Title: Elaine Showalter - Wikipedia
Headings: Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter
Contents
Personal life
Career
Critical importance
Gynocritics
Criticism and controversy
Feminist theory and criticism
Hysteria and "modern" illnesses
Popular culture
Academic teaching
Summaries of major works
Archives
Bibliography
References
Further reading
External links

Content: Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space" ( New, 260). Showalter does not advocate replacing psychoanalysis, for example, with cultural anthropology; rather, she suggests that approaching women's writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions. However, cultural anthropology and social history are especially fruitful because they "can perhaps offer us a terminology and a diagram of women's cultural situation" ( New, 266). Showalter's caveat is that feminist critics must use cultural analyses as ways to understand what women write, rather than to dictate what they ought to write ( New, 266). However isolationist-like Showalter's perspective may sound at first, she does not advocate a separation of the female tradition from the male tradition. She argues that women must work both inside and outside the male tradition simultaneously ( New, 264). Showalter says the most constructive approach to future feminist theory and criticism lies in a focus on nurturing a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that at the same time exists within the male tradition, but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable. Gynocritics
Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" to describe literary criticism based in on a female perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics :