Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, which is a woman-centric approach to literary analysis, Her A Literature of their Own discusses the -female literary tradition which she analyses as an evolution through three… Read More ›
The Feminist movement in America received great stimulus from the 1960s’ civil rights movement, and in Britain it has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. Thus Anglo-American… Read More ›
Introduced by Helene Cixous in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, ecriture feminine refers to a uniquely feminine style of writing characterised by disruptions in the text, such as gaps, silences, puns, new images and so on. It is… Read More ›
With the arrival of Poststructuralism on the critical scene, Feminism emerged as more eclectic and expanded its horizons to merge into the realms of other contemporary theories, thus giving rise to a plethora of rampant and dynamically developing areas such… Read More ›
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
A frequently heard feminist rallying cry, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, and a central doctrine of the second-wave feminists, who used its underlying meaning in their writings, speeches, consciousness-rising, and other other activities, the concept “the personal is… Read More ›
Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated… Read More ›
The 18th century British writer Mary Wollstonecraft‘s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional feminity have been significant in the development of feminism. Influenced by European Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)… Read More ›
Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman… Read More ›
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›
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