xxv, 475 pages ; 23 cm

First published in 1986 with a second edition in 1996, Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader constitutes one of the classic texts of second-into-third-wave feminist literary studies. Both a history and a survey of the varied positions within feminist literary theory, the Reader includes extracts from all the major critics, critical approaches, and theoretical positions in contemporary feminist literary studies

Includes bibliographical references and index

Part I: Finding a female tradition -- Extract from: A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf -- Extract from: A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing / Elaine Showalter -- Extract from: 'Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence' / Adrienne Rich -- Extract from: Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory / Chris Weedon -- Extract from: 'The rise of black feminist literary studies' / Anne Ducille -- Extract from: 'Race and gender in the shaping of the American literary canon: a case study from the twenties' / Paul Lauter -- Extract from: 'Telling feminist stories' / Clare Hemmings -- Extract from: Doing time: feminist theory and postmodernist culture / Rita Felski -- Extract from: 'Happy families? Feminist reproduction and matrilineal thought' / Linda R. Williams -- Extract from: Literary relations: kinship and the canon / Jane Spencer -- Extract from: 'Parables and politics: feminist criticism in 1986' / Nancy K. Miller -- Extract from: 'What women's eyes see' / Viviane Forrester -- Extract from: 'Women and madness: the critical phallacy' / Shoshana Felman -- Extract from: Writing women's literary history / Margaret J.M. Ezell -- Extract from: The professionalization of women writers in eighteenth-century Britain / Betty A. Schellenberg -- Part II: Women and literary production -- Extract from: A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf -- Extract from: 'Professions for women' / Virginia Woolf -- Extract from: Silences / Tillie Olsen -- Extract from: The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar -- Extract from: 'Writing like a woman: a question of politics' / Terry Lovell -- Extract from: The rise of the woman novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen / Jane Spencer -- Extract from: 'Emily Brontë in the hands of male critics' / Carol Ohmann -- Extract from: 'Toward a black feminist criticism' / Barbara Smith -- Extract from: 'Christina Rossetti: diary of a feminist reading' / Isobel Armstrong -- Extract from: 'Conversations' / Hélène Cixous et al. -- Extract from: 'Mapping contemporary women's fiction after Bourdieu' / Mary Eagleton -- Extract from: Marketing literature: the making of contemporary writing in Britain / Claire Squires -- Extract from: The postcolonial exotic: marketing the margins / Graham Huggin -- Extract from: The women of Grub Street: press, politics, and gender in the London literary marketplace 1678-1730 / Paula McDowell -- Extract from: 'Black woman talk' / Black Woman Talk Collective -- Extract from: 'Introduction', Let it be told: essays by black women in Britain / Lauretta Ngcobo -- Extract from: Mixed media: feminist presses and publishing politics / Simone Murray -- Extract from: 'Pushed to the margins: the slow death and possible rebirth of the feminist bookstore' / Kathryn McGrath -- Part III: Gender and genre -- A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf -- Literary women / Ellen Moers -- 'Femininity, narrative and psychoanalysis' / Juliet Mitchell -- Desire and domestic fiction: a political history of the novel / Nancy Armstrong -- 'Towards a feminist narratology' / Susan S. Lanser -- Heterosexual plots and lesbian narratives / Marilyn R. Farwell -- Having a good cry: effeminate feelings and pop-culture forms / Robyn R. Warhol -- 'Introduction', Aurora Leigh and other poems / Cora Kaplan -- 'Small island people: black British women playwrights' / Meenakshi Ponnuswami -- 'Varieties of women's writing' / Clare Brant -- Fanstasy: the literature of subversion / Rosemary Jackson -- Female desire: women's sexuality today / Rosalind Coward -- Forever England: femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars / Alison Light -- The feminine middlebrow novel, 1920s to 1950s: class, domesticity, and bohemianism / Nicola Humble -- 'Afterword: the new woman's fiction' / Shari Benstock -- Myth and fairy tale in contemporary women's fiction / Susan Sellers -- Part IV: Towards definitions of feminist writing -- ' "This novel changes lives": Are women's novels feminist novels? A response to Rebecca O'Rourke's article "Summer Reading" ' / Rosalind Coward -- 'Feminism and the definition of cultural politics' / Michèle Barrett -- 'What is lesbian literature? forming a historical canon' / Lillian Faderman -- 'American feminist literary criticism: a bibliographical introduction' / Cheri Register -- 'Introduction', Feminism meets queer theory / Elizabeth Weed -- 'Dancing through the minefield: some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism' / Annette Kolodny -- 'Towards a feminist poetics' / Elaine Showalter -- Sexual/textual politics: feminist literary theory / Toril Moi -- Gynesis: configurations of woman and modernity / Alice A. Jardine -- 'Flight reservations: the Anglo-American/French divide in feminist criticism' / Rachel Bowlby -- 'Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism' / Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson -- 'Mapping the lesbian postmodern' / Robyn Wiegman -- Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics / Bell Hooks -- Signs and cities: black literary postmodernism / Madhu Dubey -- Mappings: feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter / Susan Stanford Friedman -- The radical aesthetic / Isobel Armstrong -- What is a woman? and other essays / Toril Moi -- Undoing gender / Judith Butler -- 'The race for theory' / Barbara Christian -- 'Woman can never be defined' / Julia Kristeva -- 'Discursive desire: Catherine Belsey's feminism' / Marysa Demoor and Jürgen Pieters -- Part V: Writing, reading and difference -- Literary women / Ellen Moers -- Thinking about women / Mary Ellmann -- 'Writing like a woman' / Peggy Kamuf -- Reading woman: essays in feminist criticism / Mary Jacobus -- 'Talking about polylogue' / Julia Kristeva -- Subject to change: reading feminist writing / Nancy K. Miller -- The resisting reader / Judith Fetterley -- 'Reading as a woman' / Jonathan Culler -- 'Reading like a man' / Robert Scholes -- 'How to read a "culturally different" book' / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- The woman reader, 1837-1914 / Kate Flint -- Provincial readers in eighteenth-century England / Jan Fergus -- Reading groups / Jenny Hartley -- 'The powers of discourse and the subordination of the feminine / Luce Irigaray -- 'The laugh of the Medusa' / Hélène Cixous -- 'Castration or decapitation?' / Hélène Cixous -- 'Language and revolution: the Franco-American dis-connection' / Domna C. Stanton -- 'Made in America: "French feminism" in academia' / Claire Goldberg Moses -- Hélène Cixous rootprints: memory and life writing / Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber -- Part VI: Locating the subject -- 'A question of subjectivity: an interview' / Julia Kristeva -- 'Femininity and its discontents' / Jacqueline Rose -- Critical practice / Catherine Belsey -- What does a woman want? reading and sexual difference / Shoshana Felman -- A feeling for books: the book-of-the-month club, literary taste, and middle-class desire / Janice A. Radway -- 'Sexual difference and collective identities: the new global constellation' / Seyla Benhabib -- Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory' / Linda Alcoff -- 'Upping the anti [sic] in feminist theory' / Teresa de Lauretis -- Essentially speaking: feminism, nature and diffference / Diana Fuss -- 'A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s' / Donna Haraway -- Borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza / Gloria Anzaldúa -- Black women, writing and identity: migrations of the subject / Carole Boyce Davies -- 'The straight mind' / Monique Wittig -- Epistemology of the closet / Kosofsky Sedgwick -- 'Of OncoMice and FemaleMen: Donna Haraway on cyborg ontology' / Kate Soper -- Part VII: Writing 'glocal' -- En-gendering India: woman and nation in colonial and postcolonial narratives / Sangeeta Ray -- Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities / Avtar Brah -- Rethinking orientalism: women, travel and the Ottoman harem / Reina Lewis -- 'French feminism in an international frame' / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- 'Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses' / Chandra Talpade Mohanty -- Woman, native, other: writing postcoloniality and feminism / Trinh T. Minh-ha -- 'Woman skin deep: feminism and the postcolonial condition' / Sara Suleri -- Writing diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies / Rey Chow -- Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation / Mary Louise Pratt -- Victorian travel writing and imperial violence: British writing on Africa 1855-1902 / Laura E. Franey -- 'Introduction', Going global: the transnational reception of third world women writers / Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj -- Postcolonial studies: a materialist critique / Benita Parry -- Blood, bread, and poetry: selected prose 1979-1985 / Adrienne Rich -- Questions of travel: postmodern discourses of displacement / Caren Kaplan -- Imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial context / Anne McClintock -- Transnational women's fiction: unsettling home and homeland / Susan Strehle -- Stories of women: gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation / Elleke Boehmer -- Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory / Rosi Braidotti

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