Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism is the study of women as writers, concerned with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature written by women.

Definition

The feminist-critical study of women as producers of literature, focusing on the female literary tradition, women's creativity, and the distinctive features of writing by women.

Scope

This topic covers the project, named and theorized by Elaine Showalter, of constructing a female literary tradition and analyzing women's writing on its own terms rather than through male-defined models. It treats Showalter's account of phases in women's writing, Gilbert and Gubar's analysis of nineteenth-century women writers and the 'anxiety of authorship', and the debates about whether a distinct women's tradition or 'female aesthetic' exists.

Core questions

• Is there a continuous tradition of women's writing, and what shapes it?
• How have women writers responded to a male-dominated literary culture?
• Are there distinctive themes, forms, or strategies in literature by women?
• How should a female literary canon be constructed and studied?

Key theories

The female literary tradition

Showalter's argument, developed in A Literature of Their Own, that women's writing forms a subculture with its own phases (feminine, feminist, female) and continuities, deserving study in its own right.

Gynocritics versus feminist critique

Showalter's programmatic distinction between the 'feminist critique' of male texts and 'gynocritics', the study of women as writers, which she proposes as the more constructive feminist project.

The anxiety of authorship

Gilbert and Gubar's thesis that women writers, confronting a tradition that casts creativity as male, developed strategies of concealment and revision, often through doubled or 'monstrous' female figures.

History

Gynocriticism took shape in the 1970s with works such as Moers's Literary Women (1976), Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Showalter named and theorized the approach in her 1979 essay 'Towards a Feminist Poetics'. It drove the recovery and reissue of neglected women writers and the formation of a female literary canon.

Debates

Is there a distinct female aesthetic?

Whether women's writing exhibits genuinely distinctive features grounded in gendered experience, or whether positing a unified female tradition risks essentialism and obscures differences of class, race, and period.

Key figures

• Elaine Showalter
• Sandra Gilbert
• Susan Gubar
• Ellen Moers

Seminal works

• showalter1977
• showalter1979
• gilbertgubar1979

Frequently asked questions

Who coined the term gynocriticism?

Elaine Showalter coined 'gynocritics' (and the related 'gynocriticism') in her 1979 essay 'Towards a Feminist Poetics' to name the study of women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male-authored texts.

What are Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Showalter distinguished a 'feminine' phase of imitation of dominant norms, a 'feminist' phase of protest, and a 'female' phase of self-discovery and search for identity in women's literary history.