A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929.
Thinking about Women by Mary Ellmann, published in 1968.
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, published in 1970.
The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women's Writing By Patricia Meyer Spacks, published in 1976
A World of Difference by Barbara Johnson, published in 1987.
1. A Room of One's Own (1929)
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Woolf’s essay examines the educational, social and financial disadvantages women have faced throughout history. It contains Woolf’s famous argument that ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – although Woolf describes this as ‘an opinion upon one minor point’, and the essay explores the ‘unsolved problems’ of women and fiction ‘to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money’.
Woolf imagines what kind of life ‘Judith Shakespeare’ – a brilliant, talented sister of Shakespeare – might have lived, concluding that she ‘would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty’.
2. Thinking about Women by Mary Ellmann in 1968:
A scathingly witty attack on literary misperceptions of women and prejudice against women in letters by an Oxonian critic and writer.
3. Sexual Politics by Kate Millett in 1970:
The debut book of American writer and activist Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, is based on her doctoral dissertation, published by Doubleday in 1970. It is considered one of the key texts of radical feminism, regarded as a classic of feminism. It analyzes how women were subjugated in prominent literature and art during the twentieth century, particularly in terms oregardingresence of male dominance.
4. The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women's Writing By Patricia Meyer Spacks in 1976:
Originally published in 1976, Patricia Spacks analyzed the world from a female perspective in this brilliant and highly readable book. In juxtaposing - sometimes in startlingly original combinations - 80 books written between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, she explores patterns that repeatedly recur in the stories women tell, whether they tell about their personal lives or fictional characters.
5. A World of Difference by Barbara Johnson in 1987:
Is a willingness to carry an inquiry to the point of undecidability necessarily at odds with political engagement? In A World of Difference, Barbara Johnson extends and rethinks the theoretical perspectives on literature opened up by her earlier book, The Critical Difference. Through subtle and probing analyses of texts by Wordsworth, Poe, Baudelaie, Mallarmé, Thoreau, Mary Shelley, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, she attempts to transfer the analysis of "difference" from the realm of linguistic universality or deconstructive allegory into contexts in which difference is very much at issue in the world. New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of the current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man.
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