FEMINIST CRITICISM: Women as Contemporary Critics

This important critical study explores the main features of contemporary feminist literary criticism in Great Britain, America and France. It shows how feminist critics, while writing out their critical “fathers”, have created innovatory critical strategies in a new literary history.
Maggie Humm outlines the general problematics within the field, examines the contribution of such contemporary feminist pioneers as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, and analyses the techniques of linguistics and psychoanalysis, Marxist-feminism, myth criticism, black and lesbian criticism.
The second part of the book focuses on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Adrienne Rich, placing particular emphasis on the relationship in their work between the intellectual theories of the time, as created by men, and their own feminist voices. Maggie Humm suggests that this, together with a range of feminist ideas, makes feminist literary criticism more than simply an addition to literary criticism – it is a radical and important body of knowledge.

Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She is the editor of Feminisms: A Reader, and author of Practising Feminist Criticism, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism and the Dictionary of Feminist Theory.