SOURCE: “Denoting Hemingway: Feminist Criticism and the Canon,” in American Literature, Vol. 60, No. 2, May, 1988, pp. 255-68.

In the following essay, Merrill asserts that a work of art should not be divorced from aesthetic judgments because of an author's alleged male bias.

In the “Extra” for March 1987 Lawrence Buell presents a deeply informed overview of what feminist revisionism can do for American literary history.¹ As Buell's reasoning and examples are quite persuasive, it will perhaps seem ungenerous for me to take issue with a single comment, offered as a parenthetical illustration. Nonetheless, I think the comment in question points up the dangers of the feminist approach to literary history, so I want to use it as a springboard to discuss what I take these dangers to be.

Toward the end of his essay Buell summarizes what feminist studies can hope to do in reshaping the American canon. The first...