Paper no:7 Literary theory & criticism :2 Prepared by:Kavita .D. Mehta Semester:2 Email Id:kavitamehta164@gmail.com Enrollment no:2069108420170020 S.M.T S.B Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnkumarsihji Bhavnagar

University

Feminist criticism

What is Feminist criticism Feminist criticism is a

literary form of criticism that gives the perspective of writing through a feminist perspective. It is a political form of literature that analyzes the questions of how male and females relate to each other and the world, the repression of women and how women are portrayed in literature.

Feminist criticism is the literary and critical theory that explores the based in favour of the male gender in literature and which re-examines all literature from a feminist point of view.

Feminist theory focuses on analyzing gender inequality.

Feminist criticism gives credit to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” analyzation of circumstances unique to women writers as the beginning of feminist criticism.

One of the first examples of a major feminist literary analysis is the focus of Petruchio’s treatment of Katharina in William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in the late 1960s. The feminist criticism school entitled Gynocriticism followed in the late 1970s to solidify the existence of feminist criticism.

Patriarchy: any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.

Traditional gender roles: cast man as rational , strong,protective,decisive,and hetrosexual.Traditional cast woman as emotional,week,nurturing and submissive.

Ideology: dominant values, beliefs, ways of thinking through which a culture understands reality.

The Other: Woman has often been categorized as being “other”

Key terms for Feminist Criticism

Re-discover texts written by woman Re-value woman’s experience Examine representations of woman in literature

Challenges the view of woman as “other” Examine the challenges patriarchal roles

What feminist critics do

1. Woman presented in literature by male writers from male point of view.

2. Woman presented in writing of female writer from female point of view.

Feminist criticism has two basic premises

A Feminist reading of Cinderella Cinderella’s happiness

depends on man. After Cinderella’s father dies,

she is force to live with his evil step sister.

Cinderella lives in competition with her step mother and step sister and must vie for attention of man.

In order to attract the Prince ,she must impress him with her look.

The prince only knows her by her beauty and the missing glass slipper .