Thematic Analysis of Women’s Writing Novels of the 1990s Based on Braun and Clarke’s Approach Case Studies: As If You Had Said Lily, Forty Years Old, and The Wandering Island

Hayati, Zahra; Mehrafrooz, Nahid

doi:10.30465/ws.2026.52814.4479

Thematic Analysis of Women’s Writing Novels of the 1990s Based on Braun and Clarke’s Approach Case Studies: As If You Had Said Lily, Forty Years Old, and The Wandering Island

Document Type : -

Authors

zahra hayati ¹

Nahid Mehrafrooz ²

¹ Associate Professor Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies

² PhD student at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies

10.30465/ws.2026.52814.4479

Abstract

In 1990s, following the end of the war and the onset of social and cultural reconstruction, women writers entered the literary scene with remarkable prominence and succeeded in transforming their specifically feminine experiences into literary expression. Among the most notable works of this period are three novels: As If You Had Said Lily by Sepideh Shamloo, Forty Years Old by Nahid Tabatabai, and The Wandering Island by Simin Daneshvar. These novels emerged within a shared socio-cultural context and each engages with issues such as female identity, love, bewilderment, tradition, and modernity.This study, using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis method and focusing on key sentences and the explicit statements of characters or narrators, explores the shared and divergent themes across the three novels. The findings reveal that themes such as “identity crisis,” “power and gender,” “love and the meaning of life,” “fatalism and resistance against determinism,” and “the conflict between tradition and modernity” are strongly present in all three works. At the same time, each novel, shaped by the author’s unique language and style, reflects a particular facet of Iranian women’s experience in the 1990s.

Keywords

Thematic Analysis

Women

Novels

Subjects