The Feminine Lexicon in the Novel “Almas and Women”: A Study of Colors, Emotion, and Emphasis Markers

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages,Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jal-lq.2026.401192.1529

Abstract

The study of the feminine lexicon in contemporary narrative texts is a fertile field that reveals the impact of women writers’ lived and emotional experiences on the shaping of language and style. The lexical repertoire—with its components of color, emotion, and mechanisms of emphasis—is not a set of neutral elements; rather, it reflects a specific cultural and epistemic vision that intersects with social customs, aesthetic symbols, and mental representations. From this perspective, this article examines Almas wa-Nisāʾ (Almas and Women) by Lina Hawyan al-Hasan, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015, to describe these lexical fields and analyze their rhetorical and semantic functions in a way that highlights the features of feminine style in the text. The study adopts a descriptive–analytical method based on a close reading of the novel and the extraction of manifestations of the feminine lexicon through figurative imagery and sensory constructions. The analysis shows that the novelist employs colors as signs indicating identity and the psychological dimension of the characters, intensifies the emotional lexicon in scenes of love, loss, and longing, and assigns to devices of emphasis the role of foregrounding emotion and consolidating meaning. This interplay among the three fields contributes to constructing an integrated stylistic network that imparts distinctiveness to the text, which is characterized by a particularist perspective, precision of description, and dense figurative imagery. The novel thus offers a clear model of women’s writing that harnesses lexical and rhetorical resources to affirm the woman’s voice and identity and to bring the reading experience closer to sensory lived experience. Accordingly, the novel does not merely re-represent the world of women; it endows its language with an aesthetic and semantic depth that places it at the heart of the contemporary Arabic novelistic scene.

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