feminist criticism
feminist criticism,a modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defence of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment. The beginnings of this movement are to be found in the journalism of Rebecca West from about 1910 . More influential as founding documents are the essays of V. Woolf , notably A Room of One's Own ( 1929 ) and Three Guineas ( 1938 ), and S. de Beauvoir 's book Le Deuxième Sexe ( 1949 ; The Second Sex, 1953 ). In its developed form, the tradition was reborn amid the cultural ferment of the post- 1968 period, especially in the United States. The misogynist or belittling attitudes of male critics and novelists were subjected to ironic scrutiny in Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women ( 1968 ) and to iconoclastic rage in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics ( 1970 ), the latter...
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