scholarly journals A Critique of Twentieth Century Feminist Criticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
Dr Vijay Nagnath Mhamane
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
Female Phase ◽  
Images Of Women

Feminist criticism arose in response to developments in the field of the feminist movement. Many thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft raised their voice against the injustice done to women in every sphere of life. As this gained momentum throughout the world, feminist also awakened to the depiction and representation of women in literature which is one of the influential medium of socialization and culture. They argued that woman and womanhood are not biological facts but are given social constructs. One is not born a woman, but becomes one through culture and socialization. At first, feminist criticism was reactionary in the nature in the sense that they exposed stereotypical images of women in the literature. These images of women were promulgated by the male writers. These images of women were what men think of women. Gradually, feminist criticism moved from this phase to more constructive work. They unearthed many women writers that were either suppressed or neglected by the male literary tradition. In this way, they created a separate literary tradition of women writers. Feminist critics divided this tradition in such phases as feminine phase, feminist phase and female phase. They also studied the problems faced by female creative writers.  They used theories from post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis to study the nature of female creativity. They also realized that there is an innate difference between male and female modes of writing. Feminist critics also exposed the sexiest nature of man-made language. They also exposed phallic centrism of much of the western literary theory and criticism. They also started to study the language used by the women writers. Simon De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter and Juliet Mitchell are some of the feminist critics discussed in this paper.

FEMINISM 111 Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings, eds Adriaan T. Pe-perzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN, 1996. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York, 1987. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA, 1995. Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. New York, 1994. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, 1990. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge, 1986. Parker , David. Ethics, Theory, and the Novel. Cambridge, 1994. Parr, Susan Resneck. The Moral of the Story: Literature, Values, and American Education. New York, 1982. Phelan, James (ed). Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Colum-bus, 1988. Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago, 1999. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transac-tional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL, 1978. Siebers, Tobin. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca, NY, 1988. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, 1985. Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Oxford, 1996. Feminism Though not a unified, single critical 'voice', feminist literary criticisms are in broad agreement on their shared role as political and politicised criticisms directed at matters of gender, sexuality and identity. Developing critical languages from the political discourses of the women's movement of the 1950s and 1960s, feminist criticism addresses the representation of women in literature and culture, in the work of both female and male authors. Critical feminisms have also concerned themselves with the role of the reader from a gendered perspective and with the study of women's writing. Feminist criticism has also addressed the relation of gender to matters of class and race, and has,

2016 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Ethics Of Reading

scholarly journals The Case of Lady Anne Clifford; or, Did Women Have a Mixed Monarchy?

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1682-1689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Modern Period

I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.

scholarly journals An Anatomy of the Collective Unconscious of Leading Women Writers

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Jency Christafer
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
General Objection

This article intends to explore the concept of feminism as presented in the works of Virginia Woolf, Mary Ann Evans, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Kamala Das and Maya Angelou.A selective study of their works is conducted to exhibit the ways in which they presented the woman characters in order to deal with socially relevant issues. Woman victimisation, racism, discrimination etc become the major focus of these writers. This article investigates the collective unconscious realm of these writers and how it influenced them in their writing. The writers’ individual conception of feminism is also studied and critiqued. The traditional conception of beauty, perfection in the works of writers like Petrarch had resulted in the general objection from the women writers and it led to the representation of women characters in their novel quite differently. The article brings to light the minute flaws in the approach of the women writers and concludes by highlighting their contribution to feminism.

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
African Women ◽  
East African ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The People ◽  
African Women Writers ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Isak Dinesen

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.

Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Aparecida de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Victoria Ocampo

This paper aims at investigating how Woolf influenced Ocampo’s literary production; it might be through Ocampo’s Testemonies or in her journal Sur. It also our aim to analyse how Ocampo divulged Virginia Woolf’s writings in all Spanish-speaking countries through translations, lectures, publications and especially through her passion in talking about Woolf. Through Ocampo’s gaze, Woolf’s image and writing was understood in a different way, which goes beyond the European’s boundaries. This relationship has contributed tremendously for both of them, as women writers and intellectuals of their time. Ocampo’s progress as a writer had a dramatic impact after meeting Woolf. Above all, Ocampo contributed immensely for spreading Woolf’s writings.

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