SOURCE: “Writing Like a Woman,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 305-10.

In the following review, Costello exposes a number of pitfalls attending the theoretical orientation of Stealing the Language.

Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America is the latest in a rash of studies that have attempted to define poetry by women as generically distinct from the dominant male tradition. Suzanne Juhasz's Naked and Fiery Forms, Emily Stipes Watt's The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945, and Margaret Homans's Women Writers and Poetic Identity are the book's major precursors, and it appears simultaneously with Paula Bennett's My Life, a Loaded Gun, a study of anger in women's poetry. The appearance of Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Women's Literature crowned the notion of a female tradition and helped to complete a second stage of feminist criticism. No longer would the feminist...