Lomperis, Linda and Sarah Stanbury, ed. Women were not considered equals with men even though England had Queens who ruled their subjects. Feminism was really a product of the late nineteenth century: the word is first recorded, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1895 (although ‘feminist’ is found from 1852).However, there were obviously figures before the second half of the nineteenth century who argued for reforms in women’s rights and in how women should be treated in society. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. , Feminism in Literature & Feminist literary criticism, Feminist Literary Criticism - Download in PDF. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect. Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, women writers were largely confined to the genres of children's literature and poetry. She vehemently argued that patriarchal education systems and reading practices prevent women readers from reading as women. Feminist literature, as the name suggests, is based on the principles of feminism, and refers to any literary work that centers on the struggle of a woman for equality and to be accepted as a human being before being cast into a gender stereotype. Feminism and Historicism are two of these ideological movements. However, Historicism tackles the literary works from a historical point of view. Showalter proposed three stages in the history of women’s writing: Feminism questions the long-standing, dominant, male interpretations, phallocentric ideology and patriarchal attitude. She attacks male thinker a… It concerned with varied aspects of feminism. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man. Not all these works follow a direct approach towards this goal of equality. She attacks male thinker and scholar like Rousseau who argued that women did not need education but she supported education as a means of women’s improvement. Feminist literary criticism (also known as feminist criticism) is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism, feminist theory, and/or feminist politics. 18. The issue of Feminism in English Literature is not new but due to patriarchal society, it has been suppressed and overlooked. Feminism has empowered the confidence of women and provided the individuality identification in the patriarchal society. 1993. The evolution of the feminist movement in the literature as follows: Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own published in 1970. Routledge, 1994. Feminist Literary Criticism is the critical analysis of literary works based on feminist perspective. While in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf,  a modernist and female Victorian author, explored gender relations in her A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). The existence of inequalities between men and women are not natural but social taboo. The limitations in demonstrating Feminism It’s beyond any doubt that Charlotte Bronte has brought about the idea of feminism in this novel but she failed to demonstrate the concept perfectly. Describing the everyday world of women was a crucial initial task for the WLM – an important step towards detailing the suppressed and unvoiced oppression women experienced in daily life. Feminist Criticism (1960s-present) Feminist criticism is concerned with "the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson 83). The spirits of feminism are supposed to advocate equality between men … Third wave feminism seems to have emerged from the academy in the loosest sense – that its key spokespeople developed these ideas as a response to their own feminist education – but is equally present in popular cultural forms, as these feminists see their lives as just as powerfully shaped by popular culture, particularly music, television, film and literature. F eminism is undoubtedly the support of women by women who face domination of opposite gender and fighting against the exploitation and suppression of women in the society. from the North American Review, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1900) Laughter, War, and Feminism: Elements of Carnival in Three of Jane Austen's Novels. Whereas Simone De Beauvoir favours that there is ‘no essence’ of the woman and a woman is constructed by men. French feminists argued that women should write with a greater consciousness of their bodies, which would create a more honest and appropriate style of openness, fragmentation and non-linearity. The cause of this type of criticism lies in the oppression of women in social, political, economic and psychological literature. According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Traditionfrom 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism: 1. Earlier, feminism was limited to some female writers only but the increased number of female writers and the representation of women characters in fiction world drew large attention in the literature. Realist fiction, describing women’s lives, work and relationships, was a mainstay of feminist literature produced during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Overview of Feminist Literature In the broadest terms, "Feminist Literature" is the expression of the philosophy of feminism: that women are equal to men. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts a… It is also remarkable when she remarks ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she to write fiction’. While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. Feminist criticism is a form of literary criticism that is based on feminist theories. It could be supposed that since most of Western Europe at the time was very strongly biased towards patriarchal society models, there simply were not enough female writers to have any distinctly feminine point of view writings survive the period. However, all have become ‘gynocentric’”. As she states it in her feminism manifesto The Second Sex (1949): ‘One is not born a woman but become one’. As Showalter sums up, “English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stressed oppression, French feminist criticism, especially psychoanalyst, stresses oppression. Modern: Castellanos, Gabriela. Like her American activist, Margaret Fuller one of the famous female writers of the 19th century, in her Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845) believed that education is the means of emancipation for women and her keys planks are education, employment and political. Nonetheless, by the early eighties, feminists had advanced to a much more confrontational attack on male hegemony, advocating a complete overthrow of the biased (male) canon of literature. Thankfully, there is a branch of feminist young adult literature that is breaking away from the coming-of-age mold, and these can mostly be defined in terms of their plot devices, narratives and underlying messages apart from the characters themselves and their inner journeys. 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