ELLEN ROONEY (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory.

Abstract

This fascinating collection of 14 essays attempts several complex tasks—successfully, for the most part. Each chapter describes a particular theoretical area in which feminist thought has had a significant impact—psychoanalytic criticism, postcolonial criticism, popular culture and modernist studies, to name a few—and provides a succinct summary of the notion, its development, its major practitioners, and its most discussed literary and critical texts. In her astute introduction, editor Ellen Rooney defines feminist literary theory as ‘the theories of feminists struggling against masculinism and among themselves over the meanings of literature, reading, and feminism’ (p. 8). The volume effectively presents feminism's wide-ranging concerns, even though Rooney warns immediately, ‘Feminist literary theory resists generalization’ (p. 1). Feminist theory's success in showing that gender has been constructed and represented through language is a product of a particular moment in the history of literature and literary theory. Ironically, as feminism was subsumed into political and academic discourse, it formed an unwittingly hegemonic voice that divided some pioneering third-wave feminist theorists from more marginal groups. Rooney carefully acknowledges this dilemma, but implies that the resulting discomfort has led to a healthy correction. To take the United States as an example, the habitual definition or abstraction of ‘woman’ by dominant white and middle-class feminist theorists in terms that excluded women of color, women of the working classes, and women living outside the metropolitan centers has marked feminist theorizing in virtually all its forms … The racism and class bias, heterosexism and neocolonial privilege that underwrote these exclusions have been carefully disclosed and mapped; feminist theories that have eschewed similar exclusions and abstractions have been elaborated (p. 3).