Problems for feminist criticism

Feminist criticism has come a long way in the 20 years since Kate Millett's seminal Sexual Politics was published. Its development has been rapid, its snowball progress picking up elements of structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic criticism just as rapidly as it has been shedding its own early theories and methodologies. Now it is a critical orthodoxy with its own established canonical texts. Now is the time, then, to begin to question that orthodoxy. Problems for Feminist Criticism seeks to do that, in a spirit of enquiry whose central point of focus is the literature for which feminist critics have offered a re-reading. In essays on a range of key writers, from Milton to contemporary poets, and with a strong emphasis on the 19th century novel, five women critics ask what we may be losing from literature by adopting the feminist orthodoxy. Each chapter also provides a useful survey of feminist critical approaches to its subject. Diversity and openness of approach are key elements in this post-feminist work, which frees the way forward to critics who have found much that is stimulating and revealing in feminist approaches to literature, but who find its proscriptiveness potentially reductive. Contributors include highly experienced and widely published critics - Barbara Hardy and Barbara Lewalski - alongside newer voices. Problems For Feminist Criticism shows the flexibility which enables writing to absorb and benefit from new critical approaches, whilst still retaining its own life, never quite to be contained in criticism's theories and methodologies.