Blackwell Reference Online

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feminist criticism In ‘A criticism of our own: autonomy and assimilation in Afro-American and feminist literary theory’, Elaine Showalter discerns five ideologies that have been influential in feminist literary criticism and theory ( Showalter, 1986 ). The first, ‘androgynist poetics’, denies that there is any specifically male or female way of writing or approaching texts, maintaining that the human imagination is essentially genderless. With the rise of the women's movement, feminists initiated a critique of male culture and advanced a ‘female aesthetic’ celebrating women's culture. Believing that our sexual identities cannot be separated from our expressions and creations, advocates of the female aesthetic maintain that women's writing expresses a distinct female consciousness, is more discursive and conjunctive than classifying and linear. By the mid-1970s the emphasis had shifted to ‘gynocriticism’, or the study of literature by women. Arguing that the female aesthetic is problematic in its presupposition of an eternal, universal feminine ‘essence’ shared by all women, gynocritics preferred to focus on locating and examining texts by women, and undertook a historical analysis of the problems of talented women attempting to create in a male tradition. In the early 1980s, proponents of ‘gynesis’ charged that gynocritics were confining themselves to a women's literature ghetto, ... log in or subscribe to read full text