Sample Essay

JELTL (Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics) e-ISSN: 2502-6062, p-ISSN: 2503-1848 www.jeltl.org, 2018

Feminist literary criticism is a literary criticism knowledgeable by feminist theory, or, more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses feminist principles and ideology to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narratives of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. Feminism emerged as an important force in the western world in the 1960s when women realized the attitude of their male colleagues who swore about equality, was actually the strategy used by them to keep women subservient, then a revolution by women to fight against them, and against racism and sexism was felt. This awakening spread over and as a result, feminist criticism emerged on as an offshoot of women's Liberation Movement. Beginning with the interrogation of male-centric literature that portrayed women in a demeaning and oppressed model, theorist such as Marry Ellman, Kate Millet, and Germaine Greer challenged past imaginations of the feminine within literary scholarship. It is very important for us to know that who these women writers are, what did they write and what were the sources of their writings. The present paper focuses on some of the above said important aspects of feminist writings and some of the famous feminist writers also.

JELTL (Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics) e-ISSN: 2502-6062, p-ISSN: 2503-1848 2018, www.jeltl.org, 2018

Feminist literary criticism is a literary criticism knowledgeable by feminist theory, or, more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses feminist principles and ideology to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narratives of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. Feminism emerged as an important force in the western world in the 1960s when women realized the attitude of their male colleagues who swore about equality, was actually the strategy used by them to keep women subservient, then a revolution by women to fight against them, and against racism and sexism was felt. This awakening spread over and as a result, feminist criticism emerged on as an offshoot of women's Liberation Movement. Beginning with the interrogation of male-centric literature that portrayed women in a demeaning and oppressed model, theorist such as Marry Ellman, Kate Millet, and Germaine Greer challenged past imaginations of the feminine within literary scholarship. It is very important for us to know that who these women writers are, what did they write and what were the sources of their writings. The present paper focuses on some of the above said important aspects of feminist writings and some of the famous feminist writers also.

Essay on the role of women in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Also compares and contrasts the roles of Elizabethan women to modern women.

1996

Since the 1970s a wide range of feminist writers have made a significant contribution to scholarship by uncovering the lost histories of real women as well as revealing the subversive zone occupied by women's imagined reconstructions of reality. Another aspect of the critical project has been to reveal the complex operation of patriarchy, or to recover dissident readings lurking within traditional texts. In these terms, the literary canon has been challenged, both from with, and from the outside – from the position of exclusion, silence, and oppression. Although feminists share many ideas in common, regarding the role of power, for instance, the diversity of current work calls for the notion of feminisms, rather than a single system-driven ideology. In this regard, feminist scholarship and cultural production both reveals the dominant gender binary, while simultaneously deconstructing the shifting boundaries. Historically, the dominant role of patriarchy was generally evident until the close of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there are numerous examples of challenges to the ruling gender divisions that dis-empowered women. Writing offered opportunities to explore the injustice and cruelty endured by women, but it was also a space to imagine a different kind of society in which women's lives might be improved, and men's dominant role(s) contested. In the eighteenth century, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other social commentators and political writers were beginning to suggest that the two sexes were complementary rather than opposition. Ironically, women's roles were increasingly celebrated in the same moment that more rigid notions of what was deemed appropriate behaviour were adopted: women were adoring mothers, caring wives, and domestic angels; those who fell short of this ideal were to be despised as whores. In contrast, men occupied the public sphere and enjoyed both economic independence and commodified ownership of their wives. Curiously, men often enjoyed other women in extramarital affairs; such was the hypocritical double-standard of Victorian patriarchy.

2016

Reading Women's Writing is an advanced level text book published for undergraduates studying women's writing in English from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subject guide has been designed to enable students to read writing by women in relation to social, historical and literary contexts and in relation to its meaning for contemporary readers. Combining the writers’ research and pedagogy in the field of women’s writing, this publication aims to develop students’ reading skills with reference to questions of gender, genre and the representation of sexual difference. It will introduce students to some of the contemporary debates in feminist theories of women’s writing. The publication includes a sample syllabus, learning activities, bibliographies and sample essay questions.

Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching and Literature, 2006