"In its diversity feminism is concerned with the marginalization of all women: that is, with their being relegated to a secondary position. Most feminists believe that our culture is a patriarchal culture: that is, one organized in the interests of men. Feminist literary critics try to explain how power imbalances due to gender in a given culture are reflected in or challenged by literary texts."

"Despite their diversity, feminist critics generally agree that their goals are to expose patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices, to promote discovery and reevaluation of literature by women, and to examine social, cultural, and psychosexual contexts of literature and literary criticism."

There are four types of feminist criticism: gender studies, Marxist studies, psychoanalytic studies, and minority studies.

Gender Studies- "In criticism and in literature, feminist critics identify sex-related writing strategies, including matters of subject, vocabulary, syntax, style, imagery, narrative structure, characterization, and genre preference.

    By studying women's writing as a gender issue, we are led to ask a general question, What is to be valued?"

Marxist Feminism- ""Marxist feminist criticism focuses on the relation between reading and social realities. Marxists feminists attack the prevailing capitalistic system of the West, which they view as sexually as well as economically exploitative. Marxist feminists thus combine study of class with that of gender.

     Since Marxists emphasive historical and economic contexts of literary discourse, they often direct attention toward the conditions of production of literary texts--that is, the economics of publishing and distributing texts."

Psychoanalytic Feminism- "These critics address topics such as mothering, living within enclosures, doubling of characters and that of the self, women's diseases, and feminized landscapes, and they make the interesting argument often identify themselves with the literary characters they detest.

     Maneuvers such as bringing a subtext to light are similar in literary criticism and psychoanalysis, for the goal of both is understanding repression.

     Another type of psychological approach is myth criticism. Feminist myth critics tend to center their discussion on the Great Mother and other early female images and goddesses, viewing these figures as radical others that can offer hope against the patriarchal repression of women."

Minority Feminism- "Within the feminist minority there are still other significant minorities, the most prominent being black and lesbian feminists. While it is true that many black and lesbian feminists include each other in analyses of the problems of either group, and certainly feminism in general has allied itself with diverse arguments against racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, it may seem to violate their fundamental ideas to address them in a single section, since they have strongly protested both their marginalization in society and their often unwanted groupings with other minorities."

Works Cited

Guerin, Wilfred L. ed. A Handbook of Critica; Approaches to Literature.

     New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.