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29 - Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Lynda Zwinger
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Lynda Zwinger
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

In the Introduction to the landmark collection, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (1985), Elaine Showalter traces the evolution of feminist academic study of women writers from its birth in 1970 with Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. She notes that “the second phase of feminist criticism was the discovery that women writers had a literature of their own, whose historical and thematic coherence, as well as artistic importance, had been obscured by the patriarchal values that dominate our culture” (6). The subsequent focus on women's writing

led to a massive recovery and rereading of literature by women from all nations and historical periods. As hundreds of lost women writers were rediscovered, as letters and journals were brought to light, as new literary biographies explored the relationship between the individual female talent and the literary tradition, the continuities in women's writing became clear for the first time. (6)

In addition to her own ALiterature of theirOwn (1977), Showalter points to Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, Ellen Moers's Literary Women (published in 1975 and 1976, respectively), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) as beginning to define women's writing in feminist terms, which declared that starting from the time of these landmarks of feminist work, we

now have a coherent, if still incomplete, narrative of female literary history, which describes the evolutionary stages of women's writing during the last 250 years from imitation through protest to self-definition, and defines and traces the connections throughout history and across national boundaries of the recurring images, themes, and plots that emerge from women's social, psychological, and aesthetic experience in male-dominated cultures. (6)

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 576 - 589
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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