Knowra Feminist literary criticism Feminist literary criticism Feminist literary criticism examines how literature represents gender and participates in relations of power, including how texts are written, interpreted, and valued.
Gynocriticism : Elaine Showalter’s approach studies women’s literary traditions, authorship, and writing as distinct subjects of criticism. It shifts analysis from women as characters to women as writers and creators of literary traditions.
Mary Wollstonecraft : Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and political thinker whose 1792 work argued for women’s education and equality. Her arguments against women’s intellectual subordination anticipate later critiques of literary representations.
Elaine Showalter : Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic associated with feminist literary history and gynocriticism. Her work distinguishes studying women’s literary traditions from analyzing their representation by men.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism : Psychoanalytic literary criticism interprets texts through theories of unconscious desire, repression, and psychic development. Feminist critics adapt and challenge its accounts of sexuality, subjectivity, and gender.
Literary canon : A literary canon is a body of works treated as especially significant within a literary tradition. Feminist scholarship has challenged canons that excluded women writers and marginalized perspectives.
Close reading : Close reading examines the precise language, form, and structure of a text. Attention to diction and form can expose assumptions about gender that broad summaries miss.
Virginia Woolf : Virginia Woolf was an English modernist writer whose essays examined women’s writing and social conditions. A Room of One’s Own connects literary production to women’s material independence and access to education.
Kate Millett : Kate Millett was an American writer and critic whose 1970 book Sexual Politics analyzed gender and power in literature. She made literary depictions of sexuality and domination central to political criticism.
Marxist literary criticism : Marxist literary criticism studies how literature relates to class, labor, ideology, and economic structures. Its focus on class offers a distinct framework that feminist criticism often connects to gender.
Recovery literature : Recovery literature is writing restored to circulation after neglect, suppression, or exclusion from established literary histories. Archival research and feminist criticism have brought overlooked women writers back into study.
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