University of Delhi

• ENGLISH 101

• Navya Munjal Professor Souvik Dutta English 24th April 2020 Outline the problems faced by Elaine Showalter in her gynocritical mapping of the trajectory of women writers in her seminal work, A Literature of Their Own. What are the things she would have done differently as an afterthought? Discuss. Regarded as the manifesto of feminist studies, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own was a direct product of the ‘women’s movement’ of 1960s. The movement was the renewal of an old tradition of thought and action, an ever-present thought in classic books which had diagnosed the problem of women’s inequality in society and the literary circles that had existed throughout the centuries. In the context of this on-going political struggle of its times, the text outlines the contours and circumstances of female authors and their writings, and tries to compartmentalize the traditional writings of women, under one umbrella term. This essay will focus on the interlocutor introduction of the text, “Twenty Years on: A Literature of Their Own Revisited” in which Elaine Showalter addresses the criticism that her work has received through different swings of feminist movements. Showalter’s attempt of tracing a succinct social history of forgotten minor female writers of 19th and early 20th century England has been criticized on the claims of its inherent cultural distance from her work due to its Anglo-Americanism, its act of canon-busting - or at least, a decisive intervention when it came to re-drawing the canonic