Annette Kolodny (Essay Date 1979)

SOURCE: Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism." In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, pp. 97-116. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Kolodny traces the rise and development of feminist literary critical theory in the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

Had anyone the prescience, ten years ago, to pose the question of defining a "feminist" literary criticism, she might have been told, in the wake of Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women,1 that it involved exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and, as well, demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women. In broad...