A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (2024)

A HISTORY OF FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Feminism has transformed the academic study of literature, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting new agendas for literary analysis. In this authoritative history of feminist literary criticism, leading scholars chart the development of the practice from the Middle Ages to the present. The first section of the book explores protofeminist thought from the Middle Ages onwards, and analyses the work of pioneers such as Wollstonecraft and Woolf. The second section examines the rise of second-wave feminism and maps its interventions across the twentieth century. A final section examines the impact of postmodernism on feminist thought and practice. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of feminist writing and literary criticism.

GILL PLAIN is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

SUSAN SELLERS is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

EDITED BY

GILL PLAIN

AND

SUSAN SELLERS

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First published 2007

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Our thanks are due to the School of English at the University of St Andrews for the research funding, leave and support that have helped us to complete this project. Hope Jennings provided invaluable help with the compilation of the book – we could not have done this without her – and a number of people in St Andrews were generous in the provision of practical support. In particular we should like to thank the secretaries in the School of English: Jill Gamble, Jane Sommerville, Sandra McDevitt and Frances Mullan.

Susan Sellers would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the funding of a period of leave during which this project was first conceived, and we should both like to thank Ray Ryan and Maartje Scheltens at Cambridge University Press. Ray commissioned the book and supported it throughout its development, while Maartje carefully guided the book and us through the production process.

An enormous number of people helped in the preparation of the project, offering vital suggestions as we progressed. Inadequate records were kept of our many debts, but amongst those giving welcome advice were Sara Ahmed, Isobel Armstrong, Kate Chedgzoy, Priyamvada Gopal, Mary Jacobus, Jackie Jones, Judith Halberstam, Berthold Schoene, Elaine Showalter and Frances Spalding. Above all we would like to thank our contributors for their unstinting professionalism and enthusiasm for the project. We feel privileged to have had such an excellent group of critics devoting their time to the book.

Finally, we would like to dedicate this book to Jo Campling and to the many other feminist critics who have helped and inspired us over the years.

Contributors

LINDA ANDERSON is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Her publications include Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1997), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture (with David Alderson, 2000), Autobiography (2001) and Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (with Jo Shapcott, 2002).

HELEN CARR is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the editor of From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Women’s Writing and Genre in the Postmodern World (1989), and author of Inventing the American Primitive (1996) and Jean Rhys (1996). She was a co-founder and co-editor of Women’s Review and is a co-founder and co-editor of Women: A Cultural Review.

CLAIRE COLEBROOK is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of a number of books on Deleuze, literary criticism and literary theory. Her publications include Ethics and Representation (1999), Gilles Deleuze (2002) and Gender (2004).

CAROLYN DINSHAW is Professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she founded the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1989) and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (2003) and founding co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

MARY EAGLETON is Reader in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. Her research interests focus on feminist literary history and theory, and contemporary women’s writing. She has published widely in both areas. Recent publications include A Concise Companion to Feminist Thought (2003) and Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction (2005).

ELIZABETH FALLAIZE is Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her books include The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (1988), French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction (1993), Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (1998) and French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years (with C. Davis, 2000).

STACY GILLIS is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Newcastle. She has published widely on cybertheory, cyberpunk and feminist theory. The co-editor of Third Wave Feminism (2004) and editor of The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded (2005), she is currently working on a monograph about British detective fiction.

JANE GOLDMAN is Reader in English at the University of Glasgow and General Editor, with Susan Sellers, of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf. She is the author of Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004), The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006) and The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (1998).

CAROLINE GONDA is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (1996) and editor of Tea and Leg-Irons: New Feminist Readings from Scotland (1992). She is the co-editor with Chris Mounsey of Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality 1700–1800 (2007). She has also written on British eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, on lesbian theory, children’s literature and contemporary Scottish lesbian writing.

SUSAN GUBAR, Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University, is the co-author with Sandra M. Gilbert of The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and its three-volume sequel No Man’s Land (1988). Besides co-editing the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1996), she has published a number of books including Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000) and Poetry after Auschwitz (2003).

ARLENE R. KEIZER is Associate Professor of English and American Civilization at Brown University. She is the author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (2004), as well as articles and poems in African American Review, American Literature, Kenyon Review and other journals. She is currently at work on a book on African-diaspora intellectuals and psychoanalysis.

HEATHER LOVE is Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Gender Studies in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published articles on topics in modernism and queer theory in GLQ, New Literary History, Feminist Theory, Postmodern Culture and Transition. Her first book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), is published by Harvard University Press.

SUSAN MANLY is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. She is the editor of Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington and Practical Education, and the co-editor of Helen and Leonora, all in the twelve-volume Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth (1999/2003). She is also the editor of a paperback edition of Harrington (2004), and the author of Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s (2007).

GILL PLAIN is Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. Her publications include: Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1996), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001) and John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (2006). She is currently working on a literary history of the 1940s.

MADELON SPRENGNETHER is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She has edited several books of feminist criticism, including The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1985), Revising the Word and the World (1993) and Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (1996). She is also the author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1990).

SUSAN SELLERS is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her publications include Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2001), Hélène Cixous (1996), Language and Sexual Difference (1995) and Feminist Criticism (1991). She is currently working on a scholarly edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf.

JUDITH STILL is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. Her books include Justice and Difference in the Work of Rousseau (1993) and Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century (1997). She is the editor of Men’s Bodies (2003) and also co-editor of Textuality and Sexuality (1993),

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