The Feminist reader: Essays in gender and the politics of literary criticism

by Catherine Belsey

Ships from USA. Will take 25-35 days

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Academia, Literary Criticism

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Catherine Belsey is currently Research Professor at Swansea University and formerly Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. Best known for her pioneering book, Critical Practice (Methuen, 1980), Catherine Belsey has an international reputation as a deft and sophisticated critical theorist and subtle and eloquent critic of literature, particularly of Renaissance texts. Her main area of work is on the implications of poststructuralist theory for aspects of cultural history and criticism. Her present project is ’Culture and the Real’, a consideration of the limitations of contemporary constructivism in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Professor Belsey chairs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, a research forum for discussion and debate on current views of the relation between human beings and culture.

Reviews

[luciana]

"kristeva's emphasis on femininity as a patriarchal construct enables feminists to counter all forms of biologistic attacks from the defenders of phallocentrism. To posit all women as necessarily feminine and all men as necessarily masculine, is precisely the move which enables the patriarchal powers to define, not femininity but all women as marginal to the symbolic order and to society."

A bit too derivative for me regarding its definitions of feminine, feminism and femininity but I appreciate its take on pre-feminist work and Kristeva's deconstructed feminism.

[Cloud]

I have been tricked by the synopsis I had read. I had thought it was a series of new essays, commentaries to be precise, about the main authors in the history of feminist literary criticism. But apart from the Introduction, it's a simple collection of extracts.
Belsey's introduction is very straight-forward, it's a good read. And a couple of essays are articles and speeches that were very hard to find, but the rest has been published and circulated widely, and is easily retrievable in the second-hand book market.
In the end, I think 20% of the book was useful for my research.