1. The Feminist Approach

2. Overview Feminism has often focused upon what is absent rather than what is present, reflecting concern with silencing and marginalization of women in a patriarchal culture. Feminism is overtly political (unlike other literary approaches we have examined so far) and can attack other approaches for their false assumptions about women. Books like The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir; The Feminine Mystique (1963),Friedan and Sexual Politics (1970), Millet shaped the ideology behind feminine literary criticism.

3. Phases Elaine Showalter, one of the leading feminine critics in the U.S., came up with these three phases: 1. “Feminine” phase (1840-1880)  Women writers imitated the dominant tradition 2. “Feminist” phase (1880-1920)  Women advocated rights and protested 3. “Female” phase (1920-present)  Rediscovery of woman's’ texts and women

4. Feminist Critics See the very act of speaking- of having a language- as a focus for studying women writers, so often silenced in the past in a patriarchal literary canon. Goal: To promote discovery and reevaluation of literature by women, and to examine social and cultural contexts of literature and literary criticisms.

5. Marxist Feminism Focuses on the relation between reading and social realities. Marxist feminists attack the prevailing capitalistic system of the West, which they view as sexually as well as economically exploitative. They direct their attention toward conditions of production of literary texts- economics of publishing and distributing texts. Matter vs. manner of a text.

6. Taken from A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, Fifth Edition.