Elaine Showalter on the feminine, feminist and female phases relating and linking women writers
Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, a woman-centric approach to literary analysis. Her work 'A Literature of their Own: British Novelists from Bronte to Lessing' discusses the female literary tradition which she analyses as evolution through three phases. Taking her title from an observation of John Stuart Mill in 1869 "If women lived in a different country from men and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own." Showalter suggests that women themselves were slowly growing aware of their separateness and leaving a record of that awareness in their works. Showalter contents that all literary subcultures can be traced through three major phases: first a phase of "imitation" and "internalization" in which the subculture adopts the values and the literary forms of the dominant tradition - a phase that extends from the widespread appearance of ...