The Companion to Feminist Literary Theory

Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language. This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method. The essays draw on a range of primary material from the medieval period to postmodernism and from several countries, disciplines and genres. Each essay suggests further reading to explore this field further. This is the most accessible guide available both for students of literature new to this developing field, and for students of gender studies and readers interested in the interactions of feminism, literary criticism and literature.

Contents:

On canons : anxious history and the rise of black feminist literary studies / Ann Ducille 
Pleasure, resistance, and a feminist aesthetics of reading / Geraldine Heng 
The literary politics of feminist theory / Ellen Rooney 
What feminism did to novel studies / Nancy Armstrong
Autobiography and the feminist subject / Linda Anderson 
Modernisms and feminisms / Katherine Mullin 
French feminism's écriture féminine / Kari Weil 
Feminism and popular culture / Nickianne Moody 
Poststructuralism : theory as critical self-consciousness / Rey Chow
Feminists theorize colonial/postcolonial / Rosemary Marangoly George 
On common ground? : feminist theory and critical race studies
Feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism / Elizabeth Weed 
Queer politics, queer theory, and the future of identity : spiralling out of culture / Berthold Schoene.