Making a Difference : Feminist Literary Criticism

An invaluable overview of feminist critical thinking. The essays address a wide range of topics including: the politics of language; feminist readings of the canon; psychoanalysis and feminism; French theories of the feminine.

Feminist scholarship employs gender as a fundamental organizing category of human experience, holding two related premises: men and women have different perceptions or experiences in the same contexts, the male perspective having been dominant in fields of knowledge; and that gender is not a natural fact but a social construct, a subject to study in any humanistic discipline. This challenging collection of essays by prominent feminist literary critics offers a comprehensive introduction to modes of critical practice being used to trace the construction of gender in literature.
The collection provides an invaluable overview of current femionist critical thinking. Its essays address a wide range of topics: the rerlevance of gender scholarship in the social sciences to literary criticism; the tradition of women''s literature and its relation to the canon; the politics of language; French theories of the feminine; psychoanalysis and feminism; feminist criticism of writing by lesbians and black women; the relationship between female subjectivity, class, and sexuality; feminist readings of the canon.