Feminist literature  

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Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.

Contents

History

In the 15th Century, Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies which combats prejudices and enhances the importance of women in society. The book follows the model of De Mulieribus Claris, written in the 14th Century by Giovanni Boccaccio.

The feminist movement produced feminist fiction, feminist non-fiction, and feminist poetry, which created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. There has also been a close link between feminist literature and activism, with feminist writing typically voicing key concerns or ideas of feminism in a particular era.

Much of the early feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. In Western feminist literary scholarship, Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing.

Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early-20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s, Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of 18th-century novels written by women. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th- and 19th-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels.

Particular works of literature have come to be known as key feminist texts. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf, is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy. Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) questions the self-limiting role of the woman homemaker.

The widespread interest in women's writing is related to a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literature, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of color, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups have resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature" and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary" such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and subgenres have undergone a similar analysis, so literary studies have entered new territories such as the "female gothic" or women's science fiction.

According to Elyce Rae Helford, "Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice." Feminist science fiction is sometimes taught at the university level to explore the role of social constructs in understanding gender. Notable texts of this kind are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (1985).

Feminist nonfiction has played an important role in voicing concerns about women's lived experiences. For example, Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was extremely influential, as it represented the specific racism and sexism experienced by black women growing up in the United States.

In addition, many feminist movements have embraced poetry as a vehicle to communicate feminist ideas to public audiences through anthologies, poetry collections, and public readings.

Feminist children's literature

Feminist children's literature is the writing of children's literature through a feminist lens. Children's literature and women's literature have many similarities. Both often deal with being weak and placed towards the bottom of a hierarchy. In this way feminist ideas are regularly found in the structure of children's literature. Feminist criticism of children's literature is therefore expected, since it is a type of feminist literature. Feminist children's literature has played a critical role for the feminist movement, especially in the past half century. In her book Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks states her belief that all types of media, including writing and children's books, need to promote feminist ideals. She argues "Children's literature is one of the most crucial sites for feminist education for critical consciousness precisely because beliefs and identities are still being formed".

Feminist science fiction

Feminist science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction (abbreviated "SF") focused on theories that include feminist themes including but not limited to, gender inequality, sexuality, race, economics, and reproduction. Feminist SF is political because of its tendency to critique the dominant culture. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.

Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice. No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women's contributions (to science) are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women's desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.

This is a list of important contributions to the literature of feminism, listed by year of first publication.

15th century

16th century

17th century

1791

1798

1828

1832

1833

1834

1845

1861

1869

1872

1874

1875

1879

1880–81

1883

1886

1889

1893

1899

1905

1912

1929

1938

1949

1963

1967

1970

1971

1973

1974

  • "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?", Sherry B. Ortner

1975

1976

1977

1979

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

  • Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, Teresa de Lauretis
  • Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Select Prose (1979-1985), Adrienne Rich (especially "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence")

1987

1988

1989

1990

  • Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins
  • Echols, Alice. "Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975", University of Minnesota Press 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

  • Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein
  • Schneir, Miriam. "Feminism : The Essential Historical Writings", New York: Vintage 1994
  • Lerner, Gerda. "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy", Oxford University Press 1994

1995

1996

  • Sommers, Christina Hoff. "Who Stole Feminism? - How women have betrayed women" (1996) (ISBN 0-684-80156-6)
  • Silvers, Anita and Sterling Harwood, "Womb for Rent: Surrogate Motherhood and the Case of Baby M," in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 190-193.

1997

1998

1999

2000

2002

2004

2005

2006

  • Sarojini Sahoo- The Dark Abode ( Gambhiri Ghara in Oriya and Mithya Gerosthali in Bengali ) , (ISBN NO :ISBN No :984 404 287-9) - It is all about the providence of a woman in India, it also portrays a story how a perverted man becomes slowly as a perfect man, it describes the relation between the ‘state’ and the ‘individual’ and comes in a conclusion that ‘the state’ represents the mood and wish of a ruler and hence ‘the state’ is a form of ‘an individual’.The novel has been translated in to Bangla and published from Bangladesh in 2007.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Feminist literature" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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