SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land: The War of the Words, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 88, No. 3, July, 1989, pp. 454–57.

In the following review of the first volume of No Man's Land, Blake contends Gubar and Gilbert ought more strongly to have stressed their argument that patriarchal forms are not embedded in language.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have followed up their Madwoman in the Attic with a “Daughter of Madwoman” as powerful as its progenitor. No Man's Land is the first volume in a projected three-volume series. It gives the grounding and grand scheme of literary history that recasts Modernism and Postmodernism as episodes in the gender agon initiated by the nineteenth-century rise of women and women writers. Gilbert and Gubar here extend their historical range to the twentieth century and treat male as well as female authors, exhibiting a greater historicism and...