Lit.Guruji

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic : Feminism, Women Writers and the Angel and the Madwoman Introduction Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are two important feminist literary critics. Their famous book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination , published in 1979 , became a major work in feminist literary criticism. The book examines nineteenth-century women writers and the ways in which female characters were represented in literature. Gilbert and Gubar argue that women writers often had to struggle against a literary tradition dominated by men. They suggest that many nineteenth-century texts created two extreme images of women: The Angel The Madwoman The Angel represents the ideal woman who is obedient, pure, gentle, self-sacrificing and submissive. The Madwoman represents the woman who is angry, rebellious, passionate, independent or unwilling to follow patriarchal expectations. The title of the book comes especi...

Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Under Western Eyes : Postcolonial Feminism and the Critique of Western Feminism Introduction Chandra Talpade Mohanty is one of the most important scholars in postcolonial feminism and transnational feminist theory. Her famous essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” examines how Western feminist writing has sometimes represented women from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the Global South as a single, powerless group. Mohanty argues that women from different cultures do not have identical experiences. A woman living in India, Nigeria, Mexico, or Saudi Arabia may experience gender differently because of differences in: History Culture Class Race Caste Religion Colonialism Economic conditions Political systems Therefore, feminism should not assume that there is one universal experience of being a woman. Mohanty's work is important because it questions the relationship between feminism, colonialism, power, re...

Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Feminist Literary Theory Introduction Kimberlé Crenshaw is an important American legal scholar and one of the major thinkers associated with contemporary feminist theory. She is especially famous for developing the concept of intersectionality . Intersectionality explains how different forms of identity and oppression can work together. A woman may experience discrimination not only because she is a woman but also because of her race, class, caste, sexuality, disability, religion, nationality, or other social positions. Traditional feminism sometimes treated “women” as a single group. Crenshaw showed that women's experiences are not identical. A Black woman, a white woman, a poor woman, a wealthy woman, and a disabled woman may experience gender discrimination in very different ways. Intersectionality therefore asks us to look at multiple forms of power and inequality at the same time . For literary criticism, intersectional...