Gender and Genre

I have to begin with two disclaimers. Firstly, I am not speaking as an expert on the short story. My aim is to provide some introductory remarks about the relationship between gender and genre in the hope that short story afficionados can extrapolate and develop their own particular connections. 1 I am speaking from my interest in feminist literary criticism, but here lies my second disclaimer, for feminist criticism which has had so much to say about women writers, about literary production, about questions of style, about the construction of meaning, has had much less to say about genre. The silence is not total: the difficulty for women writers to gain access to the major genres has been the subject of critical discussion. Equally, with the development of cultural studies, there has been a growing interest in popular female forms such as romance fiction, or women’s rewritings of male-dominated forms — the detective story or science fiction. 2 But at the moment much of the work lacks detail and specificity. Even that most obvious of research areas — women’ s place in the development of the novel — is only now beginning to get the close analysis it deserves. As late as 1986 Jane Spencer could introduce her study of this very issue with the words: Eighteenth-century England witnessed two remarkable and interconnected literary events: the emergence of the novel and the establishment of the professional woman writer. The first of these has been extensively documented and debated, while the second has been largely ignored. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.