Volume 37, Number 9 · May 31, 1990
Feminism and Literature
By Helen Vendler
Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change
by Rita Felski
Harvard University Press, 223 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader
edited by Karen V. Hansen, edited by Ilene J. Philipson
Temple University Press, 624 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Feminism/Postmodernism
edited and with an introduction by Linda J. Nicholson
Routledge, 348 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century
edited by Katharina M. Wilson, edited by Frank J. Warnke
University of Georgia Press, 545 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology
edited by Roger Lonsdale
Oxford University Press, 555 pp., $35.00
Hamlet's Mother and Other Women
by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Columbia University Press, 266 pp., $29.95
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century Vol. I, The War of the Words Vol. II, Sexchanges
by Sandra Gilbert, by Susan Gubar
Yale University Press, Vol. II, 464 pp., $29.95
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
by Camille Paglia
Yale University Press, 718 pp., $35.00
The political, social, medical, and personal struggle for women's equality has had many heroines in the practical world, but its ventures in the intellectual sphere have had uneven results. Of these the clearest successes seem to be in the fields of history and sociology, where newly retrieved information about women's lives, interesting in itself, also has explanatory power. Explorations in my own subject, literary criticism, have seemed to me more dubious. It is not from any lack of sympathy for the practical and legal goals of the women's movement that I have often felt disquiet in reading what used to be called 'feminist criticism' or 'feminist literary theory,' and is now sometimes called 'feminist cultural analysis.' A number of new books in this vein, both good and bad, suggest some of the pitfalls and possible benefits of this work. I shall also look at a book diametrically opposed to feminist positions, but unsuccessful in its own counterclaims.
Review, 7809 words
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