Literature after Feminism

Recent commentators have portrayed feminist critics as grim—faced ideologues who are destroying the study of literature. Feminists, they claim, reduce art to politics and are hostile to any form of aesthetic pleasure. Literature after Feminism is the first work to comprehensively rebut such caricatures, while also offering a clear—eyed assessment of the relative merits of various feminist approaches to literature.

Spelling out her main arguments clearly and succinctly, Rita Felski explains h...