SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land, Volume 1: The War of the Words and No Man's Land, Volume 2: Sexchanges, in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. 31, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 507–12.

In the following review of volumes one and two of No Man's Land—The War of the Words and Sexchanges—Herrmann argues that Gubar and Gilbert have “abandoned” the notion of the separate literary tradition for women, which they had offered in The Madwoman in the Attic, and devalue lesbian writers, especially Gertrude Stein.

I remember walking down a tree-lined street in New Haven, between the library and a small, set-back bookstore, when a fellow graduate student rushed up to me to announce that the first “feminist poetics” had arrived. No longer would the French have a monopoly on discourses that addressed the intersection of literary theory and gender. No longer would members of clandestine reading...