As feminist ideology would have it, the world presents a harsh and alien landscape to woman. Shaped against her grain by a tradition that has left her true identity out of account, she must articulate her very grievances in a language created by her oppressor. Inevitably, in the feminist view, literature itself mirrors this oppression. Thus, the feminist literary critic sees the traditional literary canon as a “culture-bound political construct” and literary posterity as nothing more than a “group of men with the access to publishing and reviewing that enabled them to enforce their views of ‘literature’ and to define a group of ageless ‘classics.’” Given the profound illegitimacy at the heart of literary tradition, the feminist critic insists upon “a complete revolution of our literary heritage”—“a revision of the accepted theoretical assumptions about reading and writing that have been based entirely on male literary experience.” In this way gender is established “as a fundamental category of literary analysis.”

Such is the view of literary culture presented in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, a collection edited by Elaine Showalter, professor of English at Princeton University. The collection consists of “eighteen of the most important and controversial essays written by pioneers in the field [of feminist literary criticism] over the last decade.” Contributors include such prominent feminist critics as Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Carolyn Heilbrun, Annette Kolodny, Nancy K. Miller, Lillian S. Robinson, and Showalter herself, who is responsible for the views quoted