Feminist criticism appeared in Europe and America in the late 1960s. In fact, most scholars were women, so this movement could easily make its way and became influential. It aims at exploring women's role in the western cultures:
" One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere ......... women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, erratic, orphaned of any tradition of its own " 1
Such a trend was taken into account, rejected by male critics and writers, so their task was definitely hard to prove their ideas and their existence as critics; they had to reread women's works. The feminist criticism could be diverged into two divisions; The Anglo Americans who emphasized on recovering, reprinting and revaluating the work. The other division is a French stress upon the literary language by the female.
The French feminist critics were influenced by the Structuralism and the post-Structuralism specially the work of Derrida and Lacan. Some of the feminist critics sought for literary language that is fluid, while others were traditional in their methods and styles. But the women's participation in literature has been limited and for a lot of time excluded completely.
The Feminism, as a term, has many aspects; it is not devoted to literature only. The cultural feminism is one of those aspects which celebrates the woman culture and claims for its analysis. It defends the traditionally ascribed traits to woman such as subjectivity, compassion, closeness to other and reliance on others. The cultural feminists argue for the existence of female institutions as well as the male's. In 1974 Adrienne Rich called for...
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A Dictionary of, Modern Critical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler, (London and New York: Routledge and kegan Paul, 1973).
The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural criticism, ed. Joseph Childers and Gray Hentzi, (New York: Chicheste, 1995).
Other sources are available at, http://www.colambia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023106/0231063253.HTM
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/literature/faculty/toril
http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0198186754
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198186754/ref=aseabsolutsearch05/1030033463-6627077
Heberle, Mark. "Contemporary Literary Criticism." O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Vol. 74. New York, 2001. 312.
Feminism, the idea that women are equal to men, is a concept that has been an aspect of American society since the nineteenth century. However, while it was first constructed in 1848, feminism has not always been a widely embraced topic. It was once seen as an extremely taboo, controversial notion that could easily ruin a woman’s reputation if she were to dare speak of it. Despite this, many females put their fears of criticism aside and gained the courage to stand up for the freedoms of womankind. Two women who took the risk to write about the ideas of feminism were Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Kate Chopin.
Feminist criticism is a literacy form of criticism that gives the perspective of writing through a feminist perspective. It is a political form of literature that analyzes the questions of how male and females relate to each other and the world, the repression of women and how women are portrayed in literature. From a feminist perspective
What is Feminism? How does feminism affect the world we live in today? Was feminism always present in history, and if so why was it such a struggle for women to gain the respect they rightly deserve? Many authors are able to express their feelings and passions about this subject within their writing. When reading literary works, one can sense the different feminist stages depending on the timeframe that the writing takes place. Two such works are ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by, Charlotte Gilman and ‘Everyday Use’ by, Alice Walker; the feminist views within each story are very apparent by the era each author lives in. It is evident that a matter of fifty years can change the stance of an author’s writing; in one story the main character is a confident and strong willed young woman looking to voice her feminist views on the world, while the other story’s main character is a woman trying to hold on to her voice in a man’s world which is driving her insane.
Tyson, Lois. "Feminist Criticism." Critical Theory Today: a User-friendly Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
The feminist perspective of looking at a work of literature includes examining how both sexes are portrayed
For hundreds of years, women are fighting a war of inequality in the male dominated society. Heather Savigny addressed a very important question in her article, what is Feminism? By definition, “Feminism” is a moment started by women to end inequality in all fields of society. Women in the society started this protest to gain rights that were deprived by the males in the society. A feminist can be a normal person who fights against the discrimination on based on sex, age and gender. The feminist movement is very important in our society, to protect women for sexual harassment and violence. To fight this problem, and to find a possible way to end it, many great writers wrote very influential poems and stories. A very few writers who chose to
Lugones, Maria C. and Elizabeth V. Spelman. Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for “The Woman’s Voice.” Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy. Edited by Marilyn Pearsall. Wadsworth Publishing Company: California. 1986. 19-31.
Throughout history, women have struggled with, and fought against oppression. They have been held back and weighed down by the sexist ideas of a male dominated society which has controlled cultural, economic and political ideas and structure. During the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s women became more vocal and rebuked sexism and the role that had been defined for them. Fighting with the powerful written word, women sought a voice, equality amongst men and an identity outside of their family. In many literary writings, especially by women, during the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, we see symbols of oppression and the search for gender equality in society. Writing based on their own experiences, had it not been for the works of Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, and similar feminist authors of their time, we may not have seen a reform movement to improve gender roles in a culture in which women had been overshadowed by men.
Murfin, Ross and Surpryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.
Bayley, John. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 76. N.p.: Gale, 1992. 322-31. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
Being a Feminist and having a Feminist point of view in observing every cultural, social and historical issue had been translated as having a feminine centered and anti-masculine perception. Unlike the general and common knowledge about feminism, it is not only an anti-masculine perception towards social and individual issues. Feminism according to Oxford dictionary is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes that more commonly known as the pursuit of equality for women’s rights. On the other hand, in studying literary books as it will be in this paper, the mentioned definition is not applicable. Therefore, in this paper Feminist criticism will be used in order to study some characters’ lives in “Like water for chocolate” and “Season of Migration to the north” novels. Feminist criticism according to Oxford dictionary is a type of literary theory that points out different genders, races, classes, religions that are depictured in literature and will be used in this paper.
...er Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “a new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.
The discourse on the status of women and their struggle for liberation in the society and in literature, however, is not new. Women’s liberation movement, popularly known as ‘feminist’ movement, started with an aim of establishing and defending equal rights and opportunities for women. Until late eighteenth century, women, whether of Europe or non-Europe, did not raise any voice to claim their rights in the society. With the publication of the British feminist writer and advocate of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), there emerged a women’s...
Feminist criticism is a study of works written by female writers, describing women's life or representing women's consciousness. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R Edwards, in the foreword to The Authority o Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, point out that "feminist critics, obviously, are distinguished by virtue of their particular concern with society's beliefs about the nature and function of women in the world, with the transformation of these beliefs into literary plots, with the ways in which artistic and critical strategies adjust and control attitudes toward women. Compared with the long tradition of...