A Note on Using Feminist Literary Criticism in the Classroom

Nineteen seventy-eight was good year for feminist literary criticism, bringing us variety of full-length studies covering range of authors and texts with distinctive methodologies. A random sampling of these might begin with Nina Auerbach's exciting Communities of Women:An Idea in Fiction ,[ 1] which studies changing visions of female independence and solidarity, and the complex responses which they evoke, in fiction ranging from Pride and Prejudice to several novels by Muriel Spark, and including works by Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, and George Gissing. The texts that Auerbach deals with are well known in comparison with those which Nina Baym scrutinizes in Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870,[2] which aims to call to our attention a large body of once popular but now neglected American fiction, the many novels by American authors about women[3] written during the nineteenth century. British writers of slightly earlier period provide the focus of Lynne Agress' The Feminine Irony: Women on Women in Early Nineteenth-Century English Literature,[4] which explores the ways in which women writers and intellectuals [have used] their influence to perpetuate society's biases against women.[5] An important new title in the surge of work on Virginia Woolf, and also in the context of revisionist biographies of authors, is Phyllis Rose's Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf,[6] which defines Woolf s feminism as the crux of her emotional as well as her intellectual life; attempts to overcome the usual emphasis upon Woolf's suicide and madness and the image of her as an isolated technician; and studies the considerable extent to which Woolf directed her own life. Yet another clearly-defined approach is adopted by Jean E. Kennard in Victims of Convention,[7] which is based upon two assumptions: first, that there is a clear distinction between fictional formula and historical or social truth,[8] distinction which Kennard believes is obliterated or ignored in much feminist scholarship, and second, that one of the dominant structural formulae in Victorian novels with central female characters the convention of the two suitors is essentially sexist for reasons which have more to do with narrative structure than with social

Art · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Feminism · Irony · Literary criticism · Literature · Prejudice (legal term · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Publishing and Scholarly Communication

• Feminism and Literary Study

  William W Morgan•Critical Inquiry•1976

  Añadir item

• Feminist criticism in the classroom, or, “what do you mean we, white man ?”

  Elaine Reuben•Women s Studies•1973

  Añadir item

• "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism

  A Kolodny•Critical Inquiry•1975

  Añadir item