The New Feminist Criticism

"The New Feminist Criticism" brings together for the first time the most influential and controversial essays on the feminist approach to literature. These groundbreaking essays by well-known critics offer a much-needed overview of feminist critical theory, and illustrate its practice. In "The New Feminist Criticism" the authors take up a variety of topics. They challenge received notions of literary tradition and shows how women's writing has been systematically excluded, misread, and misinterpreted. They address the relationship of women's writing to ethnicity, separatism, and feminism itself. And they ask how it differs from that of men, with regard to recurrent images, symbols, themes, and plots. Complete with a bibliography of feminist literary theory, "The New Feminist Criticism" is an indispensable introduction to one of the most important intellectual movements of recent times. -- From publisher's description.

The artist, the critic and the academic: feminism's problematic relationship with 'Theory'/ Janet Wolff -- Preaching to the converted? Feminist art publishing in the 1980s / Frances Borzello -- The sphinx contemplating Napoleon : black women artists in Britain / Gilane Tawadros -- Reading between the lines: the imprinted spaces of Sutapa Biswas / Moira Roth -- Modernism, art education and sexual difference /Pen Dalton -- Eyewitnesses, not spectators/activists, not academics: feminist pedagogy and women's creativity / Val A. Walsh -- Exhibiting strategies / Debbie Duffin -- The situation of women curators / Elizabeth A. MacGregor -- Afterthoughts on curating 'The subversive stitch' / Pennina Barnett -- The cult of the individual / Fran Cottell -- On women dealers in the art world / Maureen Paley -- Where do we draw the line? An investigation into the censorship of art / Anna Douglas --Women's movements: feminism, censorship and performance art / Sally Dawson -- Why have there been no great women pornagraphers? / Naomi Salaman -- Just jamming: Irigaray, painting and psychoanalysis / Christine Battersby -- Border crossing: womanliness, body, repre-sentation / Hilary Robinson -- (P)age 49: on the subject of history / Mary Kelly -- Models of painting practice: too much body? / Joan Key --Text and textiles: weaving across the borderlines / Janis Jefferies --Kinda art, sorta tapestry ... / Ann Newdigate -- Sewn constructions / Dinah Prentice -- Penelope and the unravelling of history / Ruth Scheuing.

Presents essays by feminists of theory and literature that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today.

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women’s agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim – to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.

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.