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1
HAMZA REGUIG MOURO, Wassila. "From Feminization of Fiction to Feminine Metafiction in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Woolf’s Orlando." Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies 4, no. 4 (October 15, 2020): 187–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol4no4.13.
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Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.
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Stern, Kimberly J. "A History of Feminist Literary Criticism." Women's Writing 16, no. 1 (May 2009): 173–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699080902854503.
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Henry, Astrid. "Feminist Deaths and Feminism Today." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1717–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2006.121.5.1717.
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When asked to reflect on the role of feminist criticism today, i immediately recalled the recent deaths of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. Friedan and Dworkin join an unfortunately growing list of well-known feminist thinkers who have died over the last few years. The passing of Friedan and Dworkin makes us think about the feminism they represented and indeed about the history of feminist thought itself, its ebbs and flows, its metaphoric births and deaths. Ideas, after all, are as living as people, with periods of growth, maturity, and decline.
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Ledger, Sally. "Feminist Criticism in the Nineties." Literature & History 2, no. 2 (September 1993): 76–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030619739300200207.
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Gallop, Jane. "Heroic Images: Feminist Criticism, 1972." American Literary History 1, no. 3 (1989): 612–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/1.3.612.
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Roof, Judith. "Hypothalamic Criticism: Gay Male Studies and Male Feminist Criticism." American Literary History 4, no. 2 (1992): 355–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/4.2.355.
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Mendelman, Lisa. "Who Are We? Feminist Ambivalence in Contemporary Literary Criticism." American Literary History 32, no. 1 (December 4, 2019): 190–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz051.
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Abstract Feminism exists in a perpetual identity crisis—with a vexed past, an unstable present, and an uncertain future. A scholar interested in this charged identity must manage such existential conditions in order to enable their transformative ambitions. Historicizing Post-Discourses (2017), Bodies of Information (2019), and Selling Women’s History (2017) take up this cognitive and corporeal challenge and largely meet it. In these three books, feminism’s endemic ambivalence becomes a resource for literary and cultural criticism. Focused on popular, digital, and material cultures in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US, these volumes dramatize the merits and drawbacks of irresolution and resist a definitive conclusion about what feminism, both past and present, necessarily means for contemporary scholarship. Instead, we get alternative archives and, hopefully, better practices. Analyzing mass media, data visualizations, and consumer products, these studies engage new materials to flesh out the gendered, racialized human body at their common center. They rethink feminist historiography and demonstrate the myriad ways in which the sense of an ending continually renews and unsettles feminism’s search for a useable past. These works aim to create strategic alliances: they drive at embodied, material concerns, foreground questions of pedagogy and other modes of public interchange, and embrace a style of advocacy that rejects such extreme position-taking and instead embraces ambivalence.
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Galytska, Iuliia. "Alias in women's literature: feminist aspects in a gender context." Grani 23, no. 4 (July 5, 2020): 28–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.15421/172038.
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The problem of the identity of the woman hiding her gender under a male pseudonym makes us recollect U. Eco’s arguments about the truth and the purpose of literature as well as A. F. Losev’s ideas about the name and the meaning, the theories of the feminist literary critics K. Millett, M. Ellman, T. Moi, E. Showalter, etc. who have presented "women`s writing" and "writing about women" in the feminist field. As one of the central principles of feminist criticism is that no scientific view can ever be neutral, the problem of pseudonyms occupies an important place in the contemporary gender studies, explicitly or implicitly highlighting the artificially constructed debate, which divides "serious male literature" and "superficial and secondary female writing". On the one hand, this is the problem of feminism itself, on the other, it is a question of the role and place of the woman in the world` culture and history. In this kind of the analysis we cannot ignore such an epiphenomenon of postmodernism as "label change" with the postmodern emphasis on the sociocultural role of the context, which is especially relevant in aspects of the gender "name problem". The last one, undoubtedly, is included in the problematization of postmodern culture on the whole, since all cultural narratives have always been gender "stories". Today an individual construct his or her gender-reflecting reality, still the modelling of the new gender system is far from being complete. The created sign systems are ambivalent, the meanings are very unstable and can easily be hermeneutically interpreted. However, the role of hermeneutics in analyzing the relationship between the author and the sociocultural context is in the core of the gender aspects of literature, in general, and in the problems of the pseudonym as a change of "name", in particular. The latter is by all means relevant and important. Undoubtedly, one of the main incentives for feminist scholars in their turn to women's literature is connected with the patriarchal demand for women's "silence", their "dumbness" in culture and, accordingly, in literature. Obviously, there are two main interpretations of the concept of "female literature" in feminist criticism. The first one is the representation of female subjectivity in its difference from the male one. The second approach is the representation of "non-essentialist" female subjectivity, which is understood as the logical structure of the difference. In general, in the patriarchal dichotomy of the femininity and masculinity "women who write" are always dangerous. "Three strange sisters" – Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte wrote their novels under disguise of male pen names, exactly specifying two conceptual motives: the "Other" concept and the image of "Veil". In this context the motive of androgyny is also important from the point of view of both analysis and literary criticism. In ХIXth century George Sand (Aurora Dupin), having most vividly represented this concept, became an example for many subsequent generations of feminists – writers, actresses and media representatives. However, in our era of gender plurality, the question of the pseudonym as a problem of "genders" is not so relevant; more likely it is still a question of the priorities in the feminist theory. In the contemporary discourse of literary criticism many of the author’s socially significant features are perceived as gender neutral. In the postmodern paradigm the question of the androgynous identity of the man/woman writer requires its further actualization as the androgynous is often replaced by the bisexuality (J. Irving` "In One Person"). In general, it should be recognized that postmodern approaches to gender identity, which paint a "picture of the world" today, transform the female experience of being as the "Other", secondary and insignificant with a conceptual orientation to a fundamental variety of postmodern cognitive perspectives.
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Scott, B. K. "GILL PLAIN and SUSAN SELLERS (eds). A History of Feminist Literary Criticism." Review of English Studies 59, no. 242 (October 25, 2007): 813–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgn086.
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Smith, Peter J. "Review: Book: The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare." Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 42, no. 1 (October 1992): 123–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/018476789204200139.
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Redl, Carolyn. "Ten Year Checkup: Feminist Criticism and the American Literary Canon." Canadian Review of American Studies 22, Supplement 2 (January 1992): 193–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-022s-02-03.
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CHEN, Zhongxiang. "Interpretation of the Women in the Biblical Literature." Review of Social Sciences 1, no. 6 (June 29, 2016): 09. http://dx.doi.org/10.18533/rss.v1i6.36.
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<p>Bible as literature and Bible as religion are comparative. It is without doubt that Bible, as a religious doctrine, has played a great role in Judaism and Christianity. It is meanwhile a whole literature collection of history, law, ethics, poems, proverbs, biography and legends. As the source of western literature, Bible has significant influence on the English language and culture, English writing and modeling of characters in the subsequent time. Interpreting the female characters in the Bible would affirm the value of women, view the feminist criticism in an objective way and agree the harmonious relationship between the men and the women. </p>
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O’Malley, Maria. "Taking the Domestic View in Hawthorne’s Fiction." New England Quarterly 88, no. 4 (December 2015): 657–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00494.
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Shifting the emphasis within feminist criticism from the act of speech to the act of hearing, this article argues that, in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals how the public sphere depends on the voices of dispossessed women even as it attempts to silence them.
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Buszek, Maria Elena. "Mirror, Mirror: Joanna Frueh as Fairy Stepmother." TDR/The Drama Review 55, no. 2 (June 2011): 104–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00073.
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For over 20 years, scholar and performance artist Joanna Frueh has been a pioneering force in feminist art and criticism. In homage to Frueh's “erotic scholarship,” Frueh's own writing and performances concerning relationships between women are interwoven with a biographical history of the author and the artist's own student/teacher relationship.
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Sohm, Philip. "Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia*." Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1995): 759–808. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2863424.
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Did the concept of style have gender? Were the styles of particular Renaissance painters considered to have gendered qualities by contemporary critics? Because gender permeated the rhetorical and philological foundations of art criticism, it can provide a useful interpretive lens to examine the critical arsenal of writers on art, their attitudes toward style and the subterranean bias of their language. Feminist art history has grappled with gender more in terms of iconography, biography, or patronage following a social agenda to analyze a misogynist past and to remedy the marginalization of women in modern art historiography. An exceptional study by Elizabeth Cropper in 1976 broached the question of gender in aesthetics by reconstituting a complex history of love and beauty that converged in treatises on beautiful women.
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Cinpoeş, Nicoleta. "From New to Neo-Europe: Titus redivivus." Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 96, no. 1 (May 22, 2018): 214–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0184767818775904.
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The ‘dramatic rise’ of Titus Andronicus ‘among critics and directors’ in the 1990s was primarily linked to ‘the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism’.1 Its recent stage popularity, however, lies in its responses to the new geopolitical realities and the shifting physical and mental borders of the European Union. This article examines four European productions of Titus Andronicus in their engagement with political change, migration, rising nationalism and xenophobia, which, I argue, refocus attention onto this play’s position in the Shakespeare canon.
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Crawford, Julie. "The Case of Lady Anne Clifford; or, Did Women Have a Mixed Monarchy?" PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1682–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2006.121.5.1682.
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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.
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Sales, Roger. "Review: Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama, the Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare." Literature & History 3, no. 1 (March 1994): 106–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030619739400300115.
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Zimmerman, Tegan. "Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies." MELUS 45, no. 1 (2020): 95–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlz067.
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Abstract This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela’s presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela’s voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti’s contribution to the Dominican Republic’s history—makes visible the unacknowledged yet essential role of the Afra-Dominican not only in this novel specifically but also to the Dominican Republic more generally.
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Schaffer, Talia. "Introduction." Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 1 (December 7, 2018): 3–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150318001316.
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In May 2017, the annual City University of New York (CUNY) Victorian Conference addressed the history of Victorian feminist criticism. Our conference coincided with the fortieth anniversary of A Literature of Their Own and the thirtieth anniversary of Desire and Domestic Fiction, affording us a chance to think about the legacy of these groundbreaking texts. Elaine Showalter, Martha Vicinus, and Nancy Armstrong spoke about their struggles to establish and maintain Victorian feminist work in the twentieth century, often against outright hostility. We also heard about issues in twenty-first-century Victorian feminist practice: Alison Booth spoke about digital-humanities codification of Victorian women's lives, Jill Ehnenn discussed queer revisions, and Maia McAleavey explored new theories of relationality, while I gave a response to Armstrong's talk. Meanwhile, Carolyn Oulton's discussion of the ongoing struggle to canonize Victorian women writers spoke to the continuous work required to make Victorian women's writing familiar to the field. It was an emotional day, for we all recognized that this might be one of the last times that the founding generation could be together to share these stories.
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Schroeder, Janice. "SELF-TEACHING: MARY CARPENTER, PUBLIC SPEECH, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DELINQUENCY." Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 149–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150308080091.
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With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?
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Caldwell, Patricia. "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice." Prospects 13 (October 1988): 1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300005226.
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Anne Bradstreet has come a long way since John Harvard Ellis hailed her over a century ago as “the earliest poet of her sex in America.” Today, more justly, we view Bradstreet simply as “the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as “the founder of American literature.” At the same time, a more sensitive criticism is looking anew at Bradstreet's personal drama as a woman in the first years of the New England settlement: her life as a wife, as mother of eight children, as a frontier bluestocking (though still, in many critics' eyes, “restless in Puritan bonds”), and even as a feminist in the wilderness. Feminist critics in particular have revitalized our understanding of Bradstreet and her work by probing her subtle “subversion” of patriarchal traditions, both theological and poetical, and by placing her among contemporary 17th-Century women writers, making her no longer a phenomenon on the order of Doctor Johnson's dancing dog, but finally a participating voice in her age.
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Caldwell, Patricia. "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice." Prospects 13 (October 1988): 1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300006670.
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Anne Bradstreet has come a long way since John Harvard Ellis hailed her over a century ago as “the earliest poet of her sex in America.” Today, more justly, we view Bradstreet simply as “the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as “the founder of American literature.” At the same time, a more sensitive criticism is looking anew at Bradstreet's personal drama as a woman in the first years of the New England settlement: her life as a wife, as mother of eight children, as a frontier bluestocking (though still, in many critics' eyes, “restless in Puritan bonds”), and even as a feminist in the wilderness. Feminist critics in particular have revitalized our understanding of Bradstreet and her work by probing her subtle “subversion” of patriarchal traditions, both theological and poetical, and by placing her among contemporary 17th-Century women writers, making her no longer a phenomenon on the order of Doctor Johnson's dancing dog, but finally a participating voice in her age.
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Averis, Kate. "Vieillir, dit-elle: Nancy Huston's Feminist Trajectory and Writing Female Ageing." Nottingham French Studies 57, no. 3 (December 2018): 325–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2018.0228.
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This article examines Nancy Huston's writing of female ageing in light of her intellectual and personal trajectory as a feminist thinker. It identifies women's ageing as an integrative and ubiquitous phenomenon in Huston's œuvre, tracing the presence of this thematic and theoretical concern to her very first published works, and outlining its development until her most recent works, before examining a key instance of her fictional treatment of female ageing in Lignes de faille. Drawing on a literary, philosophical and sociological theoretical framework, it argues that Huston furthers feminist approaches to female senescence by inscribing women's experiences of later life not in terms of existential crisis but rather as part of the continuous process of change and transformation inherent to subjective development. The analysis aims to address pressing questions surrounding the intersections of gender and age that are at the forefront of Huston criticism and feminist studies.
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MOI, T. "Review. Women, Language and Literature. An Annotated Bibliography. Gelfand, Elissa D., and Hules, Virginia Thorndike, French Feminist Criticism." French Studies 41, no. 1 (January 1, 1987): 114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fs/41.1.114.
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Kharamurza, Daria. "Typological Particularities of the Newspaper “Literaturа Plіus”." Scientific notes of the Institute of Journalism, no. 1 (78) (2021): 74–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2522-1272.2021.78.6.
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The main objective of the study is to characterize the newspaper “Literaturа plіus” as an example of high-quality literary and art periodicals, to determine typological particularities of the newspaper. Methodology. The research was conducted using the following methods: historical and descriptive methods as well as analysis, synthesis, content analysis and generalization. With the help of these methods, the dynamics of changes of the newspaper “Literature plіus” were studied during the whole period of its existence, its content was analyzed and its comprehensive description was given. Results. The newspaper “Literaturа plіus” informed its readers about the new books, published the texts of Ukrainian postmodernists, and gave a qualitative analysis of the modern processes at the literary, cultural, and socio-political life of the country. The audience of the newspaper was the intellectual community of Ukraine that was open to critical dialogue and thirsty for change. The content analysis of the newspaper allowed ascertaining that division according to subject headings was formed according to genre-thematic principle. Its publication frequency was changed a few times. “Literaturа plіus” highlighted the following topics – the modern Ukrainian literature, the world literary process, the literary criticism, the book publishing, the concepts of literary theory, the problems of literary history, the feminist and gender studies, the phenomena of modern culture. The newspaper involved intellectuals in the debate of topical issues of literature and culture. Conclusions. The typological particularities of the newspaper “Literaturа plіus” were analyzed for the first time in the article. The author ascertained that focusing on the traditions and methods of the western studies throughout its existence, the newspaper “Literaturа plіus” showed a high level of literary criticism and was one of the most interesting literary and artistic magazines in Ukraine.
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Alfonsi, Marianna. "Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: the beginning of an emancipatory process between literary girls and real girls." Rivista di Storia dell’Educazione 7, no. 1 (July 9, 2020): 5–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/rse-9390.
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Giving a right place to literature for children in the context of general literature means to recognizing its roots and influences in a wider landscape. Charlotte Brontë work inserted in this context has a double meaning both because it links adult and child female characters (The italian society of literates has defined them «personagge»), and because it brings us back to the roots of a literature written by women with female protagonists able to undermine the socially approved traditional rules. Recovering Jane Eyre is the first step to be taken to trace a new way of writing about women and telling about “the becoming” of women, delineating a parallel path to bildungsroman, in which the feminine youth has not found full consideration. To define an itinerary for women and girls it is then necessary to analyze the studies of feminist literary criticism that has investigated the relationship between women and literature since 70s, both from the writer’s and reader’s point of view. The objective thus becomes the one to recover the history of that link that unites the presence of women and girls in literature and their search for an autonomous space of imagination, thought and action. Inserting Jane Eyre in the children’s literature allows us to trace the birth of the authentic female child, and the beginning of an emancipatory process that poses important questions about the role of reading and literature in social and educational contexts.
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Wahlström, Helena. "Reproduction, Politics, and John Irving’s The Cider House Rules: Women’s Rights or "Fetal Rights"?" Culture Unbound 5, no. 2 (June 12, 2013): 251–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.135251.
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While hotly debated in political contexts, abortion has seldom figured in explicit terms in either literature or film in the United States. An exception is John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, which treats abortion insistently and explicitly. Although soon thirty years old, The Cider House Rules still functions as an important voice in the ongoing discussion about reproductive rights, responsibilities, and politics. Irving represents abortion as primarily a women’s health issue and a political issue, but also stresses the power and responsibility of men in abortion policy and debate. The novel rejects a “prolife” stance in favor of a women’s rights perspective, and clearly illustrates that abortion does not preclude or negate motherhood. This article discusses Irving’s novel in order to address abortion as a political issue, the gender politics of fictional representations of abortion, and the uses of such representations in critical practice. A brief introduction to the abortion issue in American cultural representation and in recent US history offers context to the abortion issue in Irving’s novel. The analysis focuses on abortion as it figures in the novel, and on how abortion figures in the criticism of the novel that explicitly focuses on this issue. The article argues that twentyfirst century criticism of Irving’s text, by feminist scholars as well as explicitly anti-feminist pro-life advocates, demonstrate the pervasive influence of antiabortion discourses illustrates, since these readings of Irving’s novel include, or reactively respond to, the fetal rights discourse and the “awfulization of abortion.” The article further proposes that the novel’s representations of reproductive rights issues – especially abortion – are still relevant today, and that critical readings of fictional and nonfictional representations of reproductive rights issues are central to feminist poli-tics.
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Verma, Kripashankar. "The Family in Four Shakespearean Plays: A Short Analysis." Indian Journal of Gender Studies 28, no. 1 (January 20, 2021): 104–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0971521520974877.
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Gender study is one of the most select areas of modern research in nearly all branches of knowledge, that is, politics, history, sociology and of course literature. Feminist criticism has been phenomenal in closely studying works of literature. The modern era, which tries to usher in a world of equality for all, is highly concerned with the political, economic and social equality and freedom of women. In this article, four plays ( Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline) of William Shakespeare have been selected for the purpose of gender analysis. The article tries to explore the family in Shakespeare’s times, the status of women and the social hierarchy in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare’s plays highlight many more issues of gender and identity that are of universal importance. This article also explores how gender roles were predetermined in the Elizabethan society and how a woman was expected to behave accordingly.
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Piqué-Angordans, Jordi, and David Viera. "Women in the Crestià of Francesc Eiximenis Revisited." Medieval Encounters 12, no. 1 (2006): 97–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006706777502514.
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AbstractNineteenth and early twentieth-century criticism oftentimes tended to lump literary works on the topic of women from the middle ages and early modern times as either essentially misogynist or feminist. Moral-didactic works that often fluctuated between antifeminist and profeminist opinion were often categorized as misogynist, akin to works such as Boccaccio's Corbaccio. This is the case of Francesc Eiximenis' Catalan literature, written for the most part in València. The authors of this study analyzed Eiximenis' views on women, for the most part taken from biblical, patristic, scholastic, and canonical sources, and found within his writings various contradictions. In this study, Eiximenis emerges as one who readily cited antifeminist literature, but who also defended women, whom he views as weaker than men, but equally if not more capable of being devout, performing good works, and most importantly, worthy of salvation.
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Moi, Toril. "A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+352." Modern Philology 107, no. 4 (May 2010): E79—E82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/651437.
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Taufiq Ahmad Dardiri, Moh Wakhid Hidayat, Sangidu, Fadlil Munawwar Manshur,. "PETA KAJIAN ATAS NOVEL SEJARAH ISLAM KARYA JURJĪ ZAIDĀN." Jurnal CMES 12, no. 1 (October 9, 2019): 4. http://dx.doi.org/10.20961/cmes.12.1.34867.
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The novel of Islamic history by Jurjī Zaidān is one of the works of Modern Arabic literature which appeared at the end of the 19th century. Since it was first published, as a serial story in al-Hilal magazine, this novel has been read and has received a great response. Zaidān composed 22 titles of novels from 1891 to 1914. After Zaidān's death in 1914, his novels were still read by the public, reprinted, and even translated in various languages in the world. Zaidān’s Islamic historical novels still exist, both within the scope of modern Arabic literature and in Arabic thought, with many studies to date. Research on this novel is reviewed and analyzed to reveal the diversity of perspectives to be mapped. Found nine perspectives in the study of Islamic historical novels; the perspective of the development of Arabic novel genres, the perspective of authorship and pioneering in Arabic novel genre, the perspective of the popularization of Arab-Islamic history, critical perspectives of Islamic historical facts, intrinsic literary criticism perspective, narrative structure perspective, feminist perspective, perspective modern Arab identity, and Arab nationalism perspective. The mapping of studies become the positioning of further Islamic historical novel studies, and at the same time can be a model of study for the analysis of other historical novels that develop in Arabic literature or other national literature.
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Bo, Ting. "An Analysis of Lady Chatterley's Lover from the Perspective of Ecofeminism." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 8, no. 10 (October 1, 2018): 1361. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0810.15.
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Eco-feminism, as a new theoretical criticism of literature, combines the oppression and domination of women. There is a critical connection between woman and nature, originating from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society. The development of eco-feminism has significant influence on attitudes of human beings toward nature, especially the relationship between nature and woman. Lawrence is well-known for both his unique writing techniques and frank expression of sex. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence shows his strong awareness of eco-feminism by exploring the relations between man and man, nature and man, nature and woman.
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Wanzo, Rebecca. "The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken." American Literary History 31, no. 3 (2019): 564–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz028.
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Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.
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Langlands, Rebecca. "Latin Literature." Greece and Rome 63, no. 2 (September 16, 2016): 256–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383516000139.
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Mairéad McAuley frames her substantial study of the representation of motherhood in Latin literature in terms of highly relevant modern concerns, poignantly evoked by her opening citation of Eurydice's lament at her baby's funeral in Statius’ Thebaid 6: what really makes a mother? Biology? Care-giving? (Grief? Loss? Suffering?) How do the imprisoning stereotypes of patriarchy interact with lived experiences of mothers or with the rich metaphorical manifestations of maternity (as the focus of fear and awe, for instance, or of idealizing aesthetics, of extreme political rhetoric, or as creativity and the literary imagination?) How do individuals, texts, and societies negotiate maternity's paradoxical relationship to power? Conflicting issues of maternal power and disempowerment run through history, through Latin literature, and through the book. McAuley's focus is the representational work that mothers do in Latin literature, and she pursues this through close readings of works by Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius, by re-reading their writings in a way that privileges the theme, perspective, or voice of the mother. A lengthy introduction sets the parameters of the project and its aim (which I judge to be admirably realized) to establish a productive dialogue between modern theory (especially psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy) and ancient literature. Her study evokes a dialogue that speaks to theory – even contributes to it – but without stripping the Latin literature of its cultural specificity (and without befuddling interpretation of Latin culture with anachronism and jargon, which is often the challenge). The problem for a Latinist is that psychoanalysis is, as McAuley says, ‘not simply a body of theories about human development, it is also a mode of reading’ (23), and it is a mode of reading often at cross-purposes with the aims of literary criticism in Classical Studies: psychoanalytical notions of the universal and the foundational clash with aspirations to historical awareness and appreciation of the specifics of genre or historical moment. Acknowledging – and articulating with admirable clarity and honesty – the methodological challenges of her approach, McAuley practises what she describes as ‘reading-in-tension’ (25), holding on not only to the contradictions between patriarchal texts and their potentially subversive subtexts but also to the tense conversation between modern theory and ancient literary representation. As she puts it in her epilogue, one of her aims is to ‘release’ mothers’ voices from the pages of Latin literature in the service of modern feminism, while simultaneously preserving their alterity: ‘to pay attention to their specificity within the contexts of text, genre, and history, but not to reduce them to those contexts, in order that they speak to us within and outside them at the same time’ (392). Although McAuley presents her later sections on Seneca and Statius as the heart of the book, they are preceded by two equally weighty contributions, in the form of chapters on Virgil and Ovid, which she rightly sees as important prerequisites to understanding the significance of her later analyses. In these ‘preliminary’ chapters (which in another book might happily have been served as the main course), she sets out the paradigms that inform those discussions of Seneca and Statius’ writings. In her chapter on Virgil McAuley aims to transcend the binary notion that a feminist reading of epic entails either reflecting or resisting patriarchal values. As ‘breeders and mourners of warriors…mothers are readily incorporated into the generic code’ of epic (65), and represent an alternative source of symbolic meaning (66). Her reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses then shows how the poem brings these alternative subjects into the foreground of his own poetry, where the suffering and passion of mothers take centre-stage, allowing an exploration of imperial subjectivity itself. McAuley points out that even feminist readings can often contribute to the erasure of the mother's presence by their emphasis on the patriarchal structures that subjugate the female, and she uses a later anecdote about Octavia fainting at a reading of the Aeneid as a vivid illustration of a ‘reparative reading’ of Roman epic through the eyes of a mother (91–3). Later, in her discussion of mothers in Statian epic, McAuley writes: ‘mothers never stand free of martial epic nor are they fully constituted by it, and, as such, may be one of the most appropriate figures with which to explore issues of belatedness and authority in the genre’ (387). In short, the discourse of motherhood in Latin literature is always revealed to be powerfully implicated in the central issues of Roman literature and culture. A chapter is devoted to the themes of grief, virtue, and masculinity as explored in Seneca's consolation to his own mother, before McAuley turns her attention to the richly disturbing mothers of Senecan tragedy and Statius’ Thebaid. The book explores the metaphorical richness of motherhood in ancient Rome and beyond, but without losing sight of its corporeality, seeking indeed to complicate the long-developed binary distinction between physical reproduction (gendered as female) and abstract reproduction and creativity (gendered as male). This is a long book, but it repays careful reading, and then a return to the introduction via the epilogue, so as to reflect anew on McAuley's thoughtful articulation of her methodological choices. Her study deploys psychoanalytical approaches to reading Latin literature to excellent effect (not an easy task), always enhancing the insights of her reading of the ancient texts, and maintaining lucidity. Indeed, this is the best kind of gender study, which does not merely apply the modern framework of gender and contemporary theoretical approaches to ancient materials (though it does this very skilfully and convincingly), but in addition makes it clear why this is such a valuable endeavour for us now, and how rewarding it can be to place modern psychoanalytic theories into dialogue with the ancient Roman literature. The same tangle of issues surrounding maternity as emerges from these ancient works often persists into our modern era, and by probing those issues with close reading we risk learning much about ourselves; we learn as much when the ancient representations fail to chime with our expectations.
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Savage, Jordan. "True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 68, no. 1 (March 26, 2020): 53–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-0006.
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AbstractThis article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land, Mudbound, and Brokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.
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Peyre, Henri. "1960: Facing the New Decade." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115, no. 7 (December 2000): 1862. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463587.
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If ours is a young man's world, it is also a woman's world. Some of us who are fortunate to have women among our graduate students and as young colleagues are extraordinarily impressed by the high level of their work. Indeed, we often wonder if criticism will not make substantial strides forward, blending the cognitive and the affective values, taste and a rational approach, the logic of the intellect and that of the heart, only when women take over a large share of it, as they are now out-numbering men as teachers of English and of languages in many schools. This country witnessed a bold feminist movement several decades ago. The second sex then conquered all the rights and courageously accepted corresponding duties. College presidents in women's colleges were in many cases women. In anthropology, archeology, psychology several American women have been outstanding. So have they been in journalism. Why not to the same extent today in philology, medieval studies, literary history, criticism? Are men to blame, wary of these potential rivals, preferring to utilize women's generosity and their capacity for devoted attachment by keeping them as secretaries and obedient confidents of their profound male cogitations? Have women put so much energy in once winning equality and security that they are now content to enjoy these rights, and to look upon maternity and procreation without tears and without anesthesia as their sole vocation? Men in any case have the duty to make room for them, to incite them to express themselves more boldly, to elect them to more positions of power in this Association and in others, to ask them for the healthy challenge which our duller brains need to receive from their keener perceptiveness in matters of art and literature.
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Hauke, Alexandra. "A Woman by Nature? Darren Aronofsky’s mother! as American Ecofeminist Gothic." Humanities 9, no. 2 (May 26, 2020): 45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9020045.
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In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene.
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Hiddleston, Jane. "Imprisonment, freedom, and literary opacity in the work of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar." Feminist Theory 11, no. 2 (August 2010): 171–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464700110366815.
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In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression.
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Adkin, Neil. "‘Alii discunt–pro pudor!–a feminis’: Jerome, Epist. 53.7.1." Classical Quarterly 44, no. 2 (December 1994): 559–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800044098.
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In the letter which initiated his correspondence with Paulinus of Nola Jerome deplores the propensity of the inexpert to pontificate on scripture. Three kinds of incompetence are denounced. The second takes the following form: ‘alii discunt – pro pudor!–a feminis, quod viros doceant’ (Epist. 53.7.1). As in the other two denunciations, Jerome has chosen to express himself in general terms; scholars have nonetheless assumed that here a specific individual is meant. Nautin argued that with these words Jerome was attacking Rufinus, who is here represented as being intellectually dependent on his patroness Melania. More recently Testard has maintained that Jerome's criticism is in fact directed against Ambrose. However Nautin's view that Rufinus is the target has now been re-affirmed by Rebenich. The purpose of the present note is to draw attention to a piece of evidence which has hitherto been overlooked; it would seem to indicate that the object of Jerome's attack cannot be Rufinus.
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Marzec, Lucyna. "Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna mniej więcej znana." Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka, no. 32 (October 2, 2018): 75–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/pspsl.2018.32.4.
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The article is the analysis of the place of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna in contemporary literary discourse. The author of the article claims – using Pierre Bayard’s theory – that the poetess is known “more or less”: she is remembered as someone who got prizes and recognition but at the same time she is impossible to read nowadays. There is political ambiguity and antiquity in her texts that keep her in the past. Marzec points at four areas of literary studies, where Iłłakowiczówna is still present: 1. Poetics: Iłłakowiczówna uses an original and unusual type of the Polish tonic verse. The author of this article analyses it using tools of psychoanalysis. 2. Religious discourse: Iłłakowicz.wna is interpreted as the author of religious poetry but Marzec argues with such interpretations. 3. Post-dependence studies: Iłłakowiczówna has not been analysed in terms of post-dependence studies yet but she is mentioned in the Polish borderlines discourse. 4. Feminist literary criticism: Iłłakowiczówna used to be studied as the author of androgynous poetry, but Marzec points out other motifs such as miscarriage, infanticide or problems of the new woman, like work at government institution, contestation of vitalism and bureaucracy. The aimof this article is to show that writing of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna needs to be read in terms of the history of literature which is devoid of evaluation and judging. Such analysis means going back in terms of modern literary studies which have undergone multiple turns that changed the tools accessible to contemporary critics.
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Adelman, Janet, Margaret J. Arnold, Linda Bamber, Catherine Belsey, Harry Berger, Lynda Boose, Peter Erickson, et al. "Feminist Criticism." PMLA 104, no. 1 (January 1989): 77. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/462334.
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Levin, Richard. "Feminist Criticism." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 104, no. 1 (January 1989): 77–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/s0030812900136752.
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Grassi, Umberto. "Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality." Cultural History 5, no. 2 (October 2016): 200–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cult.2016.0126.
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In the first part of this article I summarize the ongoing historiographical debate over Michel Foucault's theory of the nineteenth-century medical ‘invention’ of homosexuality, as it was formulated in the 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge. Starting from the now-outdated conflict between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’, I underline the ‘blind spots’ of the Foucauldian narrative as highlighted by postcolonial, feminist and queer criticisms. In the second part, I shift to the historiography of the early modern Iberian and Colonial world. Even though a lot of work in this field has already been done, I think that a full comprehension of the connections between this research and the international debate on the history of gender and sexual transgressions is still lacking. Through the analysis of this literature, I propose a revision of Foucault's account, questioning the idea of the nineteenth-century ‘great paradigm shift’. On the one hand, these studies address the long-term genealogy of issues that has fully ripened in the nineteenth century. On the other, they confirm the coexistence in past societies of a multiplicity of understandings of sexual behaviors that questions the hypothesis of a succession of coherent and homogeneous epistemological patterns.
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Musgamy, Awaliah, Muhammad Rusydi, and Kurniati Kurniati. "Gender Mainstreaming in Arabic Literature." Jurnal Al Bayan: Jurnal Jurusan Pendidikan Bahasa Arab 12, no. 2 (September 2, 2020): 245–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.24042/albayan.v12i2.6468.
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Arabic literature is a means of gender mainstreaming which is very rich in gender issues. This is based on the social fact that Arab society in its historical footsteps has a stereotype as a community that is very thick with its patriarchal culture. Consequently, the social condition which is less responsive to gender influences the birth of Arabic literary works in various types in which gender issues such as marginalization of women, subordination of women to men, violence, negative stereotypes, and others. This article is qualitative research by using feminist Arabic literary criticism as a perspective, gender mainstreaming in Arabic literature is carried out by tracing the gender issues that exist in Arabic literature in its various forms. Through feminist Arabic literary criticism, various theories of feminist literary criticism consisting of ideological criticism, gynocritical criticism, socialist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, ethnic criticism, and lesbian criticism, are applied in transforming and reconstructing gender-responsive relations between men and women.
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Fowler, Rowena. "Feminist Criticism: The Common Pursuit." New Literary History 19, no. 1 (1987): 51. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/469301.
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Pringle, Mary Beth, Judi M. Roller, and Jennifer Smith. "Demystifying Feminist Criticism: A Response." Antioch Review 44, no. 2 (1986): 231. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4611598.
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Jennifer J. Baker. "Economic Criticism as Feminist Intervention." Early American Literature 44, no. 3 (2009): 653–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/eal.0.0073.
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Nnaemeka, Obioma. "Toward a feminist criticism of Nigerian literature." Feminist Issues 9, no. 1 (March 1989): 73–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf02685604.
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REINELT, JANELLE. "Generational shifts." Theatre Research International 35, no. 3 (October 2010): 288–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883310000593.
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Thirty-five years, the age of TRI, is roughly the length of time I have been involved in our discipline. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and entered the profession on the cusp of a generational shift. During my first decade in the academy, a number of new young scholars emerged and began to take the places of an older cohort who were primarily theatre historians and/or drama critics and interpreters. The theory explosion changed the way that both theatre history and dramatic criticism were carried out, and a whole new range of methods and objects of study began to appear in our journals and conferences. Post-structural and postmodernist ideas upset the reigning conventions of scholarship and also influenced creative artists who changed their practice to reflect these new ideas. Feminism transformed our field, as did new research on race, class and sexuality, while competing theories of the subject brought forward psychoanalysis and phenomenology as important tools for performance analysis. Cultural studies and the new historicism challenged positivist historiography and began to change the kind of theatre history (including subjects and documents) scholars researched and wrote about. Political critique was in the ascendency, after a battle to discredit what many of us perceived as a false objectivity in previous scholarship. This became, eventually, the new orthodoxy for many of us, and the senior scholars in our field today (for example Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Josette Féral, Erika Fisher-Lichte, Freddie Rokem, Joseph Roach) all participated in making these major changes happen as young scholars – while not necessarily agreeing with each other: the new generation was thoroughly heterodox in its approach to methods and topics.