragmatic approaches provide opportunities for understanding the hidden layers within the selected texts in terms of social practices and interactions among characters. It is finally suggested that sociopragmatic approaches should be integrated into literary studies for a better and deeper understanding of literary discourse in general and crosscultural issues in particular.