Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined in the seventies by Elaine Showalter to describe a new literary project intended to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".

By expanding the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace male models of literary creation, and so "map the territory" left unexplored in earlier literary criticisms.

History

While previous figures like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir had already begun to review and evaluate the female image in literature,

Development as a literary critique

Gynocriticism also examines the female struggle for identity and the social construct of gender. Arguing that male 'phallic prejudice'

Achievements and limitations

Gynocriticism helped reclaim from obscurity a vast body of early female writings, often published in Virago, as well as producing such feminist classics as The Madwoman in the Attic. However its very successes left it open to new challenges from within feminism. Poststructuralists complained that it fetishized the role of the author, at the expense of the reader and the text, and that its grand narrative, setting up a female canon in opposition to the male, was essentialist, and omitted differences and divisions among women, leaving out lesbians and women of color, for example.

Race, class, social interest, political inclination, religion and sexuality

See also

References

Further reading

  • Groden, Michael and Martin Kreiswurth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
  • virtuaLit Fiction page on Feminist Criticism