Feminist literary criticism

These goals, along with the intent to analyze women writers and their writings from a female perspective, and increase awareness of the sexual politics of language and style[3] were developed by Lisa Tuttle in the 1980s, and have since been adopted by a majority of feminist critics.

Scholars under the camp known as Feminine Critique sought to divorce literary analysis away from abstract diction-based arguments and instead tailored their criticism to more "grounded" pieces of literature (plot, characters, etc.)

"[6] More contemporary scholars attempt to understand the intersecting points of femininity and complicate our common assumptions about gender politics by accessing different categories of identity (race, class, sexual orientation, etc.)

By employing a wide range of female sexual exploration and lesbian and queer identities by those like Rita Felski and Judith Bennet, women were able attract more attention about feminist topics in literature.

It has also considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment.

[9] The more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women's lives has continued to play an active role in criticism.

More specifically, modern feminist criticism deals with those issues related to the perceived intentional and unintentional patriarchal programming within key aspects of society including education, politics and the work force.

[6] While the beginning of more mainstream feminist literary criticism is typically considered during second-wave feminism, there are multiple texts prior to that era that contributed greatly to the field.

Beginning with the interrogation of male-centric literature that portrayed women in a demeaning and oppressed model, theorists such as Mary Ellman, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer challenged past imaginations of the feminine within literary scholarship.

Its compilation of poems, short stories and essays gave rise to new institutionally supported forms of Black literary scholarship.

In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, an analysis of women's poetry and prose, and how it fits into the larger feminist literary canon.

The book specifically argues that women have largely been considered in two distinct categories by men in academia, monsters or angels.

Today, writers like Gloria E. Anzaldúa have been able to contribute to the feminist canon, while still working with writing forms other than full-sized novels.

In the 1980s, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, Nellie McKay, Valerie Smith, Hortense Spillers, Eleanor Traylor, Cheryl Wall and Sheryl Ann Williams all contributed heavily to the Black Feminist Scholarship of the period.

[18] New Feminist literature and criticism minimize the focus on male influences and disruptions in a woman's text by socio-political hegemony to better uncover the universal unconscious of the female mind in its own context.