20 Unknown Facts About Feminist Literary Criticism You Wish Knew Before!

In feminist literary criticism, stereotypes and other cultural assumptions are both reflected and shaped by literature.

Literature is critiqued in light of the principles and ideologies of feminism.

It examines how works of literature embody patriarchal attitudes or undercut them, sometimes both happening within the same work.

Specific goals of feminist criticism include:

1. The development and discovery of the female tradition of writing and rediscovering of old texts.

2. This task aims to interpret the symbolism of women's writing in a way that the male point of view will notice.

3. Resisting the sexism prevalent in most mainstream literature.

The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves:

1. The first wave (political): (1848-1920)

2. The second wave (cultural) (1963-the 1980s)

3. The third wave (academic) (the 1990s)

4. Fourth Wave: Present Day.

Three main types of feminism emerged:

1. Mainstream/liberal,

2. Radical,

3. Cultural.

Feminist literary criticism focused on women's authorship and the representation of women's conditions in literature in the first and second waves of feminism.

The birth and growth of queer studies have been closely associated with feminist criticism.

Gynocriticism is considered a 'female' perspective on women's writings.

Gynocriticism was introduced during the time of second-wave feminism.

Elaine Showalter argues that feminist critique is an "ideological, righteous, angry, and admonitory search for the sins and errors of the past."

Showalter says gynocriticism enlists "the grace of imagination in a disinterested search for the essential difference of women's writing."

Elaine Showalter became a leading gynocritical critic with A Literature of their Own in 1977.

A study of women's poetry and prose and how it fits into the more prominent feminist literary canon was published in 1979 by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

With the development of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and the rise of third-wave feminism, feminist literary criticism has taken several new directions, including those that adhere to the Frankfurt School's critical theory.

An analysis of how the dominant ideology of a subject shapes societal understanding is presented.

It has also considered gender in terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as part of deconstructing existing power relations and a substantial political investment.

In the 1980s, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Nellie McKay, Valerie Smith, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Eleanor Traylor, Cheryl Wall and Sheryl Ann Williams.

All of them contributed significantly to the Black Feminist Scholarship of the time.

The French scholars who participated in this discussion were Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Bracha L. To truly, and Luce Irigaray, "get to the root" of feminine anxieties within the text, Ettinger applied psychoanalytic discourses through Freud and Lacan to present broader societal truths about women's place in society.