Routledge Library Editions : Feminist Theory: Problems for Feminist Criticism (Rle Feminist Theory)

Feminist criticism has come a long way in the last twenty years. Its development has been rapid, its snowball progress picking up elements of structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism; just as rapidly it has been shedding its own early theories and methodologies. Now it is a critical orthodoxy with its own established canonical texts. Now is the time, then, to begin to question that orthodoxy. In Problems for Feminist Criticism five women critics seek to do that, in a spirit of enquiry whose central point of focus is the literature for which feminist critics have offered a re-reading. By reference to a wide range of writers, from Milton to the contemporary poet, with a strong emphasis on the nineteenth-century novel, the contributors ask what we may be losing from literature by adopting the feminist orthodoxy. Each chapter provides a survey of feminist critical approaches to its subject and highlights the inherent problems. The book frees the way forward for critics who have found much that is stimulating and revealing in feminist approaches to literature, but who find its proscriptiveness potentially reductive. It shows how literature may have the flexibility to absorb and benefit from new critical approaches, whilst still retaining its own life, never quite to be contained in criticism’s theories and methodologies. This is a book for all women writers, professional, amateur or aspiring, in which forty women talk about writing and the part it plays in their lives. Self-discovery, work, personal liberation, communication, hope for change - all these motives inspire these short and direct personal statements.The contributors come from very different backgrounds: some, like Sara Maitland, Rosemary Manning, Anna Livia, Suniti Namjoshi, are well known. Others are unpublished. In Other Words will provide practical support and encouragement for any woman who writes The Oppositional Imagination draws together elements from Marxism, analytical philosophy, post-structuralism, and post-colonial criticism to analyse the elusive interplay of culture and power. It focuses its attention on cultural domination, opposition and evasion in the realm of sex and gender. Joan Cocks reflects on questions crucial to both political theorists and feminists: the relationship between political theory and practical life; the possibility of bringing together a philosophical and a literary language to comprehend and evoke .. This collection contains essays by leaders in the field of post-structuralist enquiry as well as by those immersed in the new spirituality and the social consequences of recent biological research. Other essays reflect political struggles being waged with different strategies by radical feminists, and the analyses undertaken by feminists uneasy about their inclusion within educational institutions and the radical new interpretations of sexuality within the cultural domain Routledge Library Editions: Feminist Theory brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print classics from a variety of academic imprints. With titles ranging from The Liberation of Women to Feminists and State Welfare, from Married to the Job to Julia Kristeva, this set provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from the diverse field of gender studies. In essays on a range of writers, from Milton to contemporary poets and focusing on the 19th-century novel, five women critics discuss what literature may be losing by adopting the feminist orthodoxy. The contributors suggest ways to both absorb and benefit from new critical approaches. This volume gives detailed analytic accounts of particular examples of feminist research, showing how feminist epistemology can translate into concrete feminist research practices