Peggy Kamuf offers an important caution in relation to mapping a nation's literature, and her caution also holds for mapping a generation's literature, or a gender's literary enterprise. Despite her warnings, it is, of course, also necessary to try to limn the linkages between texts and writers, to establish a literary history and a way of approaching disparate (though in many ways connected) texts. Such a mapping cannot hope to include all the terrain, nor show in details its “inlets and protrusions.” However, if the mapping exercise is not undertaken, women's literature may become invisible in critical terms. Elaine Showalter argues that women writers need “a critical jury of their peers to discuss their work, to explicate its symbols and meanings, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to all readers” (Jury, xi). In this call, she is not alone. Joanna Russ contends that "[i]f women's experience is defined as inferior to, less important than, or 'narrower' than men's experience, women's writing is automatically denigrated. If women's experience is simply not seen, the effect will be the same" (How to Suppress Women's Writing, 47- 8). Hear me could well be the cry of many of the women characters who populate contemporary American women's fiction, whether they reside in classic (though now perhaps unfairly derided) consciousness-raising novels from the 1970s such as Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973) or Marilyn French's The Women's Room (1977) or novels from the early part of the twenty-first century which reiterate the request to be heard and taken seriously (even when adopting a comic tone).