Gender in Joyce. Table of Contents and Introduction.

2015

1989

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Story So Far C.Belsey & J.Moore - Women and Literary History D.Spender - The True Story of How I Became My Own Person R.Coward - Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks T.Morrison - Queer Desire in The Well of Loneliness L.Pouchard - The Difference of View M.Jacobus - Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past G.Beer - Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays H.Cixous - Feminist, Female, Feminine T.Moi - Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy S.Felman - Promises: the Fictional Philosophy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman J.Moore - Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism C.Spivak - Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation: Elvis Presley M.Garber - Feminism and the Postmodern: Theory's Romance D.Elam - Women's Time J.Kristeva - The Looking Glass, from the Other Side L.Irigaray - Summaries and Notes - Glossary - Suggestions for Further Reading - Notes on Contributors - Index

Hypatia reviews online, 2016

Hilo. She is currently chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research focuses on transnational feminist thought, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, indigenous philosophies, and American pragmatism. She regularly teaches courses in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of nature. Rereading the philosophical canon requires that philosophers cultivate habits of heightened critical reflection. It is clear that an important purpose of rereading the canon is to develop new interpretive horizons on traditional texts, which can address the experiences of those who have historically been oppressed in society. As Nancy Tuana notes in the preface to this anthology, canon-formation in Western philosophy tends to privilege the perspective of the "upper-class white males" (viii). Hence, it is evident that in the pursuit of universal truth, meaning, and certainty, the trajectory of Western philosophy has cultivated interpretive blind spots, missing perspectives in the philosophical development of larger narratives of truth. Given this problem inherent in Western philosophy, the task of this anthology in particular aims to recover not only lost texts but also to constantly question "whether a philosopher's socially inherited prejudices concerning women's nature and role is independent of her or his larger philosophical framework" (ix).

A type of literary criticism that became a dominant force in Western Literary studies in the late 1970 ‟ s, feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980 ‟ s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspectives. It is nonetheless important to understand differences among the interests and assumptions of French, British and North America,(United States and Canada), feminist critics writing during the 1970 „ s, and early 1980 „ s, given the context to which their works shaped the evolution of contemporary feminist critical discourse.

Feminism has transformed the academic study of literature, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting new agendas for literary analysis. In this authoritative history of feminist literary criticism, leading scholars chart the development of the practice from the Middle Ages to the present. The first section of the book explores protofeminist thought from the Middle Ages onwards, and analyses the work of pioneers such as Wollstonecraft and Woolf. The second section examines the rise of second-wave feminism and maps its interventions across the twentieth century. A final section examines the impact of postmodernism on feminist thought and practice. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of feminist writing and literary criticism.

Since the 1970s a wide range of feminist writers have made a significant contribution to scholarship by uncovering the lost histories of real women as well as revealing the subversive zone occupied by women's imagined reconstructions of reality. Another aspect of the critical project has been to reveal the complex operation of patriarchy, or to recover dissident readings lurking within traditional texts. In these terms, the literary canon has been challenged, both from with, and from the outside – from the position of exclusion, silence, and oppression. Although feminists share many ideas in common, regarding the role of power, for instance, the diversity of current work calls for the notion of feminisms, rather than a single system-driven ideology. In this regard, feminist scholarship and cultural production both reveals the dominant gender binary, while simultaneously deconstructing the shifting boundaries. Historically, the dominant role of patriarchy was generally evident until the close of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there are numerous examples of challenges to the ruling gender divisions that dis-empowered women. Writing offered opportunities to explore the injustice and cruelty endured by women, but it was also a space to imagine a different kind of society in which women's lives might be improved, and men's dominant role(s) contested. In the eighteenth century, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other social commentators and political writers were beginning to suggest that the two sexes were complementary rather than opposition. Ironically, women's roles were increasingly celebrated in the same moment that more rigid notions of what was deemed appropriate behaviour were adopted: women were adoring mothers, caring wives, and domestic angels; those who fell short of this ideal were to be despised as whores. In contrast, men occupied the public sphere and enjoyed both economic independence and commodified ownership of their wives. Curiously, men often enjoyed other women in extramarital affairs; such was the hypocritical double-standard of Victorian patriarchy.

2019

According to the leading American feminist critic Jane Gallop, it was “around 1981” that “feminist criticism attain[ed] some sort of centrality” in the literary scholarship of the country (222). However, this does not mean that feminist literary criticism had positively been peripheral there before the decade. Even though feminist literary traditions had yet to find their “home” in the “wilderness of theory,” as Elaine Showalter put it in 1981 (180), several notable studies had appeared in the 1970s following Kate Millett’s forceful disclosure of textual subjugation of women by male authors in her Sexual Politics (Columbia UP, 1970), including A Literature of Their Own by Showalter (Princeton UP, 1977), Woman’s Fiction by Nina Baym (Cornell UP, 1978), and The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale UP, 1979). If this is the case, what then characterized the core debate among the American literary feminists around that time? Gallop herself identifies the publica...