Title: Feminist Approaches to Literature | Great Writers Inspire
Headings: Feminist Approaches to Literature
Feminist Approaches to Literature
The Traditions of Feminist Criticism
Depictions of Women by Men
Rise of the Woman Writer
Women Writers and Class
Also see sections on the following writers:

Content: By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl, Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts. Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition. What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists? Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love. How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi? Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.