Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (Routledge Library Editions: Women, Feminism and Literature) - Softcover

Gallop, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415752310 ISBN 13: 9780415752312

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

Synopsis

Jane Gallop’s book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being ‘academic’?

Gallop takes the novel approach of structuring her inquiry around anthologies of feminist criticism: twelve important texts that have had a wide impact on more than a decade of scholarship. In reading an anthology as a whole, she typically identifies a central, hegemonic voice (usually that of the editor/s) which would organise all the voices into a unity, and then explores the resistance within that volume to such a unity. Weight is placed behind these internal differences as a wedge against the centrist drive.

Around 1981 addresses briefly ‘french feminism’ and psychoanalytic feminism before focusing on its principal subject: the mainstream of feminist literary criticism, before and after its general acceptance as part of the changing institution of literary studies. This brilliantly illuminates the dilemma of the feminist critic, divided by her allegiance to both feminism and literary studies.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Thinking Through the Body, Reading Lacan, Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, and Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0415752310
• ISBN 13: 9780415752312
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288