Gender and Race

Abstract

Feminist criticism and theory have become a force in modern literary criticism only within the last thirty years. The first critics to make an impact were the ‘images of women’ group who focussed on how women were depicted in works written by men. Their main concern was, as Josephine Donovan puts it, ‘to determine the degree to which sexist ideology controls the text’.¹ Later feminists tended to believe that this approach was too negative and that it gave too much emphasis to the work of men. These feminist critics shifted the focus to women’s writing. They argued that there was a specifically female tradition of writing. Elaine Showalter coined the term ‘gynocritics’ to categorise this form of feminist criticism.