A history of feminist literary criticism /

This comprehensive, concise historical analysis of literary feminist criticism opens by looking at medieval women writers and the "proto" female textual tradition and offering homages to Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir. The second section, devoted to second-wave feminist criticism, grapples with the controversies that mark any significant movement. These essays ask whether a separate women's literary tradition simply creates an alternative, marginalized canon and, more important, how the feminist literary critic should embrace diverse representations of class, self-identified ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender (black feminist criticism, lesbian feminist criticism, and autobiography and personal criticism are documented and evaluated). The third section examines postmodern criticism--poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, French feminist criticism, queer theory, technologies of the body. Chris Weedon offers a particularly cogent exegesis of postcolonial feminist criticism, noting that all feminist criticism is political and seeks to transform the traditions it interprets. Though not as original or provocative as Feminisms, ed. by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (CH, Jan'98, 35-2565), this title offers a chronological, well-researched history. Many essays are dense because (as the astute reader will understand) many women scholars, acutely aware of the absence of women in literary tradition, prefer abundance to exclusion. Excellent notes and bibliographies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. M. Wood Park University