Title: What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism? | Pen and the Pad
Headings: What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism?
What Is the Feminist Approach to Literary Criticism?
Historical Origins of the Movement
Challenges to the Literary Canon
Textual Analysis

Content: For this reason, writers like Josephine Donovan hope to recapture the radical basis for feminist literary criticism by reinvigorating it with both the political and ethical components inherent in the inception of the movement. By exploring previously ignored writers and studying the women's literary tradition, critics hope to unveil previously held assumptions that marginalize the place of women in society. Textual Analysis
Another popular approach to feminist literary criticism is to examine closely what the text says, or as the case may be, does not say. In other words, what the text leaves out says much about the writer, literature in general, and society as a whole. By using this "hermeneutics of suspicion" literary critics hope to reveal how women are marginalized in the language of literature, according to Ady. In some ways, this approach to literary criticism assumes that there is an unconscious transference of previously held assumptions to the text through the act of writing. What is written reveals what society believes. Influenced by the rise of post-modernism, feminist literary critics believe that the act of writing is not neutral, instead it is influenced by the values of the writer who then transfers those values to the text, often unintentionally. By understanding these values, feminist literary critics hope to reveal these subconscious ideas to show how women have been marginalized in literature. References
"Feminist Literary Criticism: