Title: 
Headings: 

Content: This approach “examines how sexual
identity influences the creation and reception of literary works.” Originally
an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a number of
approaches, including the so-called “masculinist” approach recently
advocated
by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and
takes as a central precept that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated
western thought have resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature
“full of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.” Feminist
criticism attempts
to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes—by
questioning, for example, why none of the characters in Shakespeare’s play
Othelloever challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife accused
of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how sexual
identity influences the reader of a text” and “examin[ing] how the
images of
men and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces
that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.” Psychological Criticism: This approach reflects the effect
that modern psychology has had upon both literature and literary criticism. Fundamental figures in psychological criticism include Sigmund Freud, whose
“psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human behavior by
exploring new
or controversial areas like wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and
repression” as well as expanding our understanding of how “language
and symbols
operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or
desires”; and Carl Jung, whose theories about the unconscious are also a
key
foundation of Mythological Criticism. Psychological criticism has a number of approaches, but in general, it usually
employs one (or more) of three approaches: