Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism / Edition 2

by Robyn Warhol

Overview

In the landmark 1991 edition of Feminisms, Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl assembled the most comprehensive collection of American and British feminist literary criticism ever to be published. In this revised edition, the editors have updated the volume, in keeping with the expanded parameters of feminist literary discourse. With the inclusion of more than two dozen new essays, along with a major reorganization of the sections in which they appear, Warhol and Price Herndl have again established the measure for representing the latest developments in the field of feminist literary theory. Believing that the feminist movement can only move forward "where difference commands attention, not dismissal or negativism," they have continued the original collection's mission of providing a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches.


This anthology contains three new sections ("Conflict," "Gaze," and "Practice") and includes more selections by and about women of color and lesbians. Aimed at academics and the general public alike, this collection is an indispensable guide to the range of practice on campus today in the field of feminist literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900813523896
Publication date:	06/01/1997
Pages:	1232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Robyn R. Warhol is a professor of English and director of women's studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Rutgers University Press). Diane Price Herndl is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces and the author of Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940.

Table of Contents

Women and madness: the critical phallacy / Shoshana Felman
Infection in the sentence: the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship / Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar
A mindless man-driven theory machine: intellectuality, sexuality, and the institution of criticism / James J. Sosnoski
The highs and lows of black feminist criticism / Barbara Christian
Confinements: the domestic in the discourses of upper-middle-class pregnancy / Helena Michie
What has never been: an overview of lesbian feminist literary criticism / Bonnie Zimmerman
Anomalousness ; Aesthetics / Joanna Russ
Treason our text: feminist challenges to the literary canon / Lillian S. Robinson
Caste, class, and canon / Paul Lauter
Reflections on black women writers: revising the literary canon / Nellie McKay
Dancing through the minefield: some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism / Annette Kolodny
Archimedes and the paradox of feminist criticism / Myra Jehlen
A criticism of our own: autonomy and assimilation in Afro-American and feminist literary theory / Elaine Showalter
Recycling: race, gender, and the practice of theory / Deborah E. McDowell
The wild zone thesis as gloss in Chicana literary study / Cordelia Chávez Candelaria
Storming the toolshed / Jane Marcus
The madwoman and her languages: why I don't do feminist literary theory / Nina Baym
Feminist politics: what's home got to do with it? / Biddy Martin, Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Black feminist theory and the representation of the other / Valerie Smith
Upping the anti [sic] in feminist theory / Teresa de Lauretis
The laugh of the Medusa / Hélène Cixous
This sex which is not one / Luce Irigaray
Writing the body: toward an understanding of l'Écriture féminine / Ann Roselind Jones
Mama's baby, papa's maybe: an American grammar book / Hortense J. Spillers
Women of color writers and feminist theory / Margaret Homans
Another cause: castration / Luce Irigaray
Visual pleasure and narrative cinema / Laura Mulvey
The situation of the looker-on: gender, narration, and gaze in Wuthering Heights / Beth Newman
When Virginia looked at Vita, what did she see; or Lesbian: feminist: woman : what's the differ(e/a)nce? / Elizabeth Meese
The father's seduction / Jane Gallop
Introduction from Between men ; Gender asymmetry and erotic triangles / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Sylvia Townsend Warner and the counterplot of lesbian fiction / Terry Castle
Male heroes and female sex objects: sexism in Spike Lee's Malcolm X / Bell Hooks
Introduction: on the politics of literature / Judith Fetterley
The readers and their romances / Janice Radway
Reading ourselves: toward a feminist theory of reading / Patrocinio P. Schweickart
Feminism, new historicism, and the reader / Wai-Chee Dimock
Constructing the subject: deconstructing the text / Catherine Belsey
Toward a feminist narratology / Susan S. Lanser
Apostrophe, animation, and abortion / Barbara Johnson
Gender in Bakhtin's Carnival / Dale Bauer
When a long poem is a big poem: self-authorizing strategies in women's twentieth-century long poems / Susan Stanford Friedman
Kochinninako in academe: three approaches to interpreting a Keres Indian tale / Paula Gunn Allen
La conciencia de la mestiza: towards a new consciousness / Gloria Anzaldúa
I'm here: an Asian American woman's response / Amy Ling
The truth that never hurts: black lesbians in fiction in the 1980s / Barbara Smith
Feminist and ethnic theories in Asian American literature / Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Black writing, white reading: race and the politics of feminist interpretation / Elizabeth Abel
Women's time / Julia Kristeva
Power and the ideology of woman's sphere / Judith Lowder Newton
Three women's texts and a critique of imperialism / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Some call it fiction: on the politics of domesticity / Nancy Armstrong
The queen of America goes to Washington city: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill / Lauren Berlant
Pandora's box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism / Cora Kaplan
Romance in the age of electronics: Harlequin Enterprises / Leslie Rabine
I shop therefore I am: is there a place for Afro-American culture in commodity culture? / Susan Willis
Discourses of gender, ethnicity and class in Chicano literature / Rosaura Sánchez
Reading woman (reading) / Mary Jacobus
Masculinity as excess in Vietnam films: the father/son dynamic of American culture / Susan Jeffords
Creation by the father's fiat: paternal narrative, sexual anxiety, and the deauthorizing designs of Absalom, absalom! / Joseph A. Boone
Pedagogy and sexuality / Joseph Litvak
Me and my shadow / Jane Tompkins
Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman warrior: filiality and woman's autobiographical storytelling / Sidonie Smith
Authorizing the autobiographical / Shari Benstock
The long goodbye: against personal testimony, or an infant grifter grows up / Linda S. Kauffman

Editorial Reviews

Warhol and Herndl (English, Univ. of Vermont) have cumulated 58 previously published essays on 19th- and 20th-century British and North American texts that were written between the mid-1970s and 1990 by 53 widely known feminist literary critics representing a variety of critical perspectives, including Anglo-American, French, Marxist, structuralist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic, among others. This anthology, the most comprehensive available, is one of the few that crosses the boundaries between these various feminist approaches. In addition, the editors' illuminating summaries of each essay in their introductions to the book's 13 sections, each of which is devoted to a particular issue in feminist criticism, constitute a valuable overview of the field and distinguish the book from other collections. The editors offer a strong case for their selections and for some notable omissions. Highly recommended for collections in literary criticism and women's studies.-- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT , Cambridge, Mass.

Library Journal

Everything you might want to know about the history and practice of feminist criticism in North America.

Feminist Bookstore News

Admirably comprehensive, intelligently organized and introduced, with a wide array of challenging yet accessible essays... For the theoretically inclined, this would be an ideal book to take to a desert island.

Belles Lettres