A Literature of Their Own

by Showalter, Elaine

• ISBN13: 9780691004761
• ISBN10: 0691004765
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-12-28
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

When first published in 1977,A Literature of Their Ownquickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today. This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE EXPANDED EDITION	vii	(2)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix	(2)
INTRODUCTION Twenty Years On: A Literature of Their Own Revisited	xi
I The Female Tradition	3	(34)
II The Feminine Novelists and the Will to Write	37	(36)
III The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel	73	(27)
IV Feminine Heroines: Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot	100	(33)
V Feminine Heroes: The Woman's Man	133	(20)
VI Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest	153	(29)
VII The Feminist Novelists	182	(34)
VIII Women Writers and the Suffrage Movement	216	(24)
IX The Female Aesthetic	240	(23)
X Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny	263	(35)
XI Beyond the Female Aesthetic: Contemporary Women Novelists	298	(22)
XII Laughing Medusa	320	(17)
INDEX	337