Elaine Showalter’s Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979) played a crucial role in establishing feminist literary criticism as a significant academic field. In this essay, Showalter outlines the need for a distinct feminist approach to literary studies and introduces two major models of feminist criticism:
The "Women as Reader" Approach (Feminist Critique) – This examines literature from a feminist perspective, focusing on how women are represented in male-authored texts and analyzing gender biases in literary history.
The "Women as Writer" Approach (Gynocriticism) – This focuses on female authorship, exploring women's literary traditions, themes, and experiences, and advocating for a separate literary framework for women’s writing.
By emphasizing the importance of studying women’s literature on its own terms, Showalter helped legitimize feminist literary criticism within academia and encouraged further research into women’s literary history, gender identity in writing, and the social and cultural influences on female authors.
