Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have challenged contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how 19th century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and alternative of single or professional life.

Jane Gallop's book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being 'academic'?

This innovative collection of contemporary essays in feminist literary criticism provides a spectrum of approaches and positions, united by their common focus on writing by and about women.

These autobiographical essays by eminent feminist literary critics explore the process by which women scholars became feminist scholars, articulating the connections between the personal and political in their lives and work.

Responding to a fundamental challenge from feminism, a primary objective of this book is to propose that all narrative and its reading are intrinsically inflected by sexual politics. Various approaches represented here demonstrate problems of confronting the gendered pleasures of reading.

What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature? This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied the most influential feminists.

Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period.

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyses power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume reshapes Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity.

Before 1840 there was little prestige attached to the writing of novels, and most English novelists were women. By the turn of the 20th century, 'men of letters' acclaimed novels as a form of great literature, and most successful novelists were men. Here, Gaye Tuchman examines how men redefined this form of literary expression.

Patricia Waugh addresses the relationship between feminist and postmodernist writing and theory through the insights of psychoanalysis and in the context of the development of modern fiction in Britain and America.